We’re releasing Less is More, a native macOS app that makes your consumption visible. Drop your bills, receipts, and statements into it, and AI extracts every line item, amount, and consumption quantity. It tracks not just money but also electricity, gas, water, and waste — so you can see the full picture of what you use and what it costs.
The problem it solves
You probably have a rough sense of what you spend each month. But can you answer: how much electricity did you use last quarter compared to the one before? Is your water bill trending up? Are you still paying for that subscription you signed up for a year ago? Did your insurance premium increase at renewal?
These answers are buried in PDFs — utility bills, credit card statements, insurance documents, receipts. Most people file them away and never look at them again. Finance apps that connect to your bank see transactions but not the detail inside each bill.
Less is More starts from the source documents. You import the PDFs (or photograph paper receipts), and AI reads them like a person would — extracting vendors, line items, amounts, dates, billing periods, and consumption quantities with units.
How it works
Four ways to get documents in:
- Drag and drop a PDF onto the window
- File > Import from the menu bar
- Camera capture — point your Mac’s camera at a paper receipt. Less is More detects the document, corrects perspective, runs OCR, and extracts
- Gmail import — OAuth into your Gmail and it finds receipt emails automatically, pulling data from PDF attachments and inline HTML
AI does the heavy lifting. The default AI provider is Apple Intelligence, which runs entirely on-device — your documents never leave your Mac. For more complex documents, you can switch to Claude or any OpenAI-compatible API (including local models via Ollama).
The Insight Engine watches your data for patterns: redundant subscriptions (are you paying for two streaming services you forgot about?), spending anomalies (your electric bill doubled — why?), price increases (your insurance went up 12% at renewal), and savings opportunities. Each insight can be reviewed, dismissed, or marked as acted upon.
Beyond money
Most finance tools stop at dollars. Less is More also tracks:
- Electricity in kWh
- Natural gas in therms
- Water in gallons
- Waste in bags or pounds
When you import a utility bill, AI extracts both the cost and the consumption. The dashboard shows trends over time, so you can see whether your conservation efforts are actually working.
Privacy
All data lives on your Mac in a SQLCipher-encrypted database. The encryption key is stored in the macOS Keychain — not in the app, not on disk. AI analysis defaults to on-device via Apple Intelligence. If you opt for a cloud API, your documents are sent only to the provider you choose, and only during analysis. No accounts, no cloud sync, no telemetry.
The name
“Less is More” is the philosophy behind the app: see what you consume so you can consume less of what you don’t need. The icon is a play on the mathematical notation — less than, equals, greater than — suggesting that having less can equal having more.