Looking for a YNAB or Mint alternative? Here's what we built (and why)

Mint shut down at the end of 2024. If you're reading this in 2026, you've probably already cycled through the obvious replacements — Rocket Money, Monarch, Copilot, YNAB — and you're still looking. So was I.

I'm not going to pretend I tried all of them. I tried Spendee, looked hard at YNAB, and decided I did not want to spend another evening importing CSVs to find out whether the next app would be the one we actually opened. So I built Tallyo — a couples budgeting app for two people who want to know whether they are on track today, in three seconds, without bank sync.

This is an honest comparison. YNAB is genuinely good software. Monarch is well-built. Copilot is the most polished of the bunch. None of them fit what my wife and I needed, and the reasons are specific enough to be worth writing down — because if those reasons match yours, Tallyo might fit, and if they don't, one of the others probably will.

What I actually tried: Spendee

Living in the UAE, I tried Spendee for several months. It had everything — bank sync, categories, charts, reports. I paid for the upgrade. The bank sync took three or four minutes every time we wanted to update it, and required logging in. So we did not. Our credit card bill kept drifting further from the number we had told ourselves we would stay under. The app was confirming the gap, not closing it.

That is the honest summary of every "all-in-one" budgeting app I have used. The features are real. The friction is also real. And friction wins.

What I learned from Spendee is what I went looking for, and did not find, in any of the alternatives below: a budget app that is faster to log than to skip logging, that both people in a household will actually open without one of them turning into the family accountant, and that confronts you in the moment instead of summarising the damage next week.

YNAB (You Need A Budget)

Pricing: Paid annual or monthly subscription, with a free trial. Check ynab.com for the current rate. Sync model: Bank sync in North America and the UK; manual entry or CSV import elsewhere. Couples support: Shared budget on the same plan, two devices. Mobile experience: Polished. Native iOS and Android. Apple Watch app.

Why I did not switch to it: Two reasons. First, YNAB is built around its method — the four rules, age-of-money, category rollover. It is genuinely the most opinionated budgeting app on the market, and the people who love it love it because they have internalised that method. I did not want to learn a method. I wanted to log a number. Second, YNAB's bank sync is North-America-and-UK-first; in the UAE you are reduced to manual import or CSV uploads, which is the worst of both worlds — you pay for a bank-sync app and use it like a manual one.

Who YNAB is right for: People who want to learn a budgeting system, who live in a market where YNAB's bank sync works natively, and who have ~30 minutes a week to give it. The retention numbers on YNAB users are excellent because the people who stick are the people who wanted the method in the first place.

Mint (RIP) and its successors

Mint was free, ad-supported, and shut down at the end of 2024 — Intuit folded the user base into Credit Karma, which is not a budgeting app. The closest direct successors are:

• Rocket Money (Truebill rebrand). Has a free tier, with a paid Premium tier on a sliding scale. Strong on subscription cancellation and bill negotiation, weaker as an actual budget.
• Monarch. Paid subscription, no free tier. Closest to "what Mint should have grown into" — clean UI, joint accounts, investment tracking. Priced in the same band as YNAB for a less opinionated product.
• Copilot. Paid subscription, Apple ecosystem only (Mac, iPhone, iPad). Beautifully designed. Single-user-first; couples support is awkward.

Why none of them replaced Mint for us: All three are bank-sync-first products. The same reason Spendee did not stick — three minutes to update, both phones, both partners — applies to all three. Bank sync is a great feature for someone who wants to review their finances. It is a poor feature for someone who wants to steer them in real time.

There is also a couples problem none of them solve well. Most "shared" budgeting apps are really one-person apps with a read-only viewer bolted on. That is not a shared budget — that is a spreadsheet with extra steps. The partner who opens the app becomes the family accountant by default, and the relationship dynamic that creates is not one Tallyo set out to reproduce.

What we built instead — Tallyo

The whole point of Tallyo is that it does less. No bank sync. No reports I will not read. No four-rule method. Tap a category, type a number, done. Three seconds.

Every category is colour-coded in real time. Green means on track. Amber means spending faster than planned. Red means you need to stop and regain control — be restrictive and it will come back to you. Both phones see the same running total in real time, so neither partner is the accountant — both of you just glance at your phone before the second coffee and see if that category is still under control.

When a category does run out, you cannot quietly overspend it — you have to borrow from another category, explicitly, in the app. The total stays the same; the choice becomes conscious. That single rule is what turned a budget into something we actually stuck to.

Four months in, our spending is down by roughly a third and has stayed there. Same family, same life, same city. Groceries cost about what they always cost — the savings came from elsewhere.

Honest tradeoffs

Tallyo is not the right app for everyone, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

• No bank sync means you have to log expenses yourself. Three seconds per transaction, no automation. If you want the app to do the work without you, Tallyo is wrong for you — Monarch or Copilot will be better.
• No investment tracking, no net-worth dashboard, no Sankey diagrams. Tallyo answers one question: are we on track today? If you want a personal-finance dashboard, that is a different product.
• No predictive analytics, no forecasting. The app does not tell you what you will spend next month. We found that forecasting is what people use to avoid facing this month, so we cut it.
• iOS-first. The native iOS app is live on the App Store. A PWA also runs at tallyobudget.com for anyone not on iOS. Android is on the roadmap but not built yet.

So which one should you pick?

If you read the comparison above and felt yourself nodding at YNAB's method — pick YNAB. It is excellent at what it does, and the people who love it really love it.

If you want a Mint replacement that does the dashboard-and-sync thing well — Monarch is the closest, Copilot if you are iOS-only and care about design.

If you have tried one of those and stopped opening it — that is the gap Tallyo was built to fill. Two phones, one budget, three seconds per entry, a colour you cannot ignore.

Tallyo is live on the App Store. The PWA also runs at tallyobudget.com for anyone not on iOS.