Monarch Money
The value is the network, the data or the infrastructure. Keep paying.
Personal finance in one place: bank and investment accounts connected automatically, transactions categorised, budgets and net worth tracked over time.
Build the budget. Accept that the bank connection is the hard part. THE OBSTACLE, STATED FIRST - Aggregators like Plaid are priced and licensed for companies, not individuals - Practical routes: your bank's CSV export, or an open banking API if your country mandates one STACK - SQLite, a small Node app, one HTML page IMPORTING - CSV import per account with a saved column mapping - Deduplicate on date, amount and a normalised description; never on row order - Import is idempotent: re-importing an overlapping file adds nothing CATEGORISING - Rules first: a pattern on the description sets a category - Rules are ordered, and the first match wins, so a correction is a rule and not a one-off edit - Everything unmatched lands in a review queue BUDGETS - A monthly amount per category, compared against the month to date - Recurring transactions detected by a repeating amount and interval, and projected forward NET WORTH - Balances per account per month; asset values entered by hand and stamped with a date Include the schema, the deduplication rule and the categorisation engine.
What you lose
- Connections to thousands of banks and brokerages through a licensed aggregator, which an individual cannot buy access to
- Transaction categorisation trained across millions of descriptions, which is the difference between useful and tedious
- Investment holdings and net worth tracked without manual entry
If you would rather not build
- A spreadsheet with a CSV import, which many people prefer
The escape hatch
open source · no votes, no paid placement
Actual Budget
$0Envelope budgeting, local-first and self-hostable, with CSV import.
actualbudget/actualfree · open source
Firefly III
$0A self-hosted personal finance manager with rules and reports.
firefly-iii/firefly-iiifree · open source
Why this verdict
our own opinion · changed only by a person
26/100
Verdict no at 26. The budgeting is a weekend; automatic bank feeds are the product, and they are not something you can arrange as an individual.
History
tracked since 10 Aug 2026 · nothing is ever overwritten
Questions about Monarch Money
answered from the record above
Is Monarch Money free?
No — the plan we track is $14.99 a month. Premium at $14.99/month billed monthly, around $8.33 annually.
Can you replace Monarch Money by building your own?
KEEP IT. The value is the network, the data or the infrastructure. Keep paying. Replacement score 26 out of 100, build time longer than it saves. Read what you lose before you decide.
How much does Monarch Money cost?
$14.99 a month on Premium — $179.88 a year. Recorded 10 Aug 2026.
What do you lose by replacing Monarch Money?
Connections to thousands of banks and brokerages through a licensed aggregator, which an individual cannot buy access to; Transaction categorisation trained across millions of descriptions, which is the difference between useful and tedious; Investment holdings and net worth tracked without manual entry. If any of those carry weight for you, keep paying.
Is there an open-source alternative to Monarch Money?
Yes: Actual Budget, Firefly III. The prompt on this page is for when you want it your way instead.
Related entries
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