The Kindiro MCP: run your trip by just asking Claude

You’re three days into a trip in Lisbon. Someone asks, over the second coffee of the morning, whether you’re square with Marc yet or still owe him for the apartment. The honest answer is “I’d have to check the app.” So you don’t check, and the question evaporates — until settle-up day, when nobody remembers anything.

What you actually wanted was to ask out loud and get an answer. As of this week, you can. We’ve connected Kindiro to AI assistants like Claude — so “do I still owe Marc?” becomes a question you ask in plain English, and get a real answer to, straight from your trip.

First — what’s an MCP?

You might see this feature called the “Kindiro MCP”. MCP stands for Model Context Protocol, which is a mouthful for a simple idea, and the analogy that’s stuck is the one its makers used: MCP is a USB-C port for AI assistants.

Before USB-C, every device had its own plug. A printer cable didn’t fit a phone; a camera needed its own adapter. MCP is the equivalent of agreeing on one shape of plug — but for the apps an AI assistant can talk to. Kindiro now has that plug, so any assistant with the matching port can connect to it.

What you can ask it

Once Kindiro’s connected, you can ask your assistant about any trip you’re on, in whatever words come naturally. A few things people ask:

• “What’s my balance on the Lisbon trip — do I owe anyone?”
• “How much have we spent so far?”
• “What’s the plan for Saturday?”
• “Who pays who at the end?” — and you get the shortest set of transfers that settles everyone up, kept in each currency so nothing gets fudged by a made-up exchange rate.

And it’s not only questions — you can add things too:

• “Add a €92 dinner last night, split between everyone.”
• “Mark my £25 to Marc as paid.”
• “Add to the plan: ferry to Belém, Saturday at 10.”
• “Start a new trip called Porto in August” — then “send me a link to invite the others.”

It can only ever do what you could do yourself in the app. Nothing more.

Just photograph the receipt

This is the part that makes it genuinely useful: you don’t even have to type the numbers.

Snap a photo of the receipt — the crumpled till roll from the supermarket, the bill the waiter just dropped on the table — send it to your assistant, and say “add this to the Lisbon trip, split between everyone.” It reads the total straight off the photo and logs it for you: €47.50, in euros, split equally. You didn’t type a single digit.

That kills the most tedious moment in any trip — the end-of-holiday ritual where someone flattens out a fistful of receipts and types them in one by one. Now it’s just: photo, send, done.

How to connect it

About a minute, and you only do it once. In Claude, open Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector, paste in https://mcp.kindiro.com/mcp, and click Connect. You’ll be asked to sign in to Kindiro — the same way you always do — and that’s it. To check it worked, ask “what trips am I on in Kindiro?” and you should see them listed back.

The full step-by-step, including how to do it in the Claude desktop app, is on our connect-to-Claude page.

Is it safe?

Short version: yes — and it’s worth saying why in plain terms.

Your assistant can only ever see and do what you can, on the trips you’re already part of, and never anyone else’s. It can’t see other people’s email addresses or phone numbers, and it never sees anybody’s password. It works the other way round too: we don’t see your conversations. We’ve no idea what you say to Claude — your trip just gets the result, like “add a €92 dinner.”

The one thing worth knowing is that your chats live with whoever makes your assistant — Anthropic, in Claude’s case — under their privacy rules, not ours. That’s true of everything you tell an AI assistant, not just the bits about Kindiro. Our side of it is spelled out in our privacy policy.

Why we built it

Kindiro’s whole job is to keep the money side of a trip honest without becoming a chore. The hard part was never the splitting — we do that for you — it was the checking. Opening an app to answer a one-line question is exactly the kind of small tax that means people don’t bother, and “don’t bother” is how a trip’s accounts quietly drift out of sync.

Letting you ask in the place you’re already typing removes that tax. You ask whether you’re square with Marc, you get a number, and the question doesn’t have to wait for settle-up day.

If you already use Claude, connect it in about a minute and ask it about your next trip. New here? Start with how Kindiro works — the assistant is a lovely bonus on top, not the main event.