I've run the same spreadsheet for six years and it works, but it costs me about 40 minutes a month of manual entry and I'm bored of it. Monarch keeps coming up, core plan around $99 a year with a higher tier at $199. I don't need investment analysis, I need the manual entry to go away without losing the categories I've built. Has anyone moved a long-running spreadsheet across and been glad?
Price context since you asked: core is $99.99 a year or $14.99 monthly, and the $199 tier is aimed at people who want deeper forecasting plus rental and business tracking. If you don't need investment analysis you don't need the top tier, and paying monthly for one or two months to trial it properly is worth the small premium over committing annually.
The comparison worth making isn't this versus a spreadsheet, it's this versus the other paid apps. It's within a few dollars a year of the Apple-only one and meaningfully cheaper than the strict envelope one, and they're built on genuinely different philosophies: tracking what happened versus assigning every dollar in advance. Pick the philosophy first, then the price.
This is the right framing. I paid for the wrong philosophy for a year and spent the whole time blaming the app.
Ask about the export format before you commit six years of anything. If you can't get a clean CSV of transactions and categories back out, you're renting your own history from them.
40 minutes a month is 8 hours a year. At $99 that's roughly $12 an hour to buy your time back, which is either an obvious yes or an obvious no depending on your rate and how much you secretly enjoy the spreadsheet.
I do secretly enjoy the spreadsheet. That's probably the actual variable here and I've been pretending it's a cost question.
@darning_dot · 5mo ago · 3 replies
Moved a five-year spreadsheet over. What I got was the 40 minutes back and household sharing, so my partner could look at it without me exporting anything. What I lost was the ability to do a weird one-off calculation in three seconds, which I badly underestimated. Net positive, but I still keep a spreadsheet for anything unusual.
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@coast_fi_casey · 5mo ago
Keeping the spreadsheet for one-offs rather than trying to replace it entirely is a compromise I hadn't considered at all.
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@xlookup_lena · 5mo ago
Most people who "switch" end up with both. That isn't a failure, it's just what each tool is actually good at.
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