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Looking for a Rocket Money alternative

By , who built Keep the Diff

Rocket Money does several things at once: it finds recurring subscriptions, offers to cancel them for you, tracks spending, and will attempt to negotiate some bills down. It is genuinely useful, and 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. That is not a design choice it could easily reverse. 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

This 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.

It is not as good, and it is not automatic. It also does not involve giving anybody 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

This 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

It replaces none of the three features above, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. 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 from the other direction. Rather than reading what you spent, it records 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.

Because the input is two numbers you type at the moment of a decision, there is nothing to connect. No account, no sign in, no aggregator, and nothing you log leaves your device. It 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 rather than paying a share of the 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 and Android, and you can try it in your browser before installing anything.

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