Why does the world need another budgeting app?
Short answer
- YNAB broke my trust.
- I don't want to pay for a subscription.
- I want to auto import from any bank.
- I don't want give a third party to access my bank.
Full answer
I've been using YNAB since 2013, when it was a desktop app that you paid for once. It was fine, if quirky, but it was 2013 and we didn't mind. In those days, I briefly tried Mint, but I was concerned about privacy. Since I wasn't paying anything, I understood that my data and my attention were the product. It was also slower than dial-up from the Congo.
In 2015, YNAB switched to a subscription business model. I held out. YNAB4 worked fine. In 2017, the auto import feature eventually won me over. I loved not having to log in to my bank, hunt for an export button, massage the downloaded file into the format YNAB liked, and repeat for 5 banks.
The importance of import
Auto import was problematic, though. It was the early days before many banks had rolled out OAuth, so aggregators relied on storing your bank password, forwarding SMS codes, and scraping websites. It was insecure and brittle.
In 2019 I hatched a plan to write my own budgeting app. I made FundLog, "a self-hosted budgeting app that integrates with Plaid".
Image: A screenshot of FundLog, my first go at a budgeting app
I made some progress, but never really used it. The app had conflicting requirements: I wanted it to be local AND have auto import. Auto import meant integration with Plaid. Integration with Plaid meant running a web service. Running a web service locally is cumbersome. Plus, another app was doing the same thing and went open source. My app gathered dust.
The Ensaasification of YNAB
In 2021, YNAB angered me and many others when they doubled their legacy subscription price from $45 to $90 with no prior communication and offering no additional value. Such rent-seeking felt like a betrayal. I use YNAB because I'm trying to save money. They want to jack up prices. Our goals are incompatible.
Society now has a shared vocabulary for what happened to YNAB. Everything wants to be a subscription now because it's profitable. The subscription playbook is to capture users and then extract value. I'm not willing to be treated like a taxable royal subject. I want the software I pay for to serve me, not someone else.
I canceled YNAB but a year later rejoined with a scowl. My wife likes it, and it helped us coordinate our delicate early-marriage finances. Still, I never forgot.
What now?
It's now 2026. YNAB is $109/year. Import is still problematic. I still have finances to manage. However, I'm a professional software engineer, and LLMs are here. I made an app that serves me, and it can serve you, too, because its one-time-payment business model aligns my interests with yours.
Surebeans and Beanscrape are high-quality software. I've written extensively on the risks of AI. I have a Master of Science in computer science. I've been coding for over 20 years, and I'm passionate about what I create.
Surebeans is still in beta, but it's getting pretty good. My favorite thing about it is auto import. I don't have to agree to third party terms or share any data or credentials with them. It's just me and my banks.
I'm looking forward to canceling YNAB for good. The very first feature I added was 'Import from YNAB'.
Your turn
You too can budget privately and with the convenience of auto import. Buy a copy of Surebeans today!
Not ready to buy? Try Beanscrape. It's free and open source. It's the private and secure program Surebeans runs to fetch transactions from your bank's website. You can import the resulting data into any budgeting app, even YNAB!