When I started building Tabby, the first question everyone asked was: "Why not just build an app?" It's a fair question. The App Store is full of expense trackers with beautiful dashboards, fancy charts, and every feature you can imagine.
But here's the thing: most people don't use them.
Chat is the lowest-friction interface
Think about what you already do dozens of times a day: send messages. It's muscle memory. You don't think about "opening an app." You just type.
That's the insight behind Tabby. Instead of asking people to learn a new app, we meet them where they already are: in their chat. Type 12 lunch and you're done. No forms, no dropdowns, no navigation.
Why Telegram specifically?
A few reasons:
- Bots are first-class citizens. Telegram's bot platform is powerful: inline keyboards, mini apps, webhooks, file sharing. We can build a full experience inside the chat.
- Groups work naturally. Adding a bot to a group chat for shared expense tracking is seamless. Try doing that with a standalone app. You'd need everyone to download it, create accounts, add friends.
- Mini Apps bridge the gap. When you do want a dashboard with charts, Telegram's Mini App platform lets us provide that, without asking you to download anything.
- Global reach. Telegram has 900M+ users across 200+ countries. Many of our users are travelers and expats who already live in Telegram.
The trade-off
Building on Telegram means we don't control the entire experience. We can't send push notifications the way a native app can. We can't do background processing on the user's device. We're constrained by what the Telegram bot API allows.
The result
Our most active users log expenses multiple times a day, because it takes 3 seconds. They'd never do that with a traditional app. The best expense tracker isn't the one with the most features. It's the one you actually use.
That's why we built Tabby on Telegram. Not because it's the most powerful platform, but because it's the one that gets out of the way.