Type "Walnut app" into a search bar today and the autocomplete still finishes your sentence: *Walnut app working*, *Walnut app alternative*, *what happened to Walnut*. Even after the app changed its name, a lot of Indians are still looking for it.

That tells you something. Walnut wasn't just an app. For a lot of people, it was the first time their money made sense without a single spreadsheet.

So what happened to it? The short answer: it didn't shut down. It changed owners, then changed its name, and it is still on Google Play today as **axio**. Here is the precise version, and what to weigh if you are deciding whether to stay or switch.

## Why everyone loved Walnut

Walnut did one thing, and it did it almost magically: it read the SMS alerts your bank already sent you, and turned them into an expense tracker.

You didn't link your account. You didn't type anything in. You spent ₹480 at a kirana store, your HDFC or ICICI or SBI SMS landed, and Walnut quietly logged it — merchant, amount, category, all of it. Salary credit on the 1st? Logged. Card bill due? Walnut reminded you. It even spotted ATM withdrawals and split-the-bill amounts among friends.

For a country where almost every bank fires off an SMS for every debit and credit, this was the perfect hack. No Account Aggregator, no net-banking passwords, no manual entry. Just permission to read your messages, and suddenly you had a running picture of your spending across every account at once.

And it was **free** — which, as with any free product, raises the question of how it paid for itself.

## What actually happened

Here's the timeline, from public reporting and axio's own Play Store listing:

- **Walnut already had a credit product.** Before any acquisition, Walnut ran *Walnut Prime*, an instant credit line that had crossed ₹100 crore in loans by 2018 ([Business Standard](https://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/capital-float-acquires-walnut-for-30-mn-118082100299_1.html)).
- **August 2018: Capital Float bought Walnut** for about $30 million (roughly ₹209 crore). Walnut had around 7 million downloads, and Capital Float said it wanted Walnut's alternative-data credit scoring for its consumer lending business ([Medianama](https://www.medianama.com/2018/08/223-capital-float-acquires-walnut/)).
- **July 2022: Capital Float rebranded as axio.** Capital Float, Walnut and Walnut 369 (its pay-later product) were brought under one brand. At the time, the company reported over 13 million Walnut app users ([Businessworld](https://businessworld.in/article/%E2%80%9Cpersonal-finance-management-is-like-going-to-gym%E2%80%9D-485364)).
- **September 2025: Amazon completed its acquisition of axio**, mainly for its NBFC licence and direct lending business in India ([Reuters via Yahoo Finance](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-completes-axio-acquisition-secures-095316335.html)).

And as of October 2026, the app is still there. The original Walnut Play Store package (`com.daamitt.walnut.app`) is now listed as **axio**, last updated in July 2026, with 10M+ downloads. Its listing describes it as an "SMS-based money management app" — expense tracking, bill reminders, balance checks — alongside pay-later EMIs, personal loans and fixed deposits ([Google Play](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.daamitt.walnut.app)).

So the tracker didn't die. If you used Walnut, the app on your phone most likely updated into axio. What changed is the name, the owner, and what sits around the tracker: a lending and deposits business that has been part of the story since Walnut Prime.

## How a free tracker pays for itself

The Walnut story is a useful lens on a question worth asking of any money app, not just this one:

**If the expense tracker is free, what pays for it?**

Reading and categorising millions of people's bank alerts costs real money in servers, engineering, and support. If users pay nothing, that cost is recovered somewhere. The common routes for a free finance app are:

1. **Financial products** — offering loans, credit lines, cards or deposits to the people who use the tracker.
2. **Partnerships and leads** — referring users to lenders, insurers, and card issuers.
3. **Ads.**

None of these is hidden in axio's case — its listing is upfront that credit and fixed deposits are part of the app. Whether that suits you is a personal call. Some people like having a pay-later option next to their spending view. Others would rather the app that sees their salary and EMIs has no product to sell them.

Spenco AI takes the second view, which is why it is a paid app: Starter is free for your first year, then ₹499 a year, and there are no loans, ads or data sales ([pricing](https://spenco.ai/pricing)).

## Choosing what to use: an honest checklist

Whether you stay on axio or switch, these are the questions that matter:

**1. How does it capture transactions?**
Walnut's superpower was auto-capture, and you want that. The two automatic routes today are reading SMS (Android-only, and it needs the full SMS permission) or **forwarding bank alert emails**, which works across phones. iOS does not let any third-party app read your Messages, so SMS capture has never been possible on iPhone. (We laid out the trade-offs in [expense trackers that don't read your SMS](/blogs/expense-tracker-without-sms-permission/).)

**2. Can you get your data out?**
If you can't **export** your transactions, you don't fully own your financial history. Check for export before you commit years of data to any app.

**3. What's the business model?**
Ask the blunt question: *how does this app make money?* A subscription, lending, referrals and ads all lead to different products. Pick the one whose incentives you are comfortable with.

**4. Does it look forward, not just backward?**
Most trackers, Walnut included, tell you where money *went*. The more useful question is where it's *going* — will rent, the SIP, three EMIs, and the card bill clear next month, or is the 27th going to hurt?

### Where Spenco fits

Spenco was built around these criteria, so it's worth being straight about where it fits and where it doesn't. (There's a side-by-side on the [axio alternative](https://spenco.ai/alternatives/axio) page.)

- **Capture:** Spenco reads the **bank alert emails** you forward with a one-time Gmail or Outlook filter — no SMS permission, no bank login, no Account Aggregator. Each alert becomes a categorised transaction: UPI, card swipes, EMIs, SIPs, salary credits. Alerts from HDFC, ICICI, Axis, Kotak Mahindra, Canara Bank, Punjab National Bank and Bank of Baroda are parsed automatically. It works on **iPhone**, Android and the web.
- **Forward-looking:** The [month-end balance forecast](https://spenco.ai/month-end-balance-prediction) projects where your balance lands after salary, rent, SIPs, EMIs and card bills. It is part of the Pro plan (₹1,999/year), which is built but not on sale yet.
- **Honest model:** Starter is free for your first year, then ₹499/year. Spenco does not make money from your data or from selling you credit. You're the customer, not the inventory.
- **AI chat:** Ask plain-language questions about your spending and the answers are computed from your own transactions. Spenco never connects to your bank, so it can see that a payment happened but can never move money.

**The honest limitations:** Spenco only sees what your banks email. If a bank alerts you by SMS but not by email, or isn't one of the seven parsed automatically, those transactions won't appear on their own. Most banks let you switch on email alerts in net banking, so check yours first. Your Walnut/axio history also doesn't carry over: there is no import path between the two apps. Rebuilding past months from a bank statement PDF is a Pro feature.

## The takeaway

Walnut's idea was great — that's why people still search for it. The app itself is still around as axio, alongside the lending and deposit products that have been part of its business since the early days.

So when you pick what comes next, don't just ask whether it captures your spending. Ask **who it works for**, and whether it shows you next month as clearly as last month.

See where your money is going next month at [spenco.ai](https://spenco.ai).