Eastside Physical Therapy Mar 19, 2024Total$220.00
Maple Street Pharmacy Sep 18, 2026Total$80.00
Three from the shoebox. The oldest has nearly given up. The paper can fade after this. The photo will not.
Why Brainbrook exists
You paid at the counter, you got a slip of thermal paper, and from that second the money you can take back out of your own account was tied to that slip. So you kept it. In the shoebox on the closet shelf, with the other years. In the camera roll, somewhere between a birthday and a photo of a parking spot. In an email folder called Medical that you made in a good mood one January.
None of those places is a ledger. The shoebox holds paper but not a total. The camera roll holds a picture but not a date you can sort by, or a name, or whether you were ever paid back. The email folder holds the pharmacy's receipts and none of the dentist's. And the paper itself gives up. Thermal print fades, faster in a hot car, and a receipt from two summers ago can come out of the box nearly blank.
Then something makes all of it urgent at once. You change jobs and the benefits portal closes behind you. It is March and the last day to send in claims for last year's FSA turns out to be a date nobody wrote down. It is tax season and someone asks, reasonably, what that reimbursement was for.
Brainbrook exists for the version of you who has to answer those questions later. Its whole ambition is to make that version of you a little bored, because it is all here.
the two waters
Two waters. HSA receipts rest in the still pool until you mark them reimbursed. FSA receipts ride the current toward Dec 31, 2026, the plan year end you entered.
02 · the habit
The one habit
Everything Brainbrook does grows from one habit that takes about ten seconds. You pay. You take a photo of the receipt before you leave the parking lot. You tag it HSA or FSA, pick who it was for, and mark it owed back. That is the entire chore.
From there the ledger does the remembering. It keeps the receipt with its date, its merchant and its amount. It adds the amount to what you are still owed back and holds that number steady until the day you mark the receipt reimbursed. A receipt from an earlier plan year stays listed under that year with its original date, because a receipt from 2023 does not stop being from 2023.
That is the product. A drawer that counts.
Ledger home. Owed back $1,284.00 across 12 receipts.
03 · the rules
Kept, Columbus, Ohio.
What Brainbrook never does
01
It holds no funds. Your money stays in your HSA or your FSA, where it always was. Brainbrook has no view of it, no connection to it and no way to touch it.
02
It submits no claims. When you want your money back, you ask your plan or your HSA custodian the way you always have. Brainbrook's part is to have the receipt ready, so the asking takes minutes instead of an evening.
03
It decides no eligibility. Whether an expense counts is decided by federal rules and your plan, not by Brainbrook. The HSA and FSA tags say which account you mean to claim from. They never say whether an item qualifies, and nothing on the screen will pretend to.
04
It gives no tax, legal or medical advice. It will not promise you a refund, a saving or an outcome, because it cannot know yours, and neither can anyone who has not read your plan documents.
Those four rules are why the app feels quiet. Nothing on the page is trying to sell you a projection.
04 · the household
Built for a household
Medical receipts are a family sport. One adult has the HSA through work, the other has a dental and vision FSA through theirs, one child has a prescription that refills every ninety days and the other needed glasses in August. Four people, two accounts, one pile of paper, and the pile lives in somebody's glovebox.
Plus puts all of it on one ledger. Up to six household members, each with their own receipts, tagged to the person and the account they belong to. Kids can be on the ledger by name only, with no login. A teenager can have an "adds only" seat and photograph their own receipts without seeing anyone else's.
When the plan year ends, the year end summary export puts the whole year in one file: totals by member, by account, by category and by status, the full receipt list, and every receipt image inside. Yours to keep, on your own drive, whatever happens to the job.
47 receipts in 2026. $1,284.00 owed back across all years.
05 · who it is for
Who it is for
Brainbrook is for the household that has an HSA or an FSA through somebody's job, and usually a kid or a prescription that keeps the receipts coming. You already know the account is a good deal. You suspect you are not getting the full value of it, because the receipts are in three places and the deadline is in none of them. You want to glance at your phone in the car and know what you are still owed back and whether a date is coming.
It is not for anyone hoping an app will file the claim or rule on the expense. Plenty of products promise that. This one keeps the receipt.
06 · the next receipt
Start with the next receipt
Free is for one person, this plan year, up to 30 receipts, with reminders for the dates you enter. Plus is $4 a month or $36 a year, for the household and for anyone with a receipt from an earlier year still waiting.
