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 reads it on-device, links it to the right expense, and keeps the audit trail 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, the receipt one click away — now with an HSA-eligibility badge on each entry.
Drop a photo or PDF and Stowe reads it — pre-filling the merchant, date, and amount before you even type.
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 v0.7.0
Attach a receipt and Stowe reviews it for you — entirely on your Mac, no cloud. It reads the receipt, fills in the details, and gives an advisory HSA-eligibility hint.
Apple Vision reads photos and scans; embedded PDF text is pulled straight out. Nothing — not the image, not the text — ever leaves your machine.
The Add screen pre-fills the merchant, date, and amount from the receipt. It only fills blanks, so anything you've typed stays put.
A badge — likely eligible, review suggested, or unlikely — plus the items it matched. Advisory only, and every hint points you to IRS Pub 502.
Changed a receipt or added a better scan? Re-run the review from the expense manager with one click and the hint updates.
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/.
Stowe-0.6.0-windows-setup.exe and run it — no admin rights needed.
Data lives at %APPDATA%\Stowe\. A Windows build with auto-review is planned for a later release.
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.
It's entirely on-device. Stowe reads the receipt with Apple Vision (for photos and scans) or by pulling text out of a PDF, then a small rule-based classifier suggests whether the items look HSA-eligible. No receipt, image, or extracted text ever leaves your Mac. The eligibility badge is an advisory hint, not tax advice — every result points you to IRS Publication 502.
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."
Both, with a caveat. macOS is the lead platform and gets new features first — the latest release (v0.7.0, receipt auto-review) is macOS-only. The most recent Windows installer ships in the v0.6.0 release, and a newer Windows build is planned. 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.