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Free YNAB alternatives, including Actual Budget

By , who built Keep the Diff

YNAB's method is public. Give every dollar a job, plan for the irregular bills, roll with the punches, and age your money. Anyone can follow it, and plenty of free tools make room for it. What you give up in each case is something other than money.

Actual Budget

Actual Budget is the closest free match. It is open source envelope budgeting with the same shape as YNAB: you assign money you already have to categories, then spend from them. It can import an existing YNAB budget, which makes moving over less painful than starting from scratch.

Actual runs in your browser and as a desktop app, and it works on a phone through the browser. Your data lives on your own device. To use it on more than one device you run a small sync server yourself, or pay a hosting provider a few dollars a month to run one for you. Bank import is optional and goes through an outside service if you switch it on.

What it asks of you: some comfort with setting things up. If the phrase "self-hosted" does not worry you, Actual is excellent. If it does, a hosted copy removes most of the work, at which point the price is small but no longer zero.

A spreadsheet

Free budgeting spreadsheets built around YNAB's method have been around for years, and the best known ones are genuinely good: monthly category budgets, available balances, reports, and nothing hidden.

What it asks of you: typing every transaction, usually on a computer. Spreadsheets on a phone are awkward, which is where most people fall behind.

Free tiers of envelope apps

Several envelope budgeting apps have a free plan. They tend to limit the number of envelopes, devices or accounts, and keep bank import for paying customers.

What it asks of you: working inside the limits, and manual entry. Read what the free plan actually includes before you move a year of habits over. The details for one of them are in looking for a Goodbudget alternative.

YNAB itself, run by hand

Worth saying: much of what makes YNAB work is the method, and the method costs nothing. A notebook and the four rules will take you a long way.

If the method itself was the problem

Every option above is still zero based budgeting, and every one of them needs regular upkeep. If what wore you down was the upkeep, a free copy of the same method will wear you down the same way.

Keep the Diff does a different, smaller job. When you decide against a purchase, or decide to spend less, you log what you were ready to spend and what you actually spent. The difference is money you kept, and it adds up by week, by month and toward a goal. There are no categories to balance and nothing to reconcile, and a week away changes nothing.

Logging is free forever, with no ads and no limit, on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, Windows and Android. Premium adds history, export, categories and more goals. The longer comparison with YNAB is in looking for a YNAB alternative, and you can try Keep the Diff in your browser first.

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