Verified 2026-08-09 · 9 apps · every number sourced

Budgeting app pricing, with a URL behind every number.

Most "best budgeting apps 2026" pages recycle 2023 prices with no dates. This one was researched in a single day against live pricing pages, so every figure is current and comparable — and anything that couldn't be confirmed is marked UNVERIFIED, never estimated.

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The free cheat sheet

All prices in USD, verified against each vendor's live pricing page on 2026-08-09. "Effective /mo" = annual price ÷ 12.

App	Free plan	Monthly	Annual	Effective /mo	Trial
YNAB	No	$14.99	$109	$9.08	34 days, no card
Monarch Core	No	$14.99	$99.99	$8.33	7 days
Monarch Plus	No	—	$199	$16.58	7 days
Copilot Money	No	$13	$95	$7.92	1 month
Rocket Money	Yes	$7–$14 (PWYW)	$84–$168	$7–$14	7 days
Quicken Simplifi	No	annual only	$47.88 promo / $83.88	$3.99 / $6.99	7 days
PocketGuard	No	$12.99	$74.99	$6.25	7 days, no card
Goodbudget	Yes	$10	$80	$6.67	none
EveryDollar	Yes	$17.99	$79.99	$6.67	14 days
Empower Dashboard	Fully free	—	—	$0	—

Three things the table hides

Monthly billing is an anchor, not an offer. It carries a 64–170% premium over the annual-effective rate. EveryDollar is the extreme: $17.99/mo versus $6.67 annual-effective.
"Free" means cross-subsidized, not lite. Empower's dashboard feeds a $100k-minimum advisory arm; Rocket Money takes 35–60% of first-year savings on bill negotiation; EveryDollar feeds the Ramsey ecosystem. The pure-subscription apps (YNAB, Monarch, Copilot, Simplifi, PocketGuard) offer no free plan at all.
Seats are the hidden price war. YNAB includes up to 6 household members on one subscription. At $9.08 vs $8.33 effective, per-seat economics diverge sharply — a real wedge for family-targeted acquisition.

The full teardown — $29

$29 one-time · PDF + Markdown · 90-day free refresh

Everything in the cheat sheet, plus the analysis the table can't carry:

Full pricing matrix — every tier, free-plan limit and trial length, each cell verified
Post-Mint landscape: the shutdown, who captured the diaspora, funding and subscriber counts
Pricing-strategy analysis: the two price clusters, annual-discount depth, trial-design patterns
A positioning map and where the pricing white space actually is
Complete source appendix — every number → URL + access date. Audit it yourself.

Who buys this: consumer-fintech founders and PMs pricing a money app, growth marketers at budgeting apps, investors covering consumer fintech, and affiliate and media buyers in personal finance.

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Custom teardown — your category, $149

Same method, pointed at whatever market you're pricing against. You name a category (expense management, payroll, PM tools, vertical SaaS, anything with public pricing pages) and a competitor list; you get back a fully-sourced pricing and positioning teardown.

Up to 12 competitors, every price verified against the live pricing page
Tier / trial / free-plan matrix, plus effective-monthly normalisation
Positioning map and white-space read for your specific wedge
Source appendix — URL and access date for every figure
72-hour turnaround. Half up front, half on delivery.

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Why the sourcing matters

Pricing research goes stale silently. A number without a date is a liability the moment you put it in a board deck. Every figure in this work carries the URL it came from and the day it was read, so you can re-check any single cell in about thirty seconds — and you can tell at a glance when it's time to refresh. Where a vendor hides a number behind a sales call, it says UNVERIFIED. That's the whole differentiator.