Let's clear the air
If you need more details, open an issue on GitHub or chat with Clara directly.
- What is Clara?
- Clara is an AI financial assistant: a conversational expense tracker that understands bank screenshots, PDFs, CSVs and WhatsApp voice notes. She helps you plan monthly expenses, connect to your bank via Open Banking and keep your balance up to date.
- How much does it cost?
- Clara is 100% free and open source under the MIT license. You can run the version we host for free, or self-host it on your own Vercel + Postgres. No subscriptions, no per-user pricing, no paid features.
- How does Clara process PDFs and bank statements?
- Clara uses multimodal language models via Vercel AI Gateway to extract transactions from PDFs, screenshots and CSVs. Processing runs on Vercel Functions: the file is uploaded to Vercel Blob temporarily, the model extracts the data, and Clara shows you a proposal before saving anything to your database.
- Which banks are supported?
- For automatic connections (Open Banking) Clara supports most European and UK banks. The connection is read-only: Clara never has access to your money, just to your transactions. For any bank in the world you can import PDFs/CSVs or register expenses manually via chat or voice note.
- How does the WhatsApp integration work?
- You link your number from Settings (a code arrives via WhatsApp). After that you can send Clara voice notes, photos or text: she transcribes, classifies the expense and confirms before updating the month.
- What does she do with my data?
- Your data lives in your Postgres database (ours if you use the hosted version, yours if you self-host). No telemetry, no data sales, no model training on your info. For LLM calls we use Vercel AI Gateway in zero data retention mode.
- What languages does it work in?
- Clara works in rioplatense Spanish (default) and English. You can switch language from the menu or just ask Clara in chat. The full UI, public pages and agent respect the choice.
- Can I use Clara with my own AI assistant (Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT)?
- Yes. Clara exposes an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server at /api/mcp/user. You generate a token from Settings → AI access, paste it into Claude Desktop, Cursor or any MCP client, and your assistant can list months, query balance, add expenses and mark them as paid — always with your permission.
- Is it self-hostable?
- Yes. The stack is Next.js 16 + Postgres + Prisma + Vercel AI SDK. Clone the repo, configure .env (DATABASE_URL, NEXTAUTH_SECRET, AI_GATEWAY_API_KEY), run the migrations, and deploy to Vercel in one click. The full guide is in the README.
- How does it compare to other finance apps?
- Mint, YNAB, Fintonic and similar are spreadsheets with better design: rows, categories and reports. Clara is chat-first: you talk to her in plain language, send her a PDF and she understands, send a voice note and she registers the expense. AI is the core of the product, not a marketing feature. And it is open source.