Stang for digital nomads
The hard part of nomad finances is not the spending, it is the counting. You earn in one currency and spend in five or six a year, so a single-currency budget is meaningless — and because visas and tax residency both turn on days present, the number you most need is one most apps cannot give you. Stang converts everything into one home currency at live rates, and its Stays feature derives a running day count per country from where your expenses happen, with no GPS and no check-ins.
Nomad finances have a distinctive shape: the spending is not unusually complicated, but the counting is, and almost nothing is built for it.
We make Stang, so treat this with appropriate scepticism and check the claims against our pricing page.
Your budget is meaningless in one currency
Over a year you might be paid in USD and spend in baht, dong, euro, peso and lira. A budget denominated in any one of those tells you nothing useful, and mentally converting as you go is both tiring and wrong — the rate you remember is rarely the rate you got.
Stang’s model is a home currency plus as many others as you spend in, converted at live rates, free on every plan. You set the currency you actually think in — usually what you invoice in — and everything else lands in it automatically. Budgets run monthly with per-category limits, which suits a life that has months but no trips.
Logging is one sentence: type “lunch 350 THB” and it parses the name, amount, currency, category and date. That matters more than it sounds, because the real failure mode is not bad categorisation, it is not logging at all when entry takes too long. The free plan includes 30 of those a month; Pro is unlimited.
The number you actually need is days
Here is what separates nomads from ordinary travellers: two different authorities care how many days you spent somewhere, and neither accepts “roughly”.
Visas. Most are a hard cap — 30, 60, 90 days — and overstaying has consequences that range from a fine to a ban.
Tax residency. Usually a day count over a tax year, commonly around 183 days, though the threshold and the year both vary by country and some use a different test entirely. See the 183-day rule and counting days for tax residency.
The nomad-specific trap is that you can drift into tax residency somewhere without intending to, simply by liking a place. And you usually find out long after the year has closed, when reconstructing where you were is close to impossible — modern borders often stamp nothing, and boarding passes go missing.
Stays exists for exactly this. It derives a running day count per country from where your expenses happen: no GPS, no background location, no manual check-in. Your spending log already encodes your movements; Stays reads it. It requires Pro and is currently iPhone-only.
Be aware of its one honest limitation: a day with no transactions has nothing to infer from. Most people spend something most days, but a spend-derived count is evidence, not an oracle.
Where Stang is the wrong choice
- Splitting costs with people you travel with. Stang does not do it at all. Use Splitwise.
- Android, if the day count is why you came. Stays is iPhone-only for now.
- Itineraries and bookings. Stang is not a trip planner and does not try to be.
- Invoicing and business accounting. It tracks your spending, not your company.
A workflow that survives contact with real travel
- Set your home currency to what you are paid in and leave it alone. Changing it later makes past months harder to compare.
- Log in the local currency, always. Do not convert in your head — that is where the errors come from.
- Log the same day. A spend-derived day count is only as good as the habit behind it.
- Export a CSV at the end of each tax year. It is free on every plan, and a contemporaneous record is worth far more than one you assemble afterwards under pressure.
If you are choosing between apps rather than just looking at this one, the best travel expense apps covers the alternatives, including where each beats Stang.
