Joint account plus two personal ones — an app that shares the joint without merging every coffee

We do the opposite and I'd gently argue for it. Everything is visible to both of us, including the personal accounts, and it has been better for us than the walled version.

Not because of trust — because of arguments. When only the joint pot is shared, every disagreement becomes "you're not contributing enough" with no shared evidence. When it's all visible, the conversation is about numbers on a screen and it's over in five minutes. I understand why people don't want this. I'd just say the privacy version has its own cost and it took us a year to notice ours.

We solved it with account selection rather than app choice. Both of us are on one subscription, but only the joint account and the two shared credit cards are linked to it. Our personal current accounts simply aren't connected, so there's nothing to hide because there's nothing there.

Each of us then runs whatever we like privately — she uses her bank's own app, I use a sheet. Two years, zero arguments about visibility. The mistake we made first was linking everything and then trying to hide categories, which every app does badly.

On the subscription question specifically: at least one of the mainstream ones lets you share a single subscription across up to six people, and it's $109 a year or $14.99 a month, so a couple is paying one fee rather than two. That was the deciding factor for us over paying twice for parallel accounts.

Worth checking the sharing terms before you buy rather than after — the pricing pages are clearer about this than the marketing pages.

Practical warning from doing this across two banks: the shared-app setups that depend on one person's login are fragile. Ours was linked under my account, and when I changed banks the whole joint history broke and my partner couldn't fix anything because none of it was really hers.

If you can, connect the joint account under whichever of you is least likely to change banks, and export a CSV backup quarterly. Ten minutes a quarter against losing three years of shared history.

One subscription, shared pot linked, personal accounts left out, monthly fifteen-minute review with a beer. The app matters far less than the review existing.