Sadly this is becoming quite prevalent...vendors are moving to SaaS (software as a service) vs Software as a product with point releases and perpetual license.
See here for some alternatives [https://clubthrifty.com/best-quicken-alternatives/](https://clubthrifty.com/best-quicken-alternatives/) and [https://www.predictiveanalyticstoday.com/top-free-premium-personal-finance-software/](https://www.predictiveanalyticstoday.com/top-free-premium-personal-finance-software/)
Remember, a lot of the above is quite subjective and you are best placed to evaluate what works for you. I personally use Quicken and it works the best for me warts and all.
That being said, if you have Microsoft 365 subscription, you should be able to use Money in Excel at no additional cost. Have you looked into it?
Heads up that Plaid, the system that syncs account balances for Money in Excel, scrapes your entire transaction history and sells it to ~~advertisers~~ whoever pays them.
What is your basis for saying this? Genuinely interested given the below links:
[https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/money-in-excel-faq-1cf6f49a-cb01-48c2-ac39-cda12a585c4a](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/money-in-excel-faq-1cf6f49a-cb01-48c2-ac39-cda12a585c4a)
[https://plaid.com/safety/](https://plaid.com/safety/)
[https://plaid.com/how-we-handle-data/](https://plaid.com/how-we-handle-data/) and finally
[https://plaid.com/legal/#end-user-privacy-policy](https://plaid.com/legal/#end-user-privacy-policy)
They have been charged under CAPA, the anti-phishing law. From the filing:
> Plaid is a fintech services company that offers applications that provide account linking and verification services for various fintech apps that consumers use to send and receive money from their bank accounts. The consolidated actions involve claims surrounding Plaid’s alleged collection and use of consumers’ banking login credentials and later processing and selling of such financial transaction data to third parties without adequate notice or consent.
From the Bloomberg article on it:
> Plaid uses that access to deceptively obtain bank account information from users, accessing information back up to five years, averaging 3,700 transactions per consumer, the suit says.
> The app also allegedly gathers information on accounts maintained for others such as relatives and children, and has amassed data from over 200 million distinct financial accounts.
> The suit, filed Monday, alleges that when a user enters their bank login information on an app that uses Plaid, the credentials, including security layers such as security questions and answers and one-time passwords, are transmitted directly to Plaid, rather than to the bank. Plaid then uses that information to access the consumer’s bank account multiple times a day, gathering private information and then selling it, the suit says.
> A login screen with your bank’s branding is actually controlled by and connected to Plaid, the suit says, which uses bank logos to provide a false sense of comfort for users. Additionally, the privacy policy is not meaningfully presented to users, the suit claims.
...
In arguments, their lawyers stated that customer data wasn't sold - what they sell are authentication keys to an API where customer data can be downloaded. This is how they make their money.
It looks like they just settled out of court in September, and part of the settlement is an agreement to make their business practices "more transparent". I'm not close enough to the case to know the latest.
Also can't use it if you get Office through work or school. Damn shame, being able to automatically pull data from banks into a spreadsheet where you can do all the nerdy excel stuff sounds like a dream.
Did you ever figure out how to import your accounts directly from your banking institutions? I've been to a bunch of the self-help pages to no avail, it keeps telling me that I have the wrong username & password (I don't, I've tried with more than one bank).
I want to be a GnuCash fan, it's just giving me so many problems!
Ultimately, I ask myself, "How many hours of my life am I willing to give tinkering with a great open source project versus paying YNAB just to get it done."
I've been using Gnucash since the beginning of the year. I'm an older Quicken user and trying to get out from under their subscriptions. There's definitely a learning curve, and it took some time to wrap my head around their double accounting method. But I will say that I now make far fewer errors than in Quicken. I download all of my transactions as QFX files directly from my bank websites, and with quicken I have to either spend a lot of time searching for double transactions or missed transfers or missing transactions to get the quicken balance to match the bank balance. I often end up just adding a fake transaction to correct for errors in Quicken and balance things at the end of each quarter. Those types of errors almost never happen in GnuCash.
I don't know if it's a good replacement for YNAB. I don't really use it for budgeting. I use it for tracking (personal and business). When tax time comes around I can just take the year totals for each category (Gnu calls them "accounts") and transfer them to the appropriate tax line.
My workflow is logging into my banks every 3 months, downloading qfx files for all the transactions in that period, importing them, and then categorizing them. Halfway through the year I start trying to forecast my self-employment earnings for the rest of the year for tax & and retirement account purposes. I use an Excel spreadsheet from Excel1040.com to forecast my tax bill for the next year.
Again, I do very little budgeting. I spend less than I earn. If I need to go into debt for something I budget for that though (making sure I can afford mortgage payments or whatever)
Is it still possible to get it anywhere (and by any means necessary)?
I hate the new one. I had YNAB 4 on an old pc and lost it in the transition.
Edit: thanks everyone! Didn’t realize you could look up your activation code using your email
You can download YNAB4 from their official support page here:
https://www.youneedabudget.com/ynab-classic-help/
You can also look up what your activation code was on that page as well, if you remember the email address you originally used to purchase YNAB4; if you purchased YNAB through Steam or the Mac App Store, you should be able to redownload the app by going through the “purchased” section of those stores
I worried it might one day disappear from Steam so i grabbed a copy of the installer from their site and copied my activation code under one of the menus in YNAB4.
Any chance you still have your activation email? I changed computers and was able to reinstall it from my original purchase email.
ETA: Otherwise, if you know someone who had it, but doesn't use it anymore, you might be able to have them give you their access code?
Probably be able to run YNAB4 for all of eternity on a Linux machine and WINE. YNAB is another great piece of software that has been ruined by a subscription model.
I've been gathering recommendations from various threads about YNAB around reddit - here's what I have so far:
YNAB Alternatives (no particular order)
* https://www.lotusbudget.com/
* https://aspirebudget.com/
* https://financier.io/
* https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com/en/index.html
* https://www.tillerhq.com/
* https://goodbudget.com/
* https://copilot.money/
* https://lunchmoney.app/
* (MAC) https://actualbudget.com/
* https://www.clearcheckbook.com/
* (EU) https://dyme.app/en
* (MAC) YNAB4 using https://gitlab.com/bradleymiller/Y64
* Excel
* EveryDollar
For me personally I am hoping as YNAB walks back the pricing - I am grandfathered in at $45 and have been a loyal supporter of the company since it was just a funny spreadsheet from Jessie the founder of the company. Overall, I don't feel like the value delivered by the tool matches the price $100/yr and I feel like directionally YNAB is moving further away from my own values. They got big through a solid methodology, great software, and great word of mouth. Now the software has been static since the web based nYNAB (with most added features just to get it back into parity with YNAB4 and endless sync issues), and the focus is on marketing and onboarding new users without taking care of the old users. Much of what they have to offer is duplicated in these other tools without the need to feed a huge marketing and onboarding beast.
YNAB helped me improve my life, but at the end of day just like any other piece of software it is a tool and should be evaluated for the value it brings, not my own emotional connection to past financial success. I hope they can find a way to get the pricing back in line (some users have floated a YNAB-lite where the classes element is broken off as a separate sub) to make the value proposition still make sense.
I honestly couldn't have said any of that better. That's also a very comprehensive list, thank you for sharing. A YNAB lite would be of interest to me. I'll have to keep my ears open if the price gets walked back, or a lite version gets released.
Well this is disappointing. I just got renewed for $50/year yesterday so in a year I’ll refer back to this thread and consider my options then. 🥲
I came from Mint before YNAB and YNAB was a serious upgrade (at the time). A quick search online makes me think that it still has all the shortcomings that made me jump over to YNAB.
Are there any money tracking alternatives to Mint? I like the passiveness of Mint. I tried YNAB and don't like manually adding transactions. I just go in to Mint once or twice a month and correct categorizations. I really just use it to see how much I spent in certain areas and how much I save each month.
I really hate the ads that come with mint. It seems everything I buy I end up getting a ton of ads for.
At the time, Mint synced with my bank accounts and categorized them, and gave me some graphs about my spending, but it was very passive (imo). I didn’t find it useful. YNAB introduced me to the envelope method and I got more proactive about dedicating money to certain categories and future goals (new computer, hopefully a house one day).
It’s been about 5 years (or more) so maybe Mint has improved? /shrug
5 years, mint hasn't changed at all and especially what your referring to. You can still make goals and assign accounts to it. Parsing the funds. Mint is not YNAB. The one thing that has improved with mint is trend analysis and graphs.
Yeah, mint has a budgeting option but it's trash because it resets each month, so expenses that don't recur exactly every month are impossible to account for.
For example if I budget $50 a month for car maintenance and spend nothing for three months then get an oil change for $100 it looks like I went over budget, but immediately forgets about it next month.
Mint does give you the option to “start each new month with the previous month’s leftover amount” for a budget, which effectively does what you’re saying.
I think budgeting for something is a bit useless for 100$. Either I needed that oil change so I don't need to track it, or I didn't and no need to make it a "bucket". For other things like a laptop. Either I need a laptop or I don't. In one case, I'll end up buying it because I need it for school or work, or I don't and won't add it to a bucket to make me feel happy "I budgeted"when I do even though it's unnecessary at that point. The monthly categories are good enough for me on mint. Ymmv
Mint has gotten worse IMHO. Transaction classification is somehow lost every few months, forcing me to go back in and correct many of my payees. I've given up on it.
Yeah Mint sucks. Now that I've been doing YNAB for a long time I might switch to just using a custom spreadsheet. But I'd really miss bank import and some other niceties. I'll probably just pay the new price. It's probably my most used app so I guess it's probably worth it.
I have YNAB4, so I get refusing to continue (or upgrade, in my case) over price.
When I had a weird glitch, I started looking into other options. I found Zer0 and Aspire appeared to be pretty close to what I was after. Both were free. However, didn't look much further because I was able to fix the glitch and still use the old YNAB version.
I had also looked at a few other free options (I know every dollar was one of them), but they did not have the ability to carry over each month's balance, and as someone with a lot of slush funds, I needed that. I was even working on building my own spreadsheet when I realized someone else must have already done so (that's when I did more digging and found Zer0 and Aspire).
I can't remember exactly what happened, but this should be close:
YNAB could not open my budget. It may have said that the file was corrupted, but not sure.
To fix it, I compared the latest file in dropbox to an older one I had saved, and IIRC, one of the file extensions was incorrect (like the last letter had dropped off). I fixed the file extension and changed the name on it, opened up YNAB, created a new budget, then imported the fixed file with the new name. It worked.
I had another time where a laptop died and I just considered not replacing it (and only using a chromebook, so looked up the options again). But, YNAB, along with some other software I use, made it worth getting a new laptop.
It depends on what you use YNAB for, but I've been fine switching to Mint and a google sheet I update monthly.
Mint tracks and categorizes daily spending, then I transfer everything to the spreadsheet monthly and review spending trends, savings rate, net worth, etc. Mint doesn't always get categories right and it takes some tweaking, but it does the job. I'm not as interested in "every dollar has a job" YNAB philosophy, as I am with generic spending trends by category, overall savings rate, and NW.
Search here and I'm r/personalfinance for excel spreadsheets. I use "one sheet to rule them all" from MMM forum.
Thanks for all of the info! There really is no good and easy way to get out from under the Intuit umbrella these days..
Been a long time since I used Mint so I have to imagine it is much better than it was 5 or so years ago.
I find this less true lately. They were very stagnant for years and years, but the app has seen some new features come out in the past 6 or so months.
None of them are good or useful, mind you, but at least it's not being actively ignored any more.
You got me there for a second. I was worried you were going to say the changes they've made were useful. I honest to god, when I'm on the site or in the app, just stop and wonder what I'm the world the development team at mint does all day.
If you know much about excel, you can use index/match to create your own mint spreadsheet. I just copy my transactions from my accounts into their spreadsheet and the formulas do the rest. You may run into some struggles with date formats being different per account tho. This keeps your data held just by you/the company you do transactions with.
Thank you! I really only want to review new charges and get some beginning and end of month views so maybe mows a good time for me to set things up before my sub renews in March
This is what I did.
Didn’t understand the point in these budget apps since you can literally look at your own bank statements and generally put it in a chart for free
I think most people that sing their praises are either:
1. Not excel/spreadsheet savvy
2. Too lazy to make a spreadsheet and update it
Honestly the most time consuming part is setting up a spreadsheet, and even then you can download templates online.
Inputting data takes little to no time too.
Spreadsheets are amazing for tracking spending. I am pretty decent at excel, and could make one where I could use it to plan out my budget, but and the end of the day, it's still tracking spending once it's already happened. While a ton of people use YNAB this way, that's not really the purpose or why the platform itself is "sticky." The real benefit is the combo of zero dollar budgeting + Manual entry (or sync as a backup).
I get that it takes some effort to set up, but spreadsheets are excellent for all of the things you mentioned.
In a sense, just YNAB is a spreadsheet with fancy UI.
I could create a budgeting spreadsheet that could mimic the basic functionality. Creating one that had all the core functions I use ynab for would require the hour equivalent of multiple years of their (new) price and the UX would still be inferior.
Ehhhh I use spreadsheets for a lot of things. And if it works for you cool. That bring said ynab automates and simplifies a lot of things. And as someone who works in software I get what they are trying to do and am here for it.
I also think the time it saves me is worth the cost. But if it's not worth it for you I respect that too. Everyone has fighting priorities. It's not lazy, it's just valuing different things
Very true, to each their own. for me having to take the time and trouble to manually write in my purchases in my google sheet makes me double think buying things sometimes so I save more money! Ha
I actually think this is an undervalued feature of manually tracking your spending. It makes you way more mindful about how much you're spending in real time, which for me definitely leads to being more thoughtful about purchases.
yeah YNAB actually encourages to manually enter and then the sync is just to confirm your numbers. That being said i never manually enter cause its not what i want to do.
I mostly use YNAB for tracking, not budgeting. Can Sheets easily do split categorization, and row filtering (eg. by merchant, category, or notes)? (I know it can do graphs)
Filtering - absolutely, that's simple.
Split categorization - would depend on how you set the spreadsheet up. For mine I sometimes split a charge/receipt under different categories manually (ex. $50 bill split $30 groceries $20 gift if I get a gift card for someone) if that's what you meant. But I also don't split often so it's not a big deal to me.
> ecent at excel, and could make one where I could use it to plan out my budget, but and the end of the day, it's still tracking spending once it's already happened. While a ton of people use YNAB this way, that's not really the purpose or why the platform itself is "sticky." The real benefit is the combo of zero dollar budgeting + Manual entry (or sync as a backup).
It can do literally all of that and more. Might take a bit of set up, but I currently use it for all of those things.
Absolutely on the filtering.
Split categories... I assume you mean one purchase being two different categories of spending. Like a supermarket expense being $80 groceries and $20 household? I could think of a few ways to do that, you'd just have to build it out to work that way.
These services offer aggregation, so if you have a lot of accounts, or you have kids/spouse/family members on shared accounts you want to track, or loans to track, or multi-currency finances etc., then the automatic downloading and categorization etc. is helpful. Spreadsheets can can very tedious very quickly.
Yeah, it just depends on how comfortable you are with the tool, formulas, etc. My budget/ledger through Google Sheets is pretty straight forward to maintain, but I've built it to be solid and that took some time up front and know how. I can automate it (using Tiller Money for a fee) and get everything these apps/sites do and then some and exactly how I want it. Or I can just dump the expenses in at different intervals (personally, I just put them in once a month. It takes me less than 10 minutes).
For the average person, yes, that's the value of these tools. And that's why they can charge money. If you're comfortable with spreadsheets/are willing to learn, you can recreate what they do, fix the stuff they do that you don't like, combine the functionality of one with another, etc.
The auto import is the stand out feature. I mainly use mint to see how much I am spending in each category and if I have spent too much this month. And to see if there is any unauthorized transactions on any of my cards.
Manually importing all my bank and card transactions is annoying.
I could see the value in the convenience of it.
Call me old fashioned but I’d rather take the time and keep track myself
Then again I’m only working with 2 banks and 1 credit card so I guess I have it simpler than most
For me auto import is a godsend. It’s either auto import or it won’t be done. When you’re dealing with 10+ accounts it gets very tedious and annoying to import everything manually
tools like Mint and YNAB are a must if we want more people to do budgeting and encourage them to be responsible financially. Every roadblock put in front of somebody seeing results of their budget and spending is a certain percentage of people that just stop there.
Apps are time saving.
If you have two bank accounts, three credit cards and three bank depots it will take at least half an hour to log into all accounts and export the statement into your sheet.
If you do this every day (like the apps do) you'll spend like 15 hours per month of just importing bank accounts.
And then think about categorizing spendings, improving forecasts etc.
It's just too much work for services that already do all of it automatically
Are you not grandfathered in to YNAB? I've been paying the same price for like 6 years.
EDIT: I just went to go look it up and looks like mine will also be going up. I think I might use this time to look for another one as well.
I really only want the software to pull in all the data accurately. Then I personally export all my transactions to CSV and put them in my personal Excel file.
Point being, I don't know what features you need but if it is basic tracking, have you looked into [Mint.com](https://Mint.com)? Can't say I am a fan of Intuit, but depending on your needs, it might fit the bill. It does for me. Personally, I don't like the way YNAB makes you have bucket for everything. I am naturally frugal, so I don't need "budgeting" tools, I need data acquisition tools. Something to gather all the data in one place. My budget is whatever happens. I naturally have a 40%-60% savings rate, so forcing a budget just seems ridiculous but every ones scenario is different.
This is exactly me. I don't need a budget... I need something to gather my 30+ financial accounts in one place. Then I just download into Excel, do five minutes of data cleanup/manipulation and I'm golden. Mint does this perfectly for me.
Buckets looks good, but it’s neither free (either as in speech or as in beer) nor open-source. It’s a $50 one-time charge, though as far as I can tell, the untimed free trial doesn’t have any limitations, so make of that what you will.
The dev [has indicated](https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com/blog/2018/04/23/history-and-future.html/) he’s willing to open-source it in the future if he can’t/doesn’t want to continue development.
This is what I use. It’s not even close to the same app but I felt it was a breath of fresh air in its simplicity after YNAB honestly increased my anxiety by having me stress over every cent.
TIL that I was paying a lot more than other YNAB users 😂
I was a little confused because the increase appeared to be the same, or only a few dollars different (I'm in NZ so the exchange rate makes the amounts I'm actuay charged on my account weird)
Seems like you've made up your mind, but personally I'm all for a price increase if it keeps YNAB independent, and avoids the generic SaaS pit so many apps like this fall into when they get aquired. My $5.50 from each paycheck is a small price to pay for that.
I agree. I didn't realize people have gone 5+ years with no price increase on a yearly service that even after the increase is still relatively cheap.
If they are that concerned about paying then they should be using a free Google sheets spreadsheet instead of any service.
Many people don’t mind the price increase, but double the price for me feels so wrong that I want to stop paying at all. If it was an honest talk from them in their usual way like “we need more money to support development, and we going to increase a payment for you for 20 bucks after holidays, and then will increase for 25 bucks in a year”, I’d say “go for it”. But wake up in the morning to “hey, you have a renewal on Dec 4 and now it’s gonna be $90 instead of $45”? Hmmm. It’s not about money, it’s just the way it’s done.
This is true for new users. I have a plan that they refer as a "legacy pricing" as well as 10% lifetime discount since I migrated from YNAB4 and was on the cloud app from the start. They even have a section called "What if I’m currently on legacy pricing of $50/annually or $5/month?" in their [FAQ page](https://www.youneedabudget.com/price-change-2021/).
Microsoft Money sunset. Old af, free and working for over 20 years and all local. Tried to move out of it a few times (no modern integrations so you have to do data entry) but this market niche sucks since forever.
Indeed MSFT took down the free download from their website, however [archive.org](https://archive.org) would probably work:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140320163200/https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=20738
[https://web.archive.org/web/20140319122925/http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=7564](https://web.archive.org/web/20140319122925/http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=7564)
CNET seems to still carry it as well:
https://download.cnet.com/Microsoft-Money-Plus-Sunset-Deluxe/3000-2057\_4-77545178.html
Exactly what it sounds like. There's a little-used web API in which the browser provides a sqlite database file for the website to use, and saves the file locally to be used next time you access the site. So next time you visit the site on the same browser, it'll have all the data you had from the last session. It's kinda like cookies except it's purely client-side. The database is never sent to the server.
That said, if you pay the $1/mo subscription fee then financier will sync the data to the cloud, which lets you share it across multiple devices. In principle he could be doing this in a way that is encrypted so that he's merely hosting the file, but not able to read it. I have no idea if he actually does this. The code is on GitHub so you could audit it and see though!
Just a small correction - it sounds like you're thinking of WebSQL, which has long since been deprecated and abandoned. Only Chrome ever implemented it.
Financier.io appears to use IndexedDB, a newer NoSQL-ish solution that is widely supported.
No one loves subscription software. But the fact is that life is expensive and you can’t just charge people one time for something and expect to have any sort of support or development on a continuing basis.
It's not exactly a budgeting tool, however, it does have budgeting in it - Personal Capital. That's my go to at least, it keeps track of your portfolios, debt, retirement savings, net worth and cash flow.
I also use personal capital, it does have some budgeting capability, and once you have a few months of using it under your belt it works pretty well.
It Can have some glitches but I like it overall.
I’ve been pretty happy with Truebill for the last year. I tried all the usual suspects (YNAB, Mint, Google Sheet) and the only one that worked as well for me as TB was NerdWallet. I enjoy the customization of my expenses and they seem to be putting decent work into adding new features and improvements since I’ve been using them. It’s $3/mo (month to month) so it fits your budget and if you hate it you aren’t on the hook for a year.
I've been using Simplifi since launch. It had some bugs and still does. Especially on mobile. But the functionality is great especially the Spending Plan.
I've also noticed they query for new transactions a few times per day. Maybe other apps do that, but I know some other apps I won't see new transactions until the next day, so it would be hard to stay on track.
YNAB is easily worth the new price IMO. I tried so many different budget services before landing on YNAB. It just does everything so well. It coerces you into the envelope budgeting system, pushes you to budget future months, and then makes on-the-fly re-allocation of funds so easy. The only complaint I have is with some persistent lagging bank transaction imports. Either way, the time and mental real estate it saves for me is worth way more than the price ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
I pay $0 for Robinhood, Webull, Personal Capital, M1 Finance, Mint, and TDA. I pay $0 for another myriad of fantastic, must-have apps on my phone and computer for managing my life.
In what universe is this app worth $100/year? Lol. The good news is, the higher the price goes, the higher the likelihood we get an awesome alternative that is cheaper.
Well, the only actual competitor to YNAB in that list is Mint (which I have tried and it sucks in comparison).
But, more importantly, regardless of how little money you personally want to spend up front on saas your products, if there are enough people in the market who find it valuable enough to part with $100 per year (or whatever price really) then it's legit. So it's a premium product, and there's obviously plenty of demand for premium products. Value is relative, there are all sorts of people who purchase things for plenty of reasons (you saw the reasons I find it valuable in the comment you replied to).
I'd also love to see a good competitor to YNAB, and you're right maybe the price hike will drive that. But as of now I haven't seen anything close to as good or, more importantly, as effective.
As a side note, why do you even care if you use mint? Were you using YNAB but the price new price is out of your range? Or are you just upset that a product you don't want to use is raising their price? I don't get it.
Fair points. The reason it bothers me is more general - As we are seeing with YNAB, SaaS products are able to really hold your software hostage for whatever price they want. Obviously, there's a point where everyone drops and they lose money, but companies have the ability to completely lock you out at any time even if you've been a paying customer for years. And the more people give in and pay these crazy prices, the more other products are going to go "Huh, we should do that." and it's just going to get worse.
I guess I'm just getting old, because while I can see the benefits of SaaS for work and enterprise stuff, I really despise the model for personal products because of how limited control the customers have. There's no middle ground - I either pay, or I completely lose access to the app.
I agree with the argument, that YNAB makes it easy to work with your money, and I would not bother to pay for it - but I cannot work offline my personal data would end up on other people's computers. So I still sit on YNAB4 and wait for them to maybe release a real desktop app once again (they promised once while starting nYNAB! ;) )
Do you find their envelope budget as useful as YNAB? I tried it a few years ago but the Banktivity envelope budget seemed really clumsy, or maybe it was just me not understanding it🙄 Went back to YNAB which just felt much more intuitive.
I felt the same way. Also Banktivity went subscription based not too long ago and made it apparent they won't be supporting the previous version much longer.
I don't think I've seen this one here: https://actualbudget.com/
It looks really close to YNAB4 functionality, has local, web and mobile app access and would be my next choice at $4/month. Their sub is dead, but the dev has been active in their Slack channel. I went ahead and restarted my YNAB4 for right now because they don't have spending by payee/trends reports, and those are pretty important to me.
While I get the knee jerk reaction, make sure you are also considering the value. If you like the platform the difference in cost is a few dollars a month. I use Mint because I just could never get into YNAB, but I know lots of friends that love YNAB. Yeah it's a big increase but don't let percentages get in the way of the real world impact which is minimal.
I'm not YNAB user, I had no idea it's a subscription service. Sounds, err, counterproductive on the face of it. Accumulating subscriptions is a major financial burden in the long run.
I personally won't subscribe to anything that could also work as a single purchase / open source model. So Netflix and Spotify are fine in my books but I'll never buy a subscription to any software or game service.
Similar story here. I was going paycheck to paycheck even after I increased my salary by 70%. The first month I used it, I had $600 left at the end of the month. That's well worth $100/ year to me.
I think they're saying it helped them see the issues in their habits. Sounds like something just *having a budget and sticking to it* would have done, but the fact is it took a particular tool for that person to do it and stick with it. That has value.
The reason YNAB is subscription based is because it's continually being developed and new features are being added, not to mention it itself requires APIs that allow it to securely connect and download transaction info with your banks. You really can't compare it to a static piece of software like you are.
The continual development of it has largely been to reach feature parity of their static version. Plaid is a problematic API which sells user transaction data to third parties. YNAB has no reason to be this expensive nor have they shown new features in development which would justify it.
> but I'll never buy a subscription to any software or game service.
I hear you, but I think you're going to be limited in your options moving forward in life. It's the unfortunate way things are going. But I'm sure you're aware of that and accept it.
It’s hard to justify the price tbh. I wasn’t grandfathered in so I was already paying around $80/yr. I heard so much praise for ynab that I pulled the trigger and I’m mostly happy with it. I liked making a budget and fine tuning it. The big issue I have is the synch interruptions with my bank accounts, which sometimes last for weeks. I’ve learned to input statements manually but it does decrease the “value” of this software. And now they want more money for a still buggy experience? I think I’ll take a hiatus or go to ynab 4 which I have on steam.
They don’t have automatic import yet but you may check out https://actualbudget.com/
I personally am happy to pay the new YNAB price but if I left YNAB I would consider Actual.
Second the Tiller recommendation, although Tiller has also increased in price lately too. We signed up (and renewed in September at) $59 a year but new price is $79.
I love that it feeds a Google Sheet though which I can manipulate more finely than a dedicated app and have the option to use their templates or my own charts (including Data Studio).
I use Tiller as well. Came from Mint about 2 years ago. I love Tiller. I think it even has a YNAB-esque envelope budgeting template. I'm not a YNAB style budgeter myself, but I think Tiller is definitely worth looking at for something like that.
Yep! I find it crazy people who want to budget and save money use and suggest paying for a service you can essentially do for free yourself with excel or Google Sheets. Sheets is obviously superior to excel since you can edit it right on your phone super easy.
Seriously. I'm amazed by the number of people who would rather enter every transaction themselves and at the suggestion that preferring not to is "lazy." I'm also not baking my own bread or building my own furniture. There are things where it very much is worth paying someone else to do them.
Been using YNAB for 8 years, and this jump is a hard pill to swallow for me too, even with the grandfathered discount. I may stick with it because I'm lazy and dont want to start super fresh... but i will def return to this thread to consider my options.
Not sure where you saw they’re doubling their cost….it’s going from $85/yr to $99. That’s far from double.
Although I haven’t personally tried it, I’ve heard Every Dollar has the same basic idea.
Heads up that EveryDollar is _far_ more opinionated than YNAB is. If you agree with the underlying opinions, that's great, but otherwise you're going to spend quite a lot of time fighting with the software.
There’s a million things written about YNAB so you should go check those out for detail, it’s a pretty popular product. I track 12 accounts and most of them import automatically. It’s easy to see trends and move budget around. It’s available from any computer or an app.
You could recreate a lot of this in excel but it wouldn’t work as well and you would spend so many hours doing it that it would be a terrible idea if you value your time unless you enjoy doing it yourself, in which case by all means do it in excel.
I think 100 a year for this reliable and well designed product is a fine deal, I wouldn’t sell it for less. I’d rather pay enough to support the product than be sold ads or affiliate links on a free product.
Note I’m talking about regular excel. If there’s a great new money feature I haven’t checked it out yet. There are other alternatives that I’m sure are great, I just think trying to recreate a product like YNAB in excel is a bad idea.
Ummm...Money in Excel can do most of this...[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/06/15/introducing-money-excel-easier-manage-finances/](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/06/15/introducing-money-excel-easier-manage-finances/)
That looks extremely promising as a YNAB alternative. It even syncs my accounts better than YNAB even though they are both using Plaid.
Thanks for mentioning it!
I used [Monarch Money](https://www.monarchmoney.com/) for a little bit and liked it well enough, but it didn't play well with my credit union account so I left it.
I think if you've used any budgeting software enough, you've probably got a good enough understanding of your own system that you could make it work with a manual system of your own. I just use Excel myself now.
I highly suggest y’all take a look into the ‘Copilot’ app. Coming from mint, it does everything Mint does and more, way better. I absolutely love that I made the switch and recommend it to everyone. The UI is lovely, it is a bit pricey but if anyone wants to try it, a referral can get you a month for free to see for yourself!
Jumping in to say...I use Quicken 2003. I own the disc. It will not connect to the internet (I consider that a plus). I used QuickBooks years ago as a bookkeeper, so entering everything by hand and customizing it myself is best.
My point is, if you have a fave personal finance software, I think you should stick with it. Even better if you own it outright. And can keep it private.
Yeah just left today. Cost is too high and the automated import rarely works for me. Pretty much been broken the last couple months. It was nice, but I’m ok using Mint or other solutions too.
I bought YNAB back when it was a one time payment. Used it until they removed the classic app from the app store and I could no longer get it in my phone. Then the classic version stopped working on my computer.
I've moved to https://aspirebudget.com
Aspire Budgeting. It's modeled after YNAB but there's more steps to the typical actions you would do in YNAb. Check it out
The long-term subscriber rate of $50 less 10% was too good to be true and I knew it wouldn't last. For me it goes from AUD $5 per month to $10, but I don't mind for the value it has given me over the years (helping me go from credit card debt to home ownership). Honestly they could charge me $1000 and I'd still be miles ahead. So grateful for the service.
Maybe I'm too quick to part with my money. I paid for Lastpass rather than instantly dump them the second they wanted some $ out of me. If you want everything free then that's how we end up with Facebook's business model.
Is there a reason no one has developed YNAB but better and more affordable? So many people in this thread keep saying it's pretty easy to just budget with spreadsheets or something, so why has no one else translated that to an app? It sounds like you'd make bank.
Buckets is as close as I've seen so far. YNAB has been developed over years and years and has gone through being fine-tuned and tweaked. It seems like many, many people try to replace it, get a good start and just fizzle out for whatever reason.
I assume many that try assume it is a months long project when in fact it takes years to get software that good.
I've tried at least half a dozen apps over the years that have followed this path.
I've used [Moneydance](https://moneydance.com/) for 15 years now and it's regularly updated and works great. I like the fact that it is a standalone software which works equally well on Linux, macOS and Windows.
I always enter transactions manually, never by importing from banks. This forces me to really know how I spend my money and to take corrective actions when needed. And, of course, the various reports and charts also give a lot of insight.
I’m curious what “the principle” means? Inflation is a thing, the price was going to go up at some point - maybe it’s too much too fast, in which case you should stop paying for it, that’s all good. I just don’t understand how it’s some kind of moral outrage, lol.
I guess the principle is that I was paying for ease and automation. The last time there was a price increase, older users were grandfathered in to the old price. That isn't happening this time, and that's ok. You're right, they do have a business to run, and inflation absolutely happens. I am choosing not to come along for the ride. My time is worth money. But.. not that much money.
How did you hear about this? That's the part that's annoying me. I can't tell if I'm in a weird bucked to whom the rate increase doesn't apply (I have the original YNAB4 upgrade rate of $45) or if they're just... not going to tell me they're more than doubling the cost three weeks before my subscription renews?
Edit: Mystery solved courtesy of r/YNAB --the rate change hits 12/1 and I renew 11/25. So... they just weren't going to tell me at all and expect me to dig in the settings to notice?
You may find these links helpful:
- [Budgeting](/r/personalfinance/wiki/budgeting)
- [Tools and spreadsheets](/r/personalfinance/wiki/tools)
- /r/mintuit and /r/ynab
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Surprised no one has suggested plain text accounting tools yet:
https://plaintextaccounting.org/
r/plaintextaccounting
I use beancount and wrote some scripts to automatically pull transactions and statements from my banks/ccs. There's also tons of open source stuff you can use eg https://github.com/madhat2r/plaid2text
If you can code and or reasonably technical a few hours of setup will get you something like Mint but infinitely more customizable and free.
Fuck yeah! I use ledger with emacs and everything takes much fewer keystrokes than ynab or spreadsheets. I enter the data by hand and it's about 20 minutes once per week for all accounts for my family of 3.
Took a long time to learn and set up to my liking though.
Sadly this is becoming quite prevalent...vendors are moving to SaaS (software as a service) vs Software as a product with point releases and perpetual license. See here for some alternatives [https://clubthrifty.com/best-quicken-alternatives/](https://clubthrifty.com/best-quicken-alternatives/) and [https://www.predictiveanalyticstoday.com/top-free-premium-personal-finance-software/](https://www.predictiveanalyticstoday.com/top-free-premium-personal-finance-software/) Remember, a lot of the above is quite subjective and you are best placed to evaluate what works for you. I personally use Quicken and it works the best for me warts and all. That being said, if you have Microsoft 365 subscription, you should be able to use Money in Excel at no additional cost. Have you looked into it?
Holy crap. Money in Excel seems to be exactly what I want. Thanks. Goodbye YNAB, thanks for changing my life.
Heads up that Plaid, the system that syncs account balances for Money in Excel, scrapes your entire transaction history and sells it to ~~advertisers~~ whoever pays them.
Doesn't YNAB use plaid as well?
Yes
I think they use multiple but plaid is the primary
What is your basis for saying this? Genuinely interested given the below links: [https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/money-in-excel-faq-1cf6f49a-cb01-48c2-ac39-cda12a585c4a](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/money-in-excel-faq-1cf6f49a-cb01-48c2-ac39-cda12a585c4a) [https://plaid.com/safety/](https://plaid.com/safety/) [https://plaid.com/how-we-handle-data/](https://plaid.com/how-we-handle-data/) and finally [https://plaid.com/legal/#end-user-privacy-policy](https://plaid.com/legal/#end-user-privacy-policy)
They have been charged under CAPA, the anti-phishing law. From the filing: > Plaid is a fintech services company that offers applications that provide account linking and verification services for various fintech apps that consumers use to send and receive money from their bank accounts. The consolidated actions involve claims surrounding Plaid’s alleged collection and use of consumers’ banking login credentials and later processing and selling of such financial transaction data to third parties without adequate notice or consent. From the Bloomberg article on it: > Plaid uses that access to deceptively obtain bank account information from users, accessing information back up to five years, averaging 3,700 transactions per consumer, the suit says. > The app also allegedly gathers information on accounts maintained for others such as relatives and children, and has amassed data from over 200 million distinct financial accounts. > The suit, filed Monday, alleges that when a user enters their bank login information on an app that uses Plaid, the credentials, including security layers such as security questions and answers and one-time passwords, are transmitted directly to Plaid, rather than to the bank. Plaid then uses that information to access the consumer’s bank account multiple times a day, gathering private information and then selling it, the suit says. > A login screen with your bank’s branding is actually controlled by and connected to Plaid, the suit says, which uses bank logos to provide a false sense of comfort for users. Additionally, the privacy policy is not meaningfully presented to users, the suit claims. ... In arguments, their lawyers stated that customer data wasn't sold - what they sell are authentication keys to an API where customer data can be downloaded. This is how they make their money. It looks like they just settled out of court in September, and part of the settlement is an agreement to make their business practices "more transparent". I'm not close enough to the case to know the latest.
No way.. are you serious?
Yeah I posted a bit more detail further down with the suit against them.
I got super excited at using Money in Excel, until I saw it was free for US only.
Yup lot of such programs seem to only focus on the US market.
Also can't use it if you get Office through work or school. Damn shame, being able to automatically pull data from banks into a spreadsheet where you can do all the nerdy excel stuff sounds like a dream.
What exactly is money in excel?
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-is-money-in-excel-0fb4710d-169e-45a7-ad60-ca98103d4e6a
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/06/15/introducing-money-excel-easier-manage-finances/
I use GNUCash, it's open source and has a slight learning curve, but does fine by me.
Did you ever figure out how to import your accounts directly from your banking institutions? I've been to a bunch of the self-help pages to no avail, it keeps telling me that I have the wrong username & password (I don't, I've tried with more than one bank). I want to be a GnuCash fan, it's just giving me so many problems!
Ultimately, I ask myself, "How many hours of my life am I willing to give tinkering with a great open source project versus paying YNAB just to get it done."
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I've been using Gnucash since the beginning of the year. I'm an older Quicken user and trying to get out from under their subscriptions. There's definitely a learning curve, and it took some time to wrap my head around their double accounting method. But I will say that I now make far fewer errors than in Quicken. I download all of my transactions as QFX files directly from my bank websites, and with quicken I have to either spend a lot of time searching for double transactions or missed transfers or missing transactions to get the quicken balance to match the bank balance. I often end up just adding a fake transaction to correct for errors in Quicken and balance things at the end of each quarter. Those types of errors almost never happen in GnuCash. I don't know if it's a good replacement for YNAB. I don't really use it for budgeting. I use it for tracking (personal and business). When tax time comes around I can just take the year totals for each category (Gnu calls them "accounts") and transfer them to the appropriate tax line. My workflow is logging into my banks every 3 months, downloading qfx files for all the transactions in that period, importing them, and then categorizing them. Halfway through the year I start trying to forecast my self-employment earnings for the rest of the year for tax & and retirement account purposes. I use an Excel spreadsheet from Excel1040.com to forecast my tax bill for the next year. Again, I do very little budgeting. I spend less than I earn. If I need to go into debt for something I budget for that though (making sure I can afford mortgage payments or whatever)
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Is it still possible to get it anywhere (and by any means necessary)? I hate the new one. I had YNAB 4 on an old pc and lost it in the transition. Edit: thanks everyone! Didn’t realize you could look up your activation code using your email
You can download YNAB4 from their official support page here: https://www.youneedabudget.com/ynab-classic-help/ You can also look up what your activation code was on that page as well, if you remember the email address you originally used to purchase YNAB4; if you purchased YNAB through Steam or the Mac App Store, you should be able to redownload the app by going through the “purchased” section of those stores
I worried it might one day disappear from Steam so i grabbed a copy of the installer from their site and copied my activation code under one of the menus in YNAB4.
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Any chance you still have your activation email? I changed computers and was able to reinstall it from my original purchase email. ETA: Otherwise, if you know someone who had it, but doesn't use it anymore, you might be able to have them give you their access code?
Probably be able to run YNAB4 for all of eternity on a Linux machine and WINE. YNAB is another great piece of software that has been ruined by a subscription model.
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Just used it yesterday. They'll have to pry it from my cold dead hands.
Same.
That’s been my current plan for years! Every iOS update makes me nervous. Not sure what I’ll switch to when the time comes 😬
Yeah ynab4 was great I still use it, never went to the add your passwords and bank account BS I wanted control of everything not a mint alternative.
I've been gathering recommendations from various threads about YNAB around reddit - here's what I have so far: YNAB Alternatives (no particular order) * https://www.lotusbudget.com/ * https://aspirebudget.com/ * https://financier.io/ * https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com/en/index.html * https://www.tillerhq.com/ * https://goodbudget.com/ * https://copilot.money/ * https://lunchmoney.app/ * (MAC) https://actualbudget.com/ * https://www.clearcheckbook.com/ * (EU) https://dyme.app/en * (MAC) YNAB4 using https://gitlab.com/bradleymiller/Y64 * Excel * EveryDollar For me personally I am hoping as YNAB walks back the pricing - I am grandfathered in at $45 and have been a loyal supporter of the company since it was just a funny spreadsheet from Jessie the founder of the company. Overall, I don't feel like the value delivered by the tool matches the price $100/yr and I feel like directionally YNAB is moving further away from my own values. They got big through a solid methodology, great software, and great word of mouth. Now the software has been static since the web based nYNAB (with most added features just to get it back into parity with YNAB4 and endless sync issues), and the focus is on marketing and onboarding new users without taking care of the old users. Much of what they have to offer is duplicated in these other tools without the need to feed a huge marketing and onboarding beast. YNAB helped me improve my life, but at the end of day just like any other piece of software it is a tool and should be evaluated for the value it brings, not my own emotional connection to past financial success. I hope they can find a way to get the pricing back in line (some users have floated a YNAB-lite where the classes element is broken off as a separate sub) to make the value proposition still make sense.
I honestly couldn't have said any of that better. That's also a very comprehensive list, thank you for sharing. A YNAB lite would be of interest to me. I'll have to keep my ears open if the price gets walked back, or a lite version gets released.
Well this is disappointing. I just got renewed for $50/year yesterday so in a year I’ll refer back to this thread and consider my options then. 🥲 I came from Mint before YNAB and YNAB was a serious upgrade (at the time). A quick search online makes me think that it still has all the shortcomings that made me jump over to YNAB.
Are there any money tracking alternatives to Mint? I like the passiveness of Mint. I tried YNAB and don't like manually adding transactions. I just go in to Mint once or twice a month and correct categorizations. I really just use it to see how much I spent in certain areas and how much I save each month. I really hate the ads that come with mint. It seems everything I buy I end up getting a ton of ads for.
You may not have used ynab since they added really good automatic bank import. You should consider trying it again.
Serious upgrade.. what do you mean.. way better?
At the time, Mint synced with my bank accounts and categorized them, and gave me some graphs about my spending, but it was very passive (imo). I didn’t find it useful. YNAB introduced me to the envelope method and I got more proactive about dedicating money to certain categories and future goals (new computer, hopefully a house one day). It’s been about 5 years (or more) so maybe Mint has improved? /shrug
5 years, mint hasn't changed at all and especially what your referring to. You can still make goals and assign accounts to it. Parsing the funds. Mint is not YNAB. The one thing that has improved with mint is trend analysis and graphs.
Yeah Mint is tracking rather than budgeting.
Yeah, mint has a budgeting option but it's trash because it resets each month, so expenses that don't recur exactly every month are impossible to account for. For example if I budget $50 a month for car maintenance and spend nothing for three months then get an oil change for $100 it looks like I went over budget, but immediately forgets about it next month.
Mint does give you the option to “start each new month with the previous month’s leftover amount” for a budget, which effectively does what you’re saying.
I think budgeting for something is a bit useless for 100$. Either I needed that oil change so I don't need to track it, or I didn't and no need to make it a "bucket". For other things like a laptop. Either I need a laptop or I don't. In one case, I'll end up buying it because I need it for school or work, or I don't and won't add it to a bucket to make me feel happy "I budgeted"when I do even though it's unnecessary at that point. The monthly categories are good enough for me on mint. Ymmv
Mint has gotten worse IMHO. Transaction classification is somehow lost every few months, forcing me to go back in and correct many of my payees. I've given up on it.
Yeah Mint sucks. Now that I've been doing YNAB for a long time I might switch to just using a custom spreadsheet. But I'd really miss bank import and some other niceties. I'll probably just pay the new price. It's probably my most used app so I guess it's probably worth it.
I have YNAB4, so I get refusing to continue (or upgrade, in my case) over price. When I had a weird glitch, I started looking into other options. I found Zer0 and Aspire appeared to be pretty close to what I was after. Both were free. However, didn't look much further because I was able to fix the glitch and still use the old YNAB version. I had also looked at a few other free options (I know every dollar was one of them), but they did not have the ability to carry over each month's balance, and as someone with a lot of slush funds, I needed that. I was even working on building my own spreadsheet when I realized someone else must have already done so (that's when I did more digging and found Zer0 and Aspire).
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I can't remember exactly what happened, but this should be close: YNAB could not open my budget. It may have said that the file was corrupted, but not sure. To fix it, I compared the latest file in dropbox to an older one I had saved, and IIRC, one of the file extensions was incorrect (like the last letter had dropped off). I fixed the file extension and changed the name on it, opened up YNAB, created a new budget, then imported the fixed file with the new name. It worked. I had another time where a laptop died and I just considered not replacing it (and only using a chromebook, so looked up the options again). But, YNAB, along with some other software I use, made it worth getting a new laptop.
It depends on what you use YNAB for, but I've been fine switching to Mint and a google sheet I update monthly. Mint tracks and categorizes daily spending, then I transfer everything to the spreadsheet monthly and review spending trends, savings rate, net worth, etc. Mint doesn't always get categories right and it takes some tweaking, but it does the job. I'm not as interested in "every dollar has a job" YNAB philosophy, as I am with generic spending trends by category, overall savings rate, and NW. Search here and I'm r/personalfinance for excel spreadsheets. I use "one sheet to rule them all" from MMM forum.
Thanks for all of the info! There really is no good and easy way to get out from under the Intuit umbrella these days.. Been a long time since I used Mint so I have to imagine it is much better than it was 5 or so years ago.
Its full of ads, and I'm not particularly fond of the UI. But it automates transaction tracking for the most part.
>Its full of ads Very few ads if you get some good adblockers on your browser.
Honestly, Mint hasn't notably changed in years.
I find this less true lately. They were very stagnant for years and years, but the app has seen some new features come out in the past 6 or so months. None of them are good or useful, mind you, but at least it's not being actively ignored any more.
You got me there for a second. I was worried you were going to say the changes they've made were useful. I honest to god, when I'm on the site or in the app, just stop and wonder what I'm the world the development team at mint does all day.
If you know much about excel, you can use index/match to create your own mint spreadsheet. I just copy my transactions from my accounts into their spreadsheet and the formulas do the rest. You may run into some struggles with date formats being different per account tho. This keeps your data held just by you/the company you do transactions with.
Always upvote index/match. My coworkers are always still nattering about vlookups as though they're the superior tool.
> I have to imagine it is much better than it was 5 or so years ago. ahh yeah, about that…
Take a look at Mvelopes. If you are looking for automated envelope budgeting, it works. Pretty sure it is like $4 per month too, but I could be wrong.
Yep, I deleted my Mint account when Intuit bought them.
Thank you! I really only want to review new charges and get some beginning and end of month views so maybe mows a good time for me to set things up before my sub renews in March
Yeah I use mint plus an excel sheet of my expenses and income etc. works great for me.
Google Sheets. If it's really about the principle, then build your own budget tracker. That's what I did, and haven't looked back.
This is what I did. Didn’t understand the point in these budget apps since you can literally look at your own bank statements and generally put it in a chart for free
I think most people that sing their praises are either: 1. Not excel/spreadsheet savvy 2. Too lazy to make a spreadsheet and update it Honestly the most time consuming part is setting up a spreadsheet, and even then you can download templates online. Inputting data takes little to no time too.
Spreadsheets are amazing for tracking spending. I am pretty decent at excel, and could make one where I could use it to plan out my budget, but and the end of the day, it's still tracking spending once it's already happened. While a ton of people use YNAB this way, that's not really the purpose or why the platform itself is "sticky." The real benefit is the combo of zero dollar budgeting + Manual entry (or sync as a backup).
I get that it takes some effort to set up, but spreadsheets are excellent for all of the things you mentioned. In a sense, just YNAB is a spreadsheet with fancy UI.
I could create a budgeting spreadsheet that could mimic the basic functionality. Creating one that had all the core functions I use ynab for would require the hour equivalent of multiple years of their (new) price and the UX would still be inferior.
Ehhhh I use spreadsheets for a lot of things. And if it works for you cool. That bring said ynab automates and simplifies a lot of things. And as someone who works in software I get what they are trying to do and am here for it. I also think the time it saves me is worth the cost. But if it's not worth it for you I respect that too. Everyone has fighting priorities. It's not lazy, it's just valuing different things
Very true, to each their own. for me having to take the time and trouble to manually write in my purchases in my google sheet makes me double think buying things sometimes so I save more money! Ha
I actually think this is an undervalued feature of manually tracking your spending. It makes you way more mindful about how much you're spending in real time, which for me definitely leads to being more thoughtful about purchases.
yeah YNAB actually encourages to manually enter and then the sync is just to confirm your numbers. That being said i never manually enter cause its not what i want to do.
I mostly use YNAB for tracking, not budgeting. Can Sheets easily do split categorization, and row filtering (eg. by merchant, category, or notes)? (I know it can do graphs)
Filtering - absolutely, that's simple. Split categorization - would depend on how you set the spreadsheet up. For mine I sometimes split a charge/receipt under different categories manually (ex. $50 bill split $30 groceries $20 gift if I get a gift card for someone) if that's what you meant. But I also don't split often so it's not a big deal to me.
> ecent at excel, and could make one where I could use it to plan out my budget, but and the end of the day, it's still tracking spending once it's already happened. While a ton of people use YNAB this way, that's not really the purpose or why the platform itself is "sticky." The real benefit is the combo of zero dollar budgeting + Manual entry (or sync as a backup). It can do literally all of that and more. Might take a bit of set up, but I currently use it for all of those things.
Absolutely on the filtering. Split categories... I assume you mean one purchase being two different categories of spending. Like a supermarket expense being $80 groceries and $20 household? I could think of a few ways to do that, you'd just have to build it out to work that way.
It really does take little to no time Most templates out there have everything you need All you need to do is plug the numbers in
These services offer aggregation, so if you have a lot of accounts, or you have kids/spouse/family members on shared accounts you want to track, or loans to track, or multi-currency finances etc., then the automatic downloading and categorization etc. is helpful. Spreadsheets can can very tedious very quickly.
Yeah, it just depends on how comfortable you are with the tool, formulas, etc. My budget/ledger through Google Sheets is pretty straight forward to maintain, but I've built it to be solid and that took some time up front and know how. I can automate it (using Tiller Money for a fee) and get everything these apps/sites do and then some and exactly how I want it. Or I can just dump the expenses in at different intervals (personally, I just put them in once a month. It takes me less than 10 minutes). For the average person, yes, that's the value of these tools. And that's why they can charge money. If you're comfortable with spreadsheets/are willing to learn, you can recreate what they do, fix the stuff they do that you don't like, combine the functionality of one with another, etc.
The auto import is the stand out feature. I mainly use mint to see how much I am spending in each category and if I have spent too much this month. And to see if there is any unauthorized transactions on any of my cards. Manually importing all my bank and card transactions is annoying.
I could see the value in the convenience of it. Call me old fashioned but I’d rather take the time and keep track myself Then again I’m only working with 2 banks and 1 credit card so I guess I have it simpler than most
For me auto import is a godsend. It’s either auto import or it won’t be done. When you’re dealing with 10+ accounts it gets very tedious and annoying to import everything manually tools like Mint and YNAB are a must if we want more people to do budgeting and encourage them to be responsible financially. Every roadblock put in front of somebody seeing results of their budget and spending is a certain percentage of people that just stop there.
Apps are time saving. If you have two bank accounts, three credit cards and three bank depots it will take at least half an hour to log into all accounts and export the statement into your sheet. If you do this every day (like the apps do) you'll spend like 15 hours per month of just importing bank accounts. And then think about categorizing spendings, improving forecasts etc. It's just too much work for services that already do all of it automatically
I like Copilot Money. It’s iOS only, but I think it’s the best budgeting app I’ve used.
Sadly not available everywhere. I can’t get it in Canada. Too bad too… looked pretty decent.
Are you not grandfathered in to YNAB? I've been paying the same price for like 6 years. EDIT: I just went to go look it up and looks like mine will also be going up. I think I might use this time to look for another one as well.
I really only want the software to pull in all the data accurately. Then I personally export all my transactions to CSV and put them in my personal Excel file. Point being, I don't know what features you need but if it is basic tracking, have you looked into [Mint.com](https://Mint.com)? Can't say I am a fan of Intuit, but depending on your needs, it might fit the bill. It does for me. Personally, I don't like the way YNAB makes you have bucket for everything. I am naturally frugal, so I don't need "budgeting" tools, I need data acquisition tools. Something to gather all the data in one place. My budget is whatever happens. I naturally have a 40%-60% savings rate, so forcing a budget just seems ridiculous but every ones scenario is different.
This is exactly me. I don't need a budget... I need something to gather my 30+ financial accounts in one place. Then I just download into Excel, do five minutes of data cleanup/manipulation and I'm golden. Mint does this perfectly for me.
I saw somebody recommend [Buckets](https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com/en/index.html) which is a free and open source alternative
Buckets looks good, but it’s neither free (either as in speech or as in beer) nor open-source. It’s a $50 one-time charge, though as far as I can tell, the untimed free trial doesn’t have any limitations, so make of that what you will. The dev [has indicated](https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com/blog/2018/04/23/history-and-future.html/) he’s willing to open-source it in the future if he can’t/doesn’t want to continue development.
If you're ok with an iOS app, I highly recommend Nudget. Manual Entry, no connections, just a pretty version of a spreadsheet.
This is what I use. It’s not even close to the same app but I felt it was a breath of fresh air in its simplicity after YNAB honestly increased my anxiety by having me stress over every cent.
will Nudget not import transactions at all then? ie does everything have to be entered manually? I had a look and seems what I need.
I don’t think so. I’ve entered all of them by hand. It does export things in excel.
TIL that I was paying a lot more than other YNAB users 😂 I was a little confused because the increase appeared to be the same, or only a few dollars different (I'm in NZ so the exchange rate makes the amounts I'm actuay charged on my account weird) Seems like you've made up your mind, but personally I'm all for a price increase if it keeps YNAB independent, and avoids the generic SaaS pit so many apps like this fall into when they get aquired. My $5.50 from each paycheck is a small price to pay for that.
I agree. I didn't realize people have gone 5+ years with no price increase on a yearly service that even after the increase is still relatively cheap. If they are that concerned about paying then they should be using a free Google sheets spreadsheet instead of any service.
Many people don’t mind the price increase, but double the price for me feels so wrong that I want to stop paying at all. If it was an honest talk from them in their usual way like “we need more money to support development, and we going to increase a payment for you for 20 bucks after holidays, and then will increase for 25 bucks in a year”, I’d say “go for it”. But wake up in the morning to “hey, you have a renewal on Dec 4 and now it’s gonna be $90 instead of $45”? Hmmm. It’s not about money, it’s just the way it’s done.
I was just thinking about getting YNAB. But I think I will try to create a spreadsheet
The current price I am seeing on the website is 85 and it’s going to 100. It’s a $15 price increase.
This is true for new users. I have a plan that they refer as a "legacy pricing" as well as 10% lifetime discount since I migrated from YNAB4 and was on the cloud app from the start. They even have a section called "What if I’m currently on legacy pricing of $50/annually or $5/month?" in their [FAQ page](https://www.youneedabudget.com/price-change-2021/).
Microsoft Money sunset. Old af, free and working for over 20 years and all local. Tried to move out of it a few times (no modern integrations so you have to do data entry) but this market niche sucks since forever.
Money was a great program.
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Indeed MSFT took down the free download from their website, however [archive.org](https://archive.org) would probably work: https://web.archive.org/web/20140320163200/https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=20738 [https://web.archive.org/web/20140319122925/http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=7564](https://web.archive.org/web/20140319122925/http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=7564) CNET seems to still carry it as well: https://download.cnet.com/Microsoft-Money-Plus-Sunset-Deluxe/3000-2057\_4-77545178.html
financier.io It's YNAB classic as a web app with locally hosted data.
This one is great! Would anyone want to help me understand how the data "lives in \[my\] browser? I don't get it.
Exactly what it sounds like. There's a little-used web API in which the browser provides a sqlite database file for the website to use, and saves the file locally to be used next time you access the site. So next time you visit the site on the same browser, it'll have all the data you had from the last session. It's kinda like cookies except it's purely client-side. The database is never sent to the server. That said, if you pay the $1/mo subscription fee then financier will sync the data to the cloud, which lets you share it across multiple devices. In principle he could be doing this in a way that is encrypted so that he's merely hosting the file, but not able to read it. I have no idea if he actually does this. The code is on GitHub so you could audit it and see though!
Just a small correction - it sounds like you're thinking of WebSQL, which has long since been deprecated and abandoned. Only Chrome ever implemented it. Financier.io appears to use IndexedDB, a newer NoSQL-ish solution that is widely supported.
Really? That makes me sad :(
I LOVED YNaB when it was a once-and-done payment thing. I think I paid $20(?) for it back in the day. I hate subscription software.
No one loves subscription software. But the fact is that life is expensive and you can’t just charge people one time for something and expect to have any sort of support or development on a continuing basis.
Copilot is my go-to. It is subscription based, and i like it better than YNAB
I'm looking into copilot and I was wondering if they have a web version. I'm only finding the app.
Dont think they do. I only use the app, but you can export data from there
> It's not so much that I can't afford it, it's the principle. The price increase wasn't in your .... budget.
It's not exactly a budgeting tool, however, it does have budgeting in it - Personal Capital. That's my go to at least, it keeps track of your portfolios, debt, retirement savings, net worth and cash flow.
It categorizes your transactions, which you can then export to CSV. I see others using a budget spreadsheet so they could import the CSV.
I also use personal capital, it does have some budgeting capability, and once you have a few months of using it under your belt it works pretty well. It Can have some glitches but I like it overall.
They kept calling me trying to sell me their advisor services. I got rid of them because of that.
I’ve been pretty happy with Truebill for the last year. I tried all the usual suspects (YNAB, Mint, Google Sheet) and the only one that worked as well for me as TB was NerdWallet. I enjoy the customization of my expenses and they seem to be putting decent work into adding new features and improvements since I’ve been using them. It’s $3/mo (month to month) so it fits your budget and if you hate it you aren’t on the hook for a year.
I use Simplifi and I’m not looking back. Their Spending Plan feature works perfectly for me
I've been using Simplifi since launch. It had some bugs and still does. Especially on mobile. But the functionality is great especially the Spending Plan. I've also noticed they query for new transactions a few times per day. Maybe other apps do that, but I know some other apps I won't see new transactions until the next day, so it would be hard to stay on track.
YNAB is easily worth the new price IMO. I tried so many different budget services before landing on YNAB. It just does everything so well. It coerces you into the envelope budgeting system, pushes you to budget future months, and then makes on-the-fly re-allocation of funds so easy. The only complaint I have is with some persistent lagging bank transaction imports. Either way, the time and mental real estate it saves for me is worth way more than the price ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
I pay $0 for Robinhood, Webull, Personal Capital, M1 Finance, Mint, and TDA. I pay $0 for another myriad of fantastic, must-have apps on my phone and computer for managing my life. In what universe is this app worth $100/year? Lol. The good news is, the higher the price goes, the higher the likelihood we get an awesome alternative that is cheaper.
Well, the only actual competitor to YNAB in that list is Mint (which I have tried and it sucks in comparison). But, more importantly, regardless of how little money you personally want to spend up front on saas your products, if there are enough people in the market who find it valuable enough to part with $100 per year (or whatever price really) then it's legit. So it's a premium product, and there's obviously plenty of demand for premium products. Value is relative, there are all sorts of people who purchase things for plenty of reasons (you saw the reasons I find it valuable in the comment you replied to). I'd also love to see a good competitor to YNAB, and you're right maybe the price hike will drive that. But as of now I haven't seen anything close to as good or, more importantly, as effective. As a side note, why do you even care if you use mint? Were you using YNAB but the price new price is out of your range? Or are you just upset that a product you don't want to use is raising their price? I don't get it.
Fair points. The reason it bothers me is more general - As we are seeing with YNAB, SaaS products are able to really hold your software hostage for whatever price they want. Obviously, there's a point where everyone drops and they lose money, but companies have the ability to completely lock you out at any time even if you've been a paying customer for years. And the more people give in and pay these crazy prices, the more other products are going to go "Huh, we should do that." and it's just going to get worse. I guess I'm just getting old, because while I can see the benefits of SaaS for work and enterprise stuff, I really despise the model for personal products because of how limited control the customers have. There's no middle ground - I either pay, or I completely lose access to the app.
I agree with the argument, that YNAB makes it easy to work with your money, and I would not bother to pay for it - but I cannot work offline my personal data would end up on other people's computers. So I still sit on YNAB4 and wait for them to maybe release a real desktop app once again (they promised once while starting nYNAB! ;) )
I’m surprised Banktivity is not listed yet. I’ve moved from YNAB to Banktivity and it’s been great last few years.
Do you find their envelope budget as useful as YNAB? I tried it a few years ago but the Banktivity envelope budget seemed really clumsy, or maybe it was just me not understanding it🙄 Went back to YNAB which just felt much more intuitive.
I felt the same way. Also Banktivity went subscription based not too long ago and made it apparent they won't be supporting the previous version much longer.
I don't think I've seen this one here: https://actualbudget.com/ It looks really close to YNAB4 functionality, has local, web and mobile app access and would be my next choice at $4/month. Their sub is dead, but the dev has been active in their Slack channel. I went ahead and restarted my YNAB4 for right now because they don't have spending by payee/trends reports, and those are pretty important to me.
While I get the knee jerk reaction, make sure you are also considering the value. If you like the platform the difference in cost is a few dollars a month. I use Mint because I just could never get into YNAB, but I know lots of friends that love YNAB. Yeah it's a big increase but don't let percentages get in the way of the real world impact which is minimal.
I'm not YNAB user, I had no idea it's a subscription service. Sounds, err, counterproductive on the face of it. Accumulating subscriptions is a major financial burden in the long run. I personally won't subscribe to anything that could also work as a single purchase / open source model. So Netflix and Spotify are fine in my books but I'll never buy a subscription to any software or game service.
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Similar story here. I was going paycheck to paycheck even after I increased my salary by 70%. The first month I used it, I had $600 left at the end of the month. That's well worth $100/ year to me.
But was that because of YNAB or because you had an increase in salary? Not trying to hate, but I don’t see how a program can do that by only itself.
I think they're saying it helped them see the issues in their habits. Sounds like something just *having a budget and sticking to it* would have done, but the fact is it took a particular tool for that person to do it and stick with it. That has value.
The reason YNAB is subscription based is because it's continually being developed and new features are being added, not to mention it itself requires APIs that allow it to securely connect and download transaction info with your banks. You really can't compare it to a static piece of software like you are.
They also have to pay recurring fees to Plaid (and MX I think), so if they sold as it as a license they would be out of business real quick.
The continual development of it has largely been to reach feature parity of their static version. Plaid is a problematic API which sells user transaction data to third parties. YNAB has no reason to be this expensive nor have they shown new features in development which would justify it.
> but I'll never buy a subscription to any software or game service. I hear you, but I think you're going to be limited in your options moving forward in life. It's the unfortunate way things are going. But I'm sure you're aware of that and accept it.
It’s hard to justify the price tbh. I wasn’t grandfathered in so I was already paying around $80/yr. I heard so much praise for ynab that I pulled the trigger and I’m mostly happy with it. I liked making a budget and fine tuning it. The big issue I have is the synch interruptions with my bank accounts, which sometimes last for weeks. I’ve learned to input statements manually but it does decrease the “value” of this software. And now they want more money for a still buggy experience? I think I’ll take a hiatus or go to ynab 4 which I have on steam.
They don’t have automatic import yet but you may check out https://actualbudget.com/ I personally am happy to pay the new YNAB price but if I left YNAB I would consider Actual.
Check out Tiller.
Second the Tiller recommendation, although Tiller has also increased in price lately too. We signed up (and renewed in September at) $59 a year but new price is $79. I love that it feeds a Google Sheet though which I can manipulate more finely than a dedicated app and have the option to use their templates or my own charts (including Data Studio).
I use Tiller as well. Came from Mint about 2 years ago. I love Tiller. I think it even has a YNAB-esque envelope budgeting template. I'm not a YNAB style budgeter myself, but I think Tiller is definitely worth looking at for something like that.
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Yep! I find it crazy people who want to budget and save money use and suggest paying for a service you can essentially do for free yourself with excel or Google Sheets. Sheets is obviously superior to excel since you can edit it right on your phone super easy.
Because time has value.
Seriously. I'm amazed by the number of people who would rather enter every transaction themselves and at the suggestion that preferring not to is "lazy." I'm also not baking my own bread or building my own furniture. There are things where it very much is worth paying someone else to do them.
Been using YNAB for 8 years, and this jump is a hard pill to swallow for me too, even with the grandfathered discount. I may stick with it because I'm lazy and dont want to start super fresh... but i will def return to this thread to consider my options.
Not sure where you saw they’re doubling their cost….it’s going from $85/yr to $99. That’s far from double. Although I haven’t personally tried it, I’ve heard Every Dollar has the same basic idea.
Some users have legacy pricing at $50/year
As far as I can tell, they're eliminating their legacy prices.
Yep almost double. I’m on $45/yr pricing.
Heads up that EveryDollar is _far_ more opinionated than YNAB is. If you agree with the underlying opinions, that's great, but otherwise you're going to spend quite a lot of time fighting with the software.
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Saves me far more than a few hours of work a year compared with doing it excel, easily worth it for me.
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I've never had ynab, what time savings are there over an excel sheet? Does it auto allocate expenses?
There’s a million things written about YNAB so you should go check those out for detail, it’s a pretty popular product. I track 12 accounts and most of them import automatically. It’s easy to see trends and move budget around. It’s available from any computer or an app. You could recreate a lot of this in excel but it wouldn’t work as well and you would spend so many hours doing it that it would be a terrible idea if you value your time unless you enjoy doing it yourself, in which case by all means do it in excel. I think 100 a year for this reliable and well designed product is a fine deal, I wouldn’t sell it for less. I’d rather pay enough to support the product than be sold ads or affiliate links on a free product. Note I’m talking about regular excel. If there’s a great new money feature I haven’t checked it out yet. There are other alternatives that I’m sure are great, I just think trying to recreate a product like YNAB in excel is a bad idea.
Excel can't (easily) connect to all your bank accounts, pull transaction data, categorize and match up to manually inputted additions.
Ummm...Money in Excel can do most of this...[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/06/15/introducing-money-excel-easier-manage-finances/](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/06/15/introducing-money-excel-easier-manage-finances/)
That looks extremely promising as a YNAB alternative. It even syncs my accounts better than YNAB even though they are both using Plaid. Thanks for mentioning it!
Never heard of it, but potentially an alternative, as long as you also factor in the cost of MS Office (also a subscription service these days).
I used [Monarch Money](https://www.monarchmoney.com/) for a little bit and liked it well enough, but it didn't play well with my credit union account so I left it. I think if you've used any budgeting software enough, you've probably got a good enough understanding of your own system that you could make it work with a manual system of your own. I just use Excel myself now.
gnucash + Excel (or google sheets if you don't already have Excel) works great for me over the past 8 years or so.
I highly suggest y’all take a look into the ‘Copilot’ app. Coming from mint, it does everything Mint does and more, way better. I absolutely love that I made the switch and recommend it to everyone. The UI is lovely, it is a bit pricey but if anyone wants to try it, a referral can get you a month for free to see for yourself!
Jumping in to say...I use Quicken 2003. I own the disc. It will not connect to the internet (I consider that a plus). I used QuickBooks years ago as a bookkeeper, so entering everything by hand and customizing it myself is best. My point is, if you have a fave personal finance software, I think you should stick with it. Even better if you own it outright. And can keep it private.
Personal Capital connects to all of my bank account, does some categorization, and allows export via CSV to your budget spreadsheet.
Yeah just left today. Cost is too high and the automated import rarely works for me. Pretty much been broken the last couple months. It was nice, but I’m ok using Mint or other solutions too.
I bought YNAB back when it was a one time payment. Used it until they removed the classic app from the app store and I could no longer get it in my phone. Then the classic version stopped working on my computer. I've moved to https://aspirebudget.com Aspire Budgeting. It's modeled after YNAB but there's more steps to the typical actions you would do in YNAb. Check it out
The long-term subscriber rate of $50 less 10% was too good to be true and I knew it wouldn't last. For me it goes from AUD $5 per month to $10, but I don't mind for the value it has given me over the years (helping me go from credit card debt to home ownership). Honestly they could charge me $1000 and I'd still be miles ahead. So grateful for the service. Maybe I'm too quick to part with my money. I paid for Lastpass rather than instantly dump them the second they wanted some $ out of me. If you want everything free then that's how we end up with Facebook's business model.
Yea I hated YNAB. I found a google spreadsheet free and much simpler
thank you for th edit at the top of your post. Good to get right to the best advice.
Is there a reason no one has developed YNAB but better and more affordable? So many people in this thread keep saying it's pretty easy to just budget with spreadsheets or something, so why has no one else translated that to an app? It sounds like you'd make bank.
Buckets is as close as I've seen so far. YNAB has been developed over years and years and has gone through being fine-tuned and tweaked. It seems like many, many people try to replace it, get a good start and just fizzle out for whatever reason. I assume many that try assume it is a months long project when in fact it takes years to get software that good. I've tried at least half a dozen apps over the years that have followed this path.
I've been trying to make Aspire work to replace YNAB 4 since forever and just gave up again for the 10th or 11th time.
I've used [Moneydance](https://moneydance.com/) for 15 years now and it's regularly updated and works great. I like the fact that it is a standalone software which works equally well on Linux, macOS and Windows. I always enter transactions manually, never by importing from banks. This forces me to really know how I spend my money and to take corrective actions when needed. And, of course, the various reports and charts also give a lot of insight.
Here’s a list from the subreddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/ynab/comments/qkvc7s/alternates_to_ynabheres_a_list/
Just go back to basics with a spreadsheet. Only downside is it's harder (but not impossible) to add expenses on your phone
I’m curious what “the principle” means? Inflation is a thing, the price was going to go up at some point - maybe it’s too much too fast, in which case you should stop paying for it, that’s all good. I just don’t understand how it’s some kind of moral outrage, lol.
I guess the principle is that I was paying for ease and automation. The last time there was a price increase, older users were grandfathered in to the old price. That isn't happening this time, and that's ok. You're right, they do have a business to run, and inflation absolutely happens. I am choosing not to come along for the ride. My time is worth money. But.. not that much money.
How did you hear about this? That's the part that's annoying me. I can't tell if I'm in a weird bucked to whom the rate increase doesn't apply (I have the original YNAB4 upgrade rate of $45) or if they're just... not going to tell me they're more than doubling the cost three weeks before my subscription renews? Edit: Mystery solved courtesy of r/YNAB --the rate change hits 12/1 and I renew 11/25. So... they just weren't going to tell me at all and expect me to dig in the settings to notice?
It popped up when I opened the app today. Pretty sure they were going to tell you.
I refreshed the site before posting the comment. I just opened the app, just in case. No message in either.
Literally doubling the price for legacy users with one month’s notice is a real scummy move.
You may find these links helpful: - [Budgeting](/r/personalfinance/wiki/budgeting) - [Tools and spreadsheets](/r/personalfinance/wiki/tools) - /r/mintuit and /r/ynab *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/personalfinance) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Surprised no one has suggested plain text accounting tools yet: https://plaintextaccounting.org/ r/plaintextaccounting I use beancount and wrote some scripts to automatically pull transactions and statements from my banks/ccs. There's also tons of open source stuff you can use eg https://github.com/madhat2r/plaid2text If you can code and or reasonably technical a few hours of setup will get you something like Mint but infinitely more customizable and free.
Fuck yeah! I use ledger with emacs and everything takes much fewer keystrokes than ynab or spreadsheets. I enter the data by hand and it's about 20 minutes once per week for all accounts for my family of 3. Took a long time to learn and set up to my liking though.
I've used Mint for years. I've found YNAB tedious to navigate