Four steps, then it is just a conversation.
Countbean is a Beancount ledger running as a private cloud book, with an HTTP API in front of it and an AI agent on the other end of that API. Here is the whole path from nothing to a booked transaction.
From zero to booked in four steps
Spin up a book
One click creates a private, HTTPS-secured cloud book — Beancount behind an HTTP ledger API, running on Fly.io. No servers, no Docker, no setup.
Connect Claude — or any MCP client
Countbean ships an MCP server, so any client that speaks MCP can keep a validated Beancount ledger for you; Claude is the one we package as a plugin. Ask it to connect and it shows you a short code — you approve it in your browser and pick the book. Nothing to copy between windows. Pasting a key by hand still works if you would rather, and the plugin can stay on a local ledger instead.
Just talk
"Log these transactions." "Categorize my bank export." "What did I spend on infra in Q2?" The AI does the double-entry; you never type a posting.
Review & own
Every change is a Git commit and a readable diff, so you can see exactly what was written and revert it in one line. Balance sheets and income statements are in the browser; one-click export is not built yet.
You own it like a repo — because it is one.
Every other accounting tool keeps your financial history in a database you rent access to. Countbean keeps it in files you can read, grep and diff — in a format that outlives any vendor, including us.
It's just text
Your books live in a plain .beancount file. Nothing proprietary, nothing to decode — a format grep can read in 2050.
Versioned in Git
Every entry — human or AI — is a commit. Full history, blame, and one-line revert. Your ledger is bundled off-machine to object storage, on every plan.
Zero lock-in by design
Beancount and Fava are open source and your book is an ordinary Git repo — there is no proprietary format to escape. The export button that hands you a copy isn't built.
Real double-entry
Books that must balance. Every write runs through bean-check before it is committed, so an unbalanced entry is refused rather than trusted.
Serious reporting
Multi-currency, investments and cost lots — Beancount's full model, queryable over the ledger API and readable in the browser: Fava runs inside your book, behind your login, read-only.
Sleeps when idle
Your book auto-stops when you're away, and the Fly proxy starts it again on your next request. Tiny footprint — which is how we keep the price this low.
Start with a free book.
No card required. Your first book is provisioned in a few seconds, and you can point Claude at it from that book’s page.