I bounced off a couple of replacements when the free one I'd used for a decade closed, and went back to pen and paper. That works but it doesn't scale to a household. Coming back to look properly. I want to know whether the paid apps have actually improved or whether they've just got more expensive and added an AI button. Budget up to about $120 a year, household of two.
The genuinely different option is self-hosting. Free, open source, envelope-style, runs on a cheap box or just locally, and you're not exposed to a shutdown or a price rise ever again. The cost is that you are now the sysadmin, and if that doesn't appeal it's a terrible trade.
Worth adding that the sync-from-bank part still costs a little money even self-hosted, so free is free-ish unless you import files by hand.
Pen and paper genuinely works for a household of two, provided you both look at the same page once a week. What an app adds isn't insight, it's a shared source of truth neither of you has to transcribe. That's worth $100 to some couples and nothing at all to others.
Trial periods got longer, which is the underrated change. You can properly run one for a month before paying anything, and doing that with two candidates back to back is the only comparison that has ever worked for me.
The thing to check now that you couldn't two years ago: how it handles a household where one person is enthusiastic and one is not. The good ones give the reluctant partner a read-only, low-notification view. That single feature has saved us roughly an argument a month.
Whatever you pick, decide in advance what would make you quit it. I've stayed too long in two apps purely because I'd already paid for the year and felt stupid abandoning it.
@day_rate_dee · 3h ago · 3 replies
Honest read: pricing settled into a band and the features stopped moving much. The strict envelope one is $14.99 monthly or $109 a year, the tracking-first one is $99.99 a year with a $199 tier above it, and the Apple-only one is $95 a year. The AI features are mostly a chat box over your own transaction list, and I have yet to see one tell me something I didn't already know.
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@xlookup_lena · 15h ago
So about a hundred a year is the going rate across the board, and the differentiator is the method rather than the feature list.
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@overlap_owen · 3h ago
That's about right. The one real improvement in two years is that household sharing is standard now rather than a premium add-on at most of them.
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