Chatting with your coach

Alongside the coaching keel volunteers, you can ask it questions directly. Chat lives in two places: an "Ask keel" section at the bottom of the Coach page for general questions about your month, goals and score, and an "Ask keel about this transaction" section on every transaction's detail page for questions about that specific transaction.

Answers are grounded in your own data — keel looks up your actual numbers before replying, rather than giving generic money advice.

How it works

Where chat lives

• The Coach page — a collapsible "Ask keel" section for general questions. keel can draw on your month's spending and income summary, category trends, goal progress, and your score breakdown.
• A transaction's page — "Ask keel about this transaction" for questions like "Why is this categorised Dining?" or "Was this a one-off?". keel can see the transaction itself, your history with that merchant, and the category's recent trend.
• From coaching prose — sometimes a coaching paragraph ends with a tappable question (a natural follow-up to what it just told you). Tapping it opens a chat with that question ready to send.

When you haven't typed anything yet, suggestion chips offer starting points — on the Coach page, things like "Was my dining spend high this month?" or "What would my score be if I cleared my credit card?".

Threads

Transaction chats stick to their transaction: come back to the same transaction later and the conversation picks up where you left off. General chats on the Coach page start fresh each time — they're for the question in front of you, not a running diary.

Private by default, share what's useful

Chats are private to you — your partner never sees them, even in a shared household. The footer under the composer reminds you of this.

If keel says something worth discussing, you can share an individual reply: each of keel's responses has a "Share with {partner}" button. Sharing sends that reply — along with the question you asked — to your partner's inbox. Only keel's replies can be shared, not your own messages, so chat never becomes a messaging back-channel.

In a single-person household the share button doesn't appear at all — there's no one to share with.

Suggestions inside replies

When your question points at something keel could help fix — a transaction that should be flagged as a one-off, a category that looks wrong, a goal worth setting up — keel may include a suggestion card in its reply naming the action. For now these are suggestions to act on yourself; one-tap confirmation is coming.

Conversation limits

Chat has a monthly cap of 100 conversations per household. As you approach it, a quiet counter appears below the composer ("N conversations left this month — they reset on the 1st"); at the cap, the composer pauses until the start of the next month. Most households never get near it.

Why it works this way

Chat is the same coach, answering instead of volunteering. It reads from the same data as the rest of keel's coaching, and the privacy model is deliberate: each of you can ask candid questions ("can we actually afford this?") without broadcasting them, and choose to share the answers that are worth a conversation. See How coaching works for the coaching engine behind it.

Good to know

• Messages are capped at 2,000 characters. Press Enter to send; Shift+Enter adds a new line.
• While keel is working you'll see a quiet "keel is thinking…" — answers usually take a few seconds because keel is querying your real data.
• Sharing a reply is permanent for that reply — the button flips to "Shared with {partner}" and they'll see it in their inbox.
• Chat answers describe your data; they're coaching, not regulated financial advice.

FAQ

Can my partner see my chats? No. Chats are private to you. The only thing your partner ever sees is a reply you explicitly share, which lands in their inbox together with the question you asked.

Why did my Coach page chat forget our last conversation? General chats start fresh each time. Transaction chats are the ones that persist — reopen the transaction and the thread resumes.

Can keel make changes from chat? Not yet. It can suggest actions — flag as one-off, recategorise, draft a goal — but you carry them out yourself on the relevant screen for now.

What kind of questions work best? Specific ones about your own finances: "Was my dining spend high this month?", "Am I on track for my deposit?", "Why this category?". keel answers from your data, so questions about your data get the best answers.