Behind the Scenes: The Storyboard of Vaulty's 30-Second Ad

We just finished a 30-second ad for Vaulty, for Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and Facebook. It has one job: show you, in half a minute, why an expense tracker that does the busywork for you is worth installing.

We set ourselves one rule before planning a single frame: every app screen in the ad has to be a real recording of the Vaulty app. No mock-ups, no redrawn screens, no features we don't have. This post walks through the storyboard, scene by scene, and shows how that rule shaped it.

Watch the ad

Read the transcript

You earn it. You spend it. But do you know where it goes?

Meet Vaulty. Your smarter way to manage money.

Vaulty reads your bank SMS and organises every transaction for you.

See where your money goes, track expenses and understand your spending habits.

Set budgets, track goals and make smarter financial decisions.

Take control of your money. Download Vaulty today!

[On screen: Your Money. Your Control. Powered by AI. Download Vaulty Today. Get it on Google Play.]

The idea in one line

The campaign line is "Your Money. Your Control. Powered by AI." The ad follows the path most of us take with money:

1. The problem: you spend all month, but you can't say where it went.
2. Discovery: meet Vaulty.
3. Demonstration: Vaulty picks up your bank SMS and organises the transactions.
4. Value: you can finally see where your money goes.
5. Taking control: budgets, goals and a download link.

Thirty seconds is very little time, so each of those steps gets one scene, and each scene gets one sentence of voice-over and one line of text.

Why we only used real screens

Ads for finance apps often show screens that look nothing like the app you end up installing. We didn't want that. If the ad shows Vaulty sorting an SMS into a category, that should be exactly what happens on your phone.

So we installed the same Vaulty version that's on Google Play (1.0.2) on an Android phone, signed in to a demo account, and recorded the screen. The demo account holds example data: a salary, rent, groceries, a few cab rides, a budget or two and a couple of savings goals, so the screens look like a real month. All the amounts you see are examples. Everything Vaulty did with that data (the categories, the account matches, the charts, the budget percentages) is what the app actually produced.

In the edit, the recordings are only trimmed, sped up in places and placed inside a phone frame. The headlines, the logo animation and the final screen are designed around the phone. Nothing is drawn on top of the app.

The storyboard, scene by scene

Scene 1: The problem (0–4 seconds)

The ad opens on a phone's notification shade as bank SMS land one after another: ₹649 at Swiggy, ₹250 at Uber, ₹1,842 at BigBasket and three more. Each one gets a soft notification sound. By the fourth, it already feels like too much to keep track of, and that's the point.

We first planned to show a person looking confused at their phone. We dropped it: we didn't want an actor or a computer-generated face, and a stack of real payment messages tells the story on its own. The scene ends with a fast zoom into darkness.

Scene 2: Meet Vaulty (4–7 seconds)

The Vaulty logo is a single emerald line, so we animate it being drawn, stroke by stroke, with "Meet Vaulty" and "Your AI Expense Tracker" rising underneath. Then the logo moves up and a phone rises into view, showing Vaulty's Reports screen with income and expenses for the last few months. It's the first real look at the app.

Scene 3: Smart Capture (7–13 seconds)

This is the heart of the ad, and it's one continuous real capture. Two bank SMS arrive on the phone:

• Rs.486.00 debited from A/c XX7316 at SWIGGY…
• Rs.238.00 debited from A/c XX4821 at UBER…

Within seconds, Vaulty shows its own notification: "2 pending transactions · Tap to review your transactions." One tap opens the Smart Inbox, where both payments already have a merchant and a category. On the Review Transactions screen, Vaulty had filled in:

Vaulty matched each SMS to the right account from the last four digits in the message (XX4821 is SBI Bank, XX7316 is HDFC Savings). Both drafts show 100% confidence and a Learned tag, because the demo account had paid at Uber and Swiggy before and Vaulty had learned how those were categorised. Then one tap on Save All and both are saved.

We wrote the line for this scene carefully. Reading the SMS happens on the phone, and you always review before anything is saved, so the voice-over says "Vaulty reads your bank SMS and organises every transaction for you". It doesn't claim more than that.

Scene 4: See where every rupee goes (13–19 seconds)

The phone swings to Activity, where the two transactions from the SMS now sit at the top under Today. Then it scrolls through Reports: income vs expense by month, monthly cash flow, budget performance, and a donut chart of this month's spending by category.

Scene 5: Take control (19–25 seconds)

"Track. Analyse. Take Control." lands one word at a time while the phone shows Budgets (four monthly budgets, all marked Safe) and then Goals (an emergency fund and a Goa trip, both On Track). For the last two seconds, the phone steps back and two more slide out beside it, Budgets, Goals and Reports together: scattered payments turned into an organised picture.

Scene 6: Download (25–30 seconds)

The phones drop away, an emerald glow rises from the bottom, and the logo draws itself once more. "Your Money. Your Control." and "Powered by AI" appear above a phone showing Vaulty, followed by Download Vaulty Today and the Get it on Google Play badge.

The script

The voice-over is six short lines, one per scene, each timed to start a fraction of a second after its scene:

Each line pairs with one short piece of on-screen text, so the ad still makes sense with the sound off, which is how many people watch Reels.

Look and sound

• Colour: dark charcoal backgrounds with Vaulty's emerald green (#10B981) as the only accent. The second line of every headline is emerald.
• Type: big, bold, two-line headlines above the phone, so they never cover the app.
• Motion: a quick sideways swing of the phone at every scene change, a three-phone fan before the ending, and particles only on the final screen.
• Sound: soft notification pings on the SMS, whooshes on scene changes, a shimmer on the logo and a lift into the final screen, all kept under the voice. Background music is added when the ad is posted.

Try what the ad shows

Want to see where your money goes?

Vaulty can pick up your bank SMS, organise your spending, and track your budgets and goals. Vaulty is free on Android.

Get Vaulty on Google Play

SMS Capture is opt-in: Vaulty only looks at messages that arrive after you turn it on, and you review every transaction before it's saved. For a closer look at that part, read how Vaulty turns bank SMS into transactions. To add spends that never send an SMS, like cash, see Smart Expense Entry.

You can also read more about Vaulty or browse more guides on the Vaulty blog.

Video transcript

The full voice-over from the ad above:

You earn it. You spend it. But do you know where it goes? Meet Vaulty. Your smarter way to manage money. Vaulty reads your bank SMS and organises every transaction for you. See where your money goes, track expenses and understand your spending habits. Set budgets, track goals and make smarter financial decisions. Take control of your money. Download Vaulty today!

The ad ends on "Your Money. Your Control. Powered by AI" and "Download Vaulty Today" shown on screen, with the Google Play badge.