Name: Keep the Diff
Author: Lee

Nearly every budgeting app recommended in the last five years works the same way underneath. You connect your bank through an aggregator, usually Plaid, it pulls your transaction history, and the app categorizes what you already spent.

That design is why they can be set up in four minutes. It is also why a lot of people never set one up at all. If handing a third party continuous read access to your accounts is the objection, then almost every comparison article ever written is answering a question you did not ask.

This one is about the apps that do not do that, sorted by how they avoid it, because the category you pick determines what you give up.

What you are actually agreeing to with an aggregator

Worth stating plainly, because it is usually described only as "securely connect".

A third party holds credentials or a long lived token for your bank.
It has ongoing read access, not a one time export. It keeps reading after you stop using the app.
Your full transaction history, which is a detailed record of where you go and what you do, sits on somebody else's servers.
Your relationship is with the app, but the data flows through a company you did not choose and cannot easily audit.

None of that is a scandal, and the large aggregators are competent. It is simply a real trade, and it is reasonable to decline it.

Category one: manual expense trackers

You type in what you spent. No connection, no aggregator, nothing to link.

You give up automatic categorization and completeness. You will miss transactions, and the app cannot tell you your true monthly total.

You get back something most people do not expect: typing an amount in makes you notice it. There is a decent argument that manual tracking changes behavior more than automatic tracking precisely because it is not effortless, which is worked through in expense trackers that don't link your bank.

Category two: spreadsheets

Still the most flexible option available and still free. A spreadsheet does exactly what you tell it, holds its data in a file you own, and will outlive every app in this article.

You give up convenience on a phone, and you take on maintenance. The honest failure mode is that the spreadsheet is on the laptop and the decision happens in a shop.

Category three: envelope and cash systems

Physical envelopes, or an app that models them without a bank link. You assign money to categories up front and spend from those pots.

You give up a lot of flexibility, and the method is only as good as your willingness to maintain the pots.

You get back a hard stop. When the envelope is empty the decision is made for you, which some people find restful and others find intolerable.

Category four: savings trackers

A different question entirely. Rather than recording what left your account, these record the decisions that stopped money leaving: what you were ready to spend, what you actually spent, and the difference.

You give up knowing where your money went. This is not an accounting tool and it will not reconcile to your statement.

You get back a number that only goes up, no categorization work at all, and a method that is unbothered by a bad month. Two numbers per decision is a much smaller commitment than logging every transaction.

Which to pick

If you need to find out where the money is going, take a manual expense tracker or a spreadsheet and accept the typing. If you need a hard limit, take envelopes. If you are broadly fine but want to save more, and you have already abandoned two budgeting apps, take a savings tracker, because the reason you abandoned them was almost certainly the maintenance rather than the maths.

Keep the Diff is the fourth kind. It has no bank integration, no account and no sign in, nothing you log ever leaves your device, and it is free on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Windows and Android. There is more on the reasoning at a savings tracker with no bank connection, or you can try it in your browser.

Budget apps that don't connect to your bank