An honest tour of the Capi dashboard: what works and what hurts

By Daniil Kozin · ex-banker · Florianópolis

The Capi dashboard is a mini-app inside Telegram that answers four questions in one screen: am I net positive this month, am I on pace, how long would my cash last, and what ate the most. I built it. This is a tour with the flaws left in: the empty first week, the stale insights, the upload review that still hurts.

This post walks the whole screen, including the parts I would fix tomorrow if the roadmap allowed. Everything praised below is checkable in the interactive demo, which runs the same layout as the live app, and everything criticized is something I hit with my own account.

What is the Capi dashboard and where does it live?

The Capi dashboard is a Telegram mini-app served from app.meetcapi.com. Send /dashboard to @MeetCapi_Bot and it opens in place, with nothing to install and your Telegram theme carried over. The home screen shows net for the month in your main currency, a pace bar, runway in months, top five categories, and a card naming the bank you used most.

Capi started as a chat. You send coffee 4.50, it replies with the logged entry, and for the first year that was the entire product. The dashboard came later and was redesigned in May 2026 around one question I kept asking my own bot: where am I this month? Six tabs run along the bottom: Home, History, Spend, Budgets, Insights and Settings. This tour stays on Home, because Home decides whether the other five ever get visited. If you are new to the chat side, how to track money in Telegram covers it from zero.

What does the Capi dashboard get right?

Four things earn their place: the hero net number in one currency regardless of how many you spend in, the Copilot-style pace bar that says whether you are ahead or behind, the runway card computed from your real burn over 60 days, and the top-five category rows with vs-last-month deltas. Each answers a question you actually ask, without a chart to decode.

Little of this is original, and I would rather name the sources than pretend otherwise. The pace bar is Copilot Money's idea, ported: a dotted line for where you would sit at typical pace, a solid line for where you actually are, sage when ahead, peach when behind. The one-sentence insight cards follow N26's format of one finding, one number, one delta. The runway card descends from Zenmoney's old savings widget. The side-by-side with the strongest of those originals lives in Capi vs Copilot Money.

The part I do claim is the rollup. Every entry keeps its native currency underneath, and the hero converts at the FX rate captured when the transaction was logged, so a month spent across dollars and reais still produces one honest number. Two newer cards ride on the same data: "Where the money moves" names the bank behind most of your activity, and a parcela card forecasts installment charges still coming. When 61 percent of my own May ran through one bank, the card said so before I felt it.

What is still bad UX in the Capi dashboard?

Five things, in descending order of pain: the first week is nearly empty because patterns need about ten transactions; the pace bar is meaningless in your first month since it compares against a history you do not have; insights can lag six hours behind a big upload; statement review still means walking hundreds of rows; and only seven currencies are supported.

A dashboard is a mirror, and ten transactions is the minimum silvering. On day one, Home is mostly placeholders with a set of sample entries you can tap to explore. That softens the blank screen without solving it: the product only starts paying rent near the end of week one. The pace bar has the same cold-start problem one level up, because it compares your position against your own trailing three months. With no history it just watches the calendar move.

The staleness is a cost decision I signed. Insight cards regenerate at most every six hours or when a new transaction commits, because each refresh is a language-model call. The place it shows: a bulk statement import waits for the next six-hour cycle instead of regenerating per row, so for a while the insight cards describe the account you had this morning. And that statement review is my least favorite screen we ship. A 433-row bank CSV still means paging through matched, missing and suspicious rows one screen at a time; the single-screen delta view that should replace it is designed and half built. The parser behind it is solid, as the 11-bank upload test showed, but parsing well and reviewing well are different jobs.

Receipt photos add their own noise. The vision model misreads faded paper and occasionally guesses the wrong currency on a blurry photo. Those mistakes land as pending entries you confirm rather than silent writes, which is the right failure mode, and a chore even so. And the currency list stops at seven: USD, EUR, BRL, ARS, MXN, RUB and GBP. That covers my life and most of the people Capi is built for. If you hold CHF or JPY, today this dashboard is not for you.

What does the dashboard hide on purpose?

Three omissions are deliberate. There is no donut chart on the home screen, because a donut is homework and a sentence is an answer. There is no widget customization, because defaults should do the work. And the per-currency split sits behind the main-currency pill, hidden until a second currency actually matters in your month.

The donut rule I will defend anywhere: a pie chart asks you to read it, while "groceries ran 22 percent hot" tells you. The category drilldown keeps one for people who miss it. Widget grids I watched kill better dashboards than mine, because they turn every user into an unpaid designer. And there is no net worth view at all. Capi tracks flows, money in and money out, not balances across brokerage accounts. Monarch does balances well, and that trade is written up in Capi vs Monarch.

The hiding rule for currencies has a threshold problem I want to be plain about. The drawer stays hidden while a second currency is small, and a banner points to the split once one non-base currency passes roughly 40 percent of the month. Between those two marks, some users never discover the drawer exists. Discoverability is the price of a quiet screen, and I chose quiet, but I count it as a cost rather than a win.

Why does the demo look exactly like the real app?

The demo looks like the real app because the alternative is the trained-account screenshot trick the industry runs on. The interactive demo at cappi.io/dashboard uses sample data on the same layout, palette and cards as the live mini-app. What you tap in the demo is what you get after your tenth transaction, including the parts that are rough.

I wrote a longer piece on why finance app screenshots lie: the hero image is a trained account, months of merchant renaming deep, with the messy first weeks cropped out. The demo policy is the practical answer we could ship. It costs us something real, because a screen that admits pending entries and an Other bucket demos worse than a curated one. The return is that nobody who arrives from the demo is surprised by the real thing, and unsurprised users stay.

How does it compare with Monarch and Copilot dashboards?

Monarch and Copilot ship more polished dashboards than Capi does, with net worth views, investment tracking and years of design iteration. Where Capi wins is entry point and price: the dashboard lives inside Telegram where the logging already happens, rolls up seven currencies natively, and the free tier needs no card. The table below reads as a trade, not a ranking.

If your money lives in US accounts and you want balances, budgets and investments in one place, Monarch is the more complete product, and Copilot remains the best-looking spend view on an iPhone. If your money moves between currencies, or your day already happens inside Telegram, the trade tilts this way. The wider field is ranked in the 2026 money tracker guide.

How much does the Capi dashboard cost?

The dashboard ships with every tier, including the free one. Capi is free up to 30 transactions a month with no card. Capi Core at $9.90 a month or $69.90 a year removes the limit and adds statement uploads. Capi Together at $99 a year covers a two-person household, and the dashboard adds a per-person view and joint goals.

The free tier is the whole dashboard with the limits sitting elsewhere: 30 transactions a month and a single tracked currency. Core removes both, which matters here because the multi-currency rollup is the screen's best trick. Together adds the household layer: who spent what, a #mine flag that keeps a purchase off the shared view, and joint goals with per-person contributions. My own logging routine, four voice notes and a photo a day, fits inside Core and is written up in what I track every day.

Frequently asked questions about the Capi dashboard

What is the Capi dashboard?

The Capi dashboard is a mini-app that opens inside Telegram when you send /dashboard to @MeetCapi_Bot, or in any browser at app.meetcapi.com. It shows net for the month in your main currency, a pace bar, runway in months, your top five categories with deltas, and insight cards. It ships with the free tier.

Do I need to install anything to use the Capi dashboard?

No. The dashboard is a Telegram mini-app, so it opens in place inside the chat with @MeetCapi_Bot. There is no separate app or password, because your Telegram identity is the login. On a desktop, the same dashboard loads at app.meetcapi.com. The color theme of your Telegram client carries over automatically, dark mode included.

Does the Capi dashboard work with multiple currencies?

Yes, and it is the strongest feature. Every transaction keeps its native currency, and the dashboard rolls everything up to one main currency using the FX rate captured at entry time. Seven currencies are supported: USD, EUR, BRL, ARS, MXN, RUB and GBP. A drawer shows the per-currency split when a second currency carries real weight in your month.

What are the Capi dashboard's biggest limitations?

The first week is thin, because patterns need about ten transactions before the cards say anything useful. The pace bar compares against your own trailing three months. Insight cards refresh at most every six hours, so they can lag a fresh statement upload. There is no net worth view and no investment tracking, and reviewing a long statement upload remains tedious.

How much does Capi cost?

Capi is free up to 30 transactions per month, in one currency, with no card. Capi Core costs $9.90 per month or $69.90 per year and removes the limit, adding statement uploads and analysis. Capi Together, the couples plan, costs $99 per year for the whole household. The free plan has no expiry date.