Two chequing accounts, one credit card, and one joint account with my partner. Every free app I've tried either caps the number of connections or turns the credit card into double-counted spending. I'm not against paying eventually, I want to know the thing works before I hand over $100 a year. Currently I have a spreadsheet I update maybe twice a month, which is to say not really.
Actual Budget is free and open source, envelope-style, and you can run it locally. The honest catch for a North American user is that automatic bank import goes through SimpleFIN at about $1.50 a month, so free means free software with a small feed cost, or genuinely free if you import files by hand.
Manual import is less painful than it sounds if you do it weekly. It's the fortnightly-or-worse cadence that kills people, because then it's a chore rather than a habit.
The free tiers are mostly demos. What I'd do in your position is take the month-long trial of a paid one and run it properly for a full cycle, including the awkward joint-account part, then decide. A month of real use tells you more than any comparison thread, including this one.
Twice a month in a spreadsheet isn't a tooling failure, it's a cadence failure, and an app won't fix that by itself. What fixed it for me was a fixed 15-minute slot on Sunday morning with coffee. The tool I use is almost irrelevant to whether it works.
Ouch, but fair.
The joint account with a partner is reliably where free tiers stop. Almost every app treats household sharing as the paid feature, because it's the one thing people will actually pay for.
@openkey_owen · 2w ago · 3 replies
Double-counting a credit card is the single most common reason people quit these apps, and it's a modelling problem rather than a bug. The card is a liability account, the purchase is the expense, and paying the card off is a transfer between two accounts. If the app won't let you mark that payment as a transfer, it will always look like you spent the money twice. Check that specific behaviour before anything else.
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@coast_fi_casey · 3w ago
Every app worth using supports it, they just don't explain it during onboarding. Some auto-detect the transfer and some make you match it by hand every month.
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@kitchen_table_talk · 2w ago
This is the exact thing that broke my last two attempts and nobody has ever explained it that way.
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