FintechTeardown
Verified 2026-08-09 · 9 apps · every number sourced

Budgeting app pricing, with a URL behind every number.

Most "best budgeting apps 2026" pages recycle 2023 prices with no dates. This one was researched in a single day against live pricing pages, so every figure is current and comparable — and anything that couldn't be confirmed is marked UNVERIFIED, never estimated.

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The free cheat sheet

All prices in USD, verified against each vendor's live pricing page on 2026-08-09. "Effective /mo" = annual price ÷ 12.

Table scrolls sideways →

AppFree planMonthlyAnnualEffective /moTrial
YNABNo$14.99$109$9.0834 days, no card
Monarch CoreNo$14.99$99.99$8.337 days
Monarch PlusNo$199$16.587 days
Copilot MoneyNo$13$95$7.921 month
Rocket MoneyYes$7–$14 (PWYW)$84–$168$7–$147 days
Quicken SimplifiNoannual only$47.88 promo / $83.88$3.99 / $6.997 days
PocketGuardNo$12.99$74.99$6.257 days, no card
GoodbudgetYes$10$80$6.67none
EveryDollarYes$17.99$79.99$6.6714 days
Empower DashboardFully free$0

Three things the table hides

  1. Monthly billing is an anchor, not an offer. It carries a 64–170% premium over the annual-effective rate. EveryDollar is the extreme: $17.99/mo versus $6.67 annual-effective.
  2. "Free" means cross-subsidized, not lite. Empower's dashboard feeds a $100k-minimum advisory arm; Rocket Money takes 35–60% of first-year savings on bill negotiation; EveryDollar feeds the Ramsey ecosystem. The pure-subscription apps (YNAB, Monarch, Copilot, Simplifi, PocketGuard) offer no free plan at all.
  3. Seats are the hidden price war. YNAB includes up to 6 household members on one subscription. At $9.08 vs $8.33 effective, per-seat economics diverge sharply — a real wedge for family-targeted acquisition.

The full teardown — $29

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Everything in the cheat sheet, plus the analysis the table can't carry:

Who buys this: consumer-fintech founders and PMs pricing a money app, growth marketers at budgeting apps, investors covering consumer fintech, and affiliate and media buyers in personal finance.

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Same method, pointed at whatever market you're pricing against. You name a category (expense management, payroll, PM tools, vertical SaaS, anything with public pricing pages) and a competitor list; you get back a fully-sourced pricing and positioning teardown.

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Sources — check any number yourself

Every price above was read off the vendor's own live pricing page on the access date shown. Nothing here is estimated, remembered or scraped from a comparison blog.

The full $29 teardown carries the complete appendix — every single cell mapped to its URL and access date, including the ones that came back UNVERIFIED.

Why the sourcing matters

Pricing research goes stale silently. A number without a date is a liability the moment you put it in a board deck. Every figure in this work carries the URL it came from and the day it was read, so you can re-check any single cell in about thirty seconds — and you can tell at a glance when it's time to refresh. Where a vendor hides a number behind a sales call, it says UNVERIFIED. That's the whole differentiator.