When Intuit announced on October 31, 2023 that it was shutting down Mint, and then actually closed the app on March 23, 2024, roughly 25 million people who had never had to think about which budgeting tool to use suddenly did. Intuit pointed them toward Credit Karma, its other product, but Credit Karma is a credit-monitoring and marketing platform, not a budgeting tool, and it never carried over Mint's category budgets, custom alerts, or historical net-worth tracking.
That gap is the real reason "spreadsheet or app" became a live question again in 2024, and it's why this comparison names actual products at actual prices rather than describing the category in the abstract.
A spreadsheet still costs nothing.
Every serious app now does, and each one asks you to link your bank account through a third-party data aggregator to work at all. Both of those facts changed the decision, and both deserve to be weighed honestly rather than waved past.
Every price named below is current as of 2026. Every one of them is higher than the zero a spreadsheet costs.
Why This Decision Got Harder in 2024
Mint wasn't a niche product. At the time of its shutdown it had on the order of 25 million users, built over more than a decade as the default free budgeting app for a generation of Americans, according to Bloomberg's and CNBC's reporting on the shutdown. Its closure didn't just remove one option from a crowded field; it removed the specific option that had trained an entire cohort of users to expect full bank-sync budgeting for free.
None of the apps that absorbed those users kept that expectation alive. YNAB, Monarch Money, and Copilot all launched or grew through 2024 as paid, subscription-only products with no permanent free full-sync tier. EveryDollar is the one exception worth noting up front, and it earns a full section below.
A Treasury Department finding from 2022, cited repeatedly in the CFPB's own rulemaking, states plainly that there is virtually no regulatory oversight of data aggregators' storage of consumer financial information comparable to how banks themselves are supervised. The company sitting between your bank and your budgeting app is, structurally, less regulated than the bank is.
What a Bank-Linked App Actually Does With Your Data
"Linking your bank account" to YNAB, Monarch, or Copilot doesn't mean the app itself stores your bank password. It means a data aggregator, most commonly Plaid, sits between the two, authenticates on your behalf, and passes transaction data to the app. That layer is where most of the real privacy tradeoff actually lives.
The Plaid Settlement
In 2021, Plaid agreed to pay $58 million to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging it harvested and shared consumers' bank login credentials and financial data without adequately informed consent, and that its login interface was designed to resemble a bank's own login screen closely enough that users didn't realize they weren't logging into their bank directly. The settlement covered an estimated 98 million people whose data had been screen-scraped through a Plaid-linked app between 2013 and 2021, according to coverage in American Banker and the settlement's own FAQ page. As part of the settlement, Plaid committed to moving away from screen-scraping toward token-based API access and to improving its data-deletion and disclosure practices.
That's a meaningful settlement, not a rounding error.
The Open Banking Rule in Limbo
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized a rule in October 2024, under Section 1033 of Dodd-Frank, that would require banks to make consumer data available to authorized third parties like Plaid through secure, standardized channels, and that explicitly described screen-scraping as "a risky data collection practice," per Skadden's summary of the rule and the rule text itself. As of 2026, that rule is tied up in litigation, with the CFPB's own current leadership arguing the rule exceeds the agency's authority, according to Consumer Finance Monitor's 2025 coverage of the case. In practical terms, the safer, standardized data-sharing model the rule was meant to push the industry toward is not yet settled, resolved, or guaranteed.
What FDIC Guidance Does and Doesn't Cover
The FDIC's own consumer guidance warns that nonbank companies are never themselves FDIC-insured, that funds are only protected once actually deposited at a partner bank and other conditions are met, and that consumers should be wary of apps requesting suspicious permissions such as access to contacts, text messages, or stored passwords, per fdic.gov. That guidance is aimed primarily at fintech apps that hold your deposits, such as neobanks and standalone savings apps, not at read-only budgeting apps like YNAB, Monarch, or Copilot, which read transaction data but never hold your money. It's worth knowing the distinction so a real warning about one category of app doesn't get mistakenly applied to a different one.
A related but genuinely different risk category: when Synapse, a banking-as-a-service middleman connecting fintech apps to FDIC-insured partner banks, collapsed into bankruptcy in April 2024, more than 100,000 people temporarily lost access to over $265 million. That episode is about deposit-holding fintechs relying on an opaque middleman, not about budgeting apps that only read your transactions, but it's a fair reminder that "fintech" covers companies with very different relationships to your actual money.
What It Actually Costs
The honest starting point: a spreadsheet costs $0 a year, whether you build it in Google Sheets or Excel from a free template. Every paid app costs somewhere between roughly $80 and $200 a year for full bank-sync features, and none of the four named here has a permanent free tier that matches what Mint once offered.
Two details are easy to miss in a plain price list. YNAB lets up to six people share one subscription at no extra cost, and offers a $4.99-a-month student rate for a year, verified directly at ynab.com/pricing. Monarch's pricing, unlike YNAB's and Copilot's, could not be confirmed first-party from its own site for this piece, since its pricing page renders through JavaScript; the figures above are corroborated by multiple independent reviews agreeing exactly, but a reader who wants first-party certainty should check monarch.com directly before paying.
The Apps, By What They Actually Are
Pricing alone doesn't tell you which app fits you. What each one is built around does.
YNAB's method is closer in spirit to envelope budgeting than to simple expense tracking: every dollar gets assigned a job before it's spent, which asks for more active engagement than an app that just categorizes what already happened. Monarch, by contrast, is closer to a full financial dashboard than a pure budgeting tool, which is exactly why households managing money jointly tend to gravitate toward it. EveryDollar's free tier requires manual entry, per Ramsey Solutions, which puts it on the same privacy footing as a plain spreadsheet until you decide to pay for sync.
Does Tracking Your Spending Actually Work?
This is the question a features comparison never answers, and it's the one that matters most. The honest short version: rigorous, US-specific research directly comparing spreadsheet adherence to app adherence essentially doesn't exist. What does exist is worth taking seriously.
What the National Numbers Show
A NerdWallet/Harris Poll survey of 2,070 U.S. adults, fielded in early April 2023, found that 74% of Americans have a monthly budget, but 84% of people who have a budget say they've exceeded it at some point, and 83% report overspending at least occasionally. Only 32% regularly review their budget and spending at all, per the published report. Read together, those numbers say the review habit, not the tool, is the real bottleneck for most budgeters.
What Manual Tracking Does Differently
A 2023 study by Yiling Zhang, then a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, analyzed behavioral data from a financial tracking app alongside a roughly 4,600-person survey and found something genuinely useful: automated tracking, with automatic collection of spending data through bank accounts or financial tools, is convenient but linked to lower attention and less financial self-awareness, while active tracking through manual expense recording requires more engagement and is associated with higher financial self-awareness, according to the paper published in Consumer Interests Annual. The same research found that persistent tracking, whether manual or automated, was associated with a measurable reduction in discretionary spending, but did not significantly improve adherence to a set monthly budget number. Only 6% of the active trackers in the sample had ever set a formal monthly budget at all, and the average tracking duration was just 5.53 months before people stopped. That data comes from a Chinese app-user sample, not a US-representative one, so it should be read as evidence about expense-tracking behavior generally rather than a claim about American budgeters specifically.
Tracking less isn't the failure mode here. Tracking without ever reviewing what it shows is.
The friction of manual entry is not purely a downside. It's the same mechanism behind the well-established finding that new habits take an average of roughly 66 days to form: repetition with attention is what builds the habit, and an app that removes the repetition can also remove the thing that was building the habit in the first place.
What You're Actually Budgeting Against
It helps to know the scale of what a budget, spreadsheet or app, is actually trying to manage. Federal data on 2024 household budgets, drawn from the government's annual expenditure survey, puts typical yearly spending at $78,535, a 1.8% climb over the prior year, while pre-tax income averaged $104,207. Spending is heavily concentrated in a handful of categories.
The top five categories alone account for 83.7% of all household spending, and the gap between income groups is large: the lowest expenditure quintile averaged $35,046 a year against $150,342 for the highest. Against that backdrop, the Fed's 2024 well-being survey put a real number on how many households actually stay ahead of their own paycheck: just 51%, leaving close to half spending more than they brought in during the prior month. A tool that makes housing, transportation, and food visible in one place, whichever tool that is, is doing the actual job.
Who Actually Fits Each Tool
Put the pricing, privacy, and behavioral research together, and a genuine decision framework emerges, not a universal winner.
A spreadsheet fits you if you're privacy-conscious about bank data, your finances are relatively simple and stable, you find manual entry itself clarifying rather than tedious, or you simply don't want another subscription. It's also the natural next step after reading our guide to budgeting manually without an app, and pairs well with our foundational primer on what a budget is for in the first place.
YNAB fits you if you want a structured method, not just a tracker, especially if you're new to zero-based budgeting, or you're sharing finances with a partner or family at no extra subscription cost, or you're a student who qualifies for the discounted rate.
Monarch fits you if you want one dashboard covering budgeting, investments, and net worth together rather than budgeting alone, especially for households comparing a shared family budget, and you're comfortable being at the higher end of the price range.
Copilot fits you if you're fully in the Apple ecosystem, prioritize interface polish, and don't mind being locked out of Android entirely, since there is no version for it at all.
EveryDollar fits you if you want a genuine no-cost, no-bank-linking option with the ability to upgrade to sync later, particularly if you're already following the Ramsey debt-payoff method, and it's a reasonable complement to a tighter student budget where every dollar needs an assigned job.
The Bottom Line
The Mint shutdown didn't just remove an app. It removed the assumption that full bank-sync budgeting could be free, and it's worth deciding with that fact in view rather than around it. A spreadsheet still costs nothing and shares no data with anyone; every named app here costs real money and routes your data through a third-party aggregator that isn't regulated the way your bank is, a gap the CFPB's own now-contested rule was written to close.
None of that makes apps a bad choice.
It makes the choice a real tradeoff: automation and features against cost and data exposure, on one side, versus friction and privacy against ongoing manual effort, on the other. The research on which side actually changes behavior is thinner than marketing from either side suggests, and what does exist points less at the tool and more at whether you actually review what it shows you. Pick based on that, and on which tradeoffs you can live with, and you'll likely do better than switching tools again next year looking for the one that finally makes budgeting easy.
