A crypto budgeting app that puts crypto in the budget, not next to it

Almost every app shows a crypto balance. Almost none turn crypto activity into transactions with categories, and that's the part that decides whether your budget is complete or decorative. On the evidence of their own help pages, Orla is the one doing that today, and the comparison page has the receipts.

Ask any budgeting app this: when I sell 0.25 ETH on Binance, what appears in my monthly report? If the answer is "your net worth changes", the crypto is a ticker. If the answer is "nothing, that's an investment account", the crypto is furniture. The answer you want is boring and specific.

A trade is not income, so it shouldn't inflate your month. A withdrawal to your own wallet is not spending, so it shouldn't leave a 600 dollar hole in your cashflow. A client paying you 900 USDT is income, and it belongs in the same income line as your salary when you close the month.

The fee is an expense, it's small, and it still belongs somewhere. Four behaviours, four answers. An app that treats all four as "balance changed" gives you a budget that's wrong in four directions at once.

People assume one connection type does everything. It doesn't, and the differences are the interesting part. Longer version on Accounts and sync.

A bank connects through open banking, which is a legal framework before it's a technology. You approve it inside the bank's own hosted window. Orla receives balances and transactions and nothing else: no password, and no ability to start a payment.

Remove the connection and access is withdrawn at the provider, not just hidden here. Some US banks, Chase and Bank of America among them, do the sign-in on their own site and hand you back.

An exchange connects with a read-only API key you create yourself: Binance, Bybit, OKX, Kraken, Coinbase. Hyperliquid is the exception, because it issues no keys at all: you paste your wallet address and we read the balance from a public endpoint that accepts no signature. OKX also wants its passphrase.

Coinbase uses a CDP key name and private key, which is fiddly and always has been. The key is verified with the exchange before it's saved, so a dead key never gets stored, and on all five a key carrying trade or withdrawal rights is refused outright.

How we ask differs: Binance, Bybit and OKX report the rights, Coinbase answers through its key permissions endpoint, and Kraken is asked indirectly, because its API answers permission before arguments. That distinction matters and most write-ups skip it, so we repeat it every time.

Balances in the top 25 coins refresh hourly. Trade history imports too, from 1 January of the previous year: spot trades, deposits and withdrawals arrive as transactions on those accounts. On Hyperliquid, which is a perpetuals venue, it's the last 90 days of deposits, withdrawals and one trading result per day instead.

That's the whole point of the exercise, after all.

• Binance
• Bybit
• OKX
• Kraken
• Coinbase
• Hyperliquid

A wallet connects by address on BTC, EVM chains, TRON and Solana. Nothing to authorise, nothing to revoke. If you want to send from Orla, import or create the wallet instead: the twelve words are shown once and encrypted in your browser, and only the public address reaches a server.

EVM, Tron and Solana addresses can be verified by signing a short challenge, which puts a green badge on the account. BTC can't be verified yet. That's a real gap and we'd rather write it here than have you find it on a Tuesday.

• BTC
• EVM chains
• TRON

Exchange balances refresh every hour, with a manual sync button per connection for the impatient. Bank balances refresh from the provider. Watch-only wallets update on a schedule. When something breaks it says so instead of showing a stale number.

An exchange key the exchange keeps rejecting gets marked "needs new key", the sync pauses, a notification lands in your bell inbox, and "Update key" swaps in a fresh one without losing the connection or its accounts. A bank link that wants a re-login gets a "needs re-linking" badge and a Reconnect button.

There's also a daily automation whose entire job is to notice that a sync has been silent for over a day. Stale financial data is worse than missing financial data. That's the whole design principle behind those two paragraphs.

Connections are the demo. Categories are the product. A ledger full of "Binance", "0x4a2f9c", "TRANSFER 8841" is not a budget, it's a log. So the filing happens in layers. Your own rules, which are literally "payee contains X, category Y". A merchant dictionary for the chains and shops everyone has.

Similar-payee matching against your own history. And a repeating series check for rows whose text tells you nothing: same amount, same account, weekly, monthly or yearly, with at least two earlier occurrences already categorised.

Those rows get a small repeat badge so you know why they were filed that way, and correcting one offers to write an exclusion. Text always beats the rhythm signal when both have an opinion. There's an AI pass as well, and you review it before anything is applied. It's useful.

It isn't magic, and we don't put it on posters.

Limits by week, month, quarter or year, a warning threshold you set, a line telling you the day of the month you're on pace to cross the limit, and unused budget rolling into next month instead of evaporating. Everyday tracking goes through it properly.

This happens, particularly outside the EU and the US, and it's the honest weak spot of every app in this category including ours. Only six exchanges connect directly, only four chain families sync, and there are two fallbacks.

CSV import, where the file's encoding (UTF-8, Windows-1251, Windows-1252, Windows-1255), the separator, the decimal style and the date format are detected and prefilled, and every guess can be overridden.

Banks that split amounts into separate debit and credit columns, common in Israeli and German exports, are handled: map the debit column as the amount and pick the credit column in the field for it.

If the day and month order can't be told apart, the page stops and asks which order it is, rather than guessing at the answer.

Upload a PDF or a picture of a statement in any language, including right to left, and it's read into rows you preview before importing. It detects the statement currency and preselects a matching account. Lines it couldn't parse are counted and shown above the preview rather than dropped silently.

Very long statements can exceed what the reader handles, and then you split the file. Statement scans are metered per calendar month by the plan of whoever owns the space, with the remaining count shown next to the button. CSV imports and receipt scans aren't metered.

We're not a portfolio tool. No charts of your coins, no P&L dashboard, no signals. If you want to look at positions all day, a tracker will make you happier. We don't cover DeFi: LP tokens, farming, staking derivatives, lending positions across five protocols.

Aave lending has a page in the app, but the general answer is no. No brokerage accounts, no property, no vehicles. Kubera and Empower do that side and we don't.

On Free you get a real ledger, manual accounts and CSV imports, and the Banks and Exchanges tabs show what a paid plan would connect. We think that's the honest place to draw the line, but it does mean the free tier isn't the thing this page describes.

Prices are on the pricing page and come from the live plan catalogue, so there are no numbers quoted here.

Orla installs from the browser: "Install app" on Android and desktop Chrome, Share then "Add to Home Screen" on iPhone. A native iPhone app is built and close to release, but it is not published yet, so today this is how you get it. Some people hate that. Worth knowing before you sign up.

The person this was built for earns and spends mostly in fiat, keeps a meaningful chunk of savings on an exchange and in a wallet, and sometimes gets paid in stablecoins. Freelancers. People who moved countries.

Anyone with a Kraken balance they've been retyping into a spreadsheet on the last Sunday of the month for two years. If your money is entirely in one bank in one country, Monarch and YNAB are mature and excellent and you don't need us.

If your money is entirely on chain and you never touch a bank account, a tracker plus Koinly is a better pair than we are. We're for the middle, which turns out to be a lot of people.

Notice what the ETH trade did to the month. Nothing. It moved 0.25 ETH into USDT at whatever the price was, and the only money that left was the 1.80 fee, which folds into the cost basis instead of becoming a random expense line. Notice the 600 too.

It appears twice, leaving the exchange and arriving in the wallet, and it nets to zero. Orla pairs those legs by their on-chain hash and keeps them out of cashflow, so your savings rate for the month isn't fiction. The 900 from the client is income.

It lands in an income category, and at year end it lands in an income line in the tax center as well.