Stowe is a tiny desktop app that tracks the medical expenses you paid out-of-pocket so you can reimburse yourself from your HSA later — months or decades from now. Your data lives on your computer. Nothing is sent to a server.
Why Stowe
The IRS lets you reimburse yourself from your HSA years after the expense — but only if you can still produce the receipt. Stowe keeps that proof in one tidy place.
Stowe is local-first by design. No Stowe account, no cloud, no telemetry. The database is a single SQLite file you fully own.
Snap a photo, drop a PDF, or upload a scan. Stowe links each receipt to the right expense so the audit trail is always intact.
Per-year and all-time exports drop straight into your spreadsheet or accountant's inbox. Reimburse, file, and move on.
A look inside
No dashboards you'll never look at. Four pages: log, review, pull, export.
Every expense in one running list, with the receipt one click away.
Log a charge in seconds. Drop a photo or PDF; Stowe links it to the entry.
Reimburse a lump sum from your HSA and split it across the receipts it covers.
Per-year totals you can export to CSV when it's time to file.
New in v0.6.0
Signed and notarized for macOS. Plus categories you control, light analytics, account reconciliation, and three themes.
Name expenses your way — add your own categories alongside the built-in HSA ones.
Quiet charts that show where your medical spending is going, by category and over time.
Link your HSA, import a custodian distribution CSV, and reconcile every Pull against the real money that left your account.
Three themes that stick across launches. Pick the one that's easiest on your eyes.
Install
Use the macOS DMG, the Windows installer, or run from source if you'd rather see the code.
Stowe-x.y.z.dmg from Releases.
The app keeps your database at ~/Library/Application Support/Stowe/.
Requires Python 3.10+.
git clone https://github.com/Conkay1/Stowe.git cd Stowe python3 run.py
run.py installs deps, opens the app in your browser, and prints a LAN URL so you can snap receipts from your phone on the same WiFi.
FAQ
On macOS the app keeps two things: a SQLite database at ~/Library/Application Support/Stowe/database/stowe.db and your receipt files at ~/Library/Application Support/Stowe/receipts/. To back up, copy that folder. To wipe everything, delete it.
No. There's no server, no analytics, no auto-update calls, no telemetry. The app runs a tiny web server bound to localhost only.
No catch. Stowe is open source under MIT and built as a personal project. It will likely stay small — "do one thing well" is the goal, not "become the Expensify of HSAs."
macOS and Windows both ship as packaged installers. On Linux you can run from source today.
Copy the ~/Library/Application Support/Stowe/ folder anywhere — iCloud Drive, Dropbox, an external drive. Both the SQLite DB and the receipts back up cleanly. To restore, copy it back.
No — Stowe is a record-keeping tool, not tax advice. Consult IRS Publication 969 and a tax professional for what qualifies as a reimbursable medical expense.
Whatever you didn't back up is gone. That's the trade-off for keeping nothing in the cloud. Drop the data folder inside iCloud Drive or Dropbox to get cross-machine backup without giving up local-first.