Keep the Diff Premium Download
All articles

Looking for a Rocket Money alternative

By , who built Keep the Diff

If you want a Rocket Money alternative with no bank linking, the short answer is this: find your subscriptions once from your bank's own statements, cancel them yourself, and use an app that never asks for your bank login to keep track of what you save. Each of those steps is laid out below.

Rocket Money does several things at once: it finds recurring subscriptions, offers to cancel them for you with its Premium plan, tracks spending, and will attempt to negotiate some bills down. The subscription finder in particular has saved a lot of people money they had forgotten they were spending.

All of it depends on one thing: continuous read access to your bank accounts. Rocket Money could not easily reverse that design choice. Finding a subscription you forgot about requires seeing a charge you forgot about.

So if the account connection is your objection, you cannot replace Rocket Money with one app. You have to take its features apart and decide which you actually wanted.

If you wanted the subscription finder

The subscription finder is the feature worth most, and there is no privacy preserving version of it, because the whole trick is reading your transactions.

The manual version takes about twenty minutes once. Open your last three months of statements in your bank's own app, which needs no third party at all, and write down every recurring charge. Three months is enough to catch the monthlies and most of the annuals. Cancel what you do not want. Most services let you cancel in their own app or account settings, and what a canceled subscription adds up to over a year is worked out in what canceling a subscription actually saves.

The manual version is slower and less thorough. It also gives nobody standing access to your financial history, and once a year is honestly often enough.

If you wanted the bill negotiation

Worth knowing how this works before replacing it: these services typically take a cut of the first year's savings, which can be a substantial share. Calling the provider yourself and asking for their retention offer costs you one phone call and keeps all of the saving. The success rate is not far off.

If you wanted the spending overview

The spending overview is the part that has real alternatives. Nearly every one of them is either a manual expense tracker, a spreadsheet, or an envelope system, and the trade for each is set out in budget apps that don't connect to your bank.

The same ground, from the angle of people leaving Mint specifically, is covered in Mint alternatives if you never wanted your bank connected.

Where Keep the Diff fits

Keep the Diff replaces none of the three features above. It is worth mentioning because of what a lot of people are actually after when they install something like Rocket Money: the feeling of being on top of their money and the sense that it is going somewhere.

Keep the Diff produces that feeling from the other direction by recording what you decided not to spend. You log what you were ready to spend and what you actually spent, and the difference is added up as money you kept.

The input is two numbers you type at the moment of a decision, and no account is ever connected. No account needed, no aggregator, and we never see anything you log. Keep the Diff cannot find a forgotten subscription, and it will never see a single transaction.

A reasonable setup

If you want most of what Rocket Money gave you without the account access:

  1. Audit your recurring charges by hand, from your bank's own app, twice a year.
  2. Call your own providers for retention offers and keep the whole saving.
  3. Use a savings tracker for the ongoing part, because it is the only one of these that you will still be doing in three months.

Keep the Diff is free on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Windows, Linux and Android, and you can try it in your browser before installing anything.

More on this