How to budget without linking your bank account

Search for a budget app that doesn't link to your bank account and you'll find a dozen listicles, most of them recommending the same thing: an app where you type in every transaction by hand. That advice isn't wrong. It's just incomplete, and the incompleteness is why so many people conclude that refusing to link a bank means resigning themselves to a spreadsheet.

There's a third option that almost nobody writes about. This page is mostly about that.

Why people are leaving bank-linked budget apps

Mint shut down on March 23, 2024. Intuit folded it into Credit Karma, and millions of people who had used the product exactly as intended for a decade discovered that the ledger of their financial lives had been sitting on someone else's servers, subject to someone else's business strategy.

That was the shove. The unease was already there. In 2022, Plaid — the plumbing behind a large share of "connect your bank" buttons — paid $58 million to settle a class action alleging it had used consumers' banking login credentials to harvest and sell financial data without consent. Plaid did not admit wrongdoing, and agreed to delete certain data, minimize what it stores, and give users a portal to manage and revoke connections.

So people started looking for the door. The question is what's on the other side of it.

What you actually give up when you don't link a bank

Let's be honest about the cost before selling you on the benefit.

If you don't connect a bank, you lose:

• Auto-refresh. Nothing appears on its own. If you don't do something, your budget is a museum piece.
• Live balances. Your app shows what you've entered, not what your bank thinks you have. Those two numbers drift apart, and closing the gap is your job.
• Automatic categorization. No algorithm quietly files Whole Foods under Groceries. You do it, at least the first time.
• Investment and net worth tracking that updates itself. If you want a live portfolio figure, this whole category is the wrong aisle.
• Reconciliation. "The bank says $2,412.06, so that's the truth" is a safety net you now have to go fetch yourself.

Realistically, manual entry costs a couple of minutes a day. File import costs perhaps a quarter of an hour a month. Neither is nothing.

If what you want is zero effort — a budget that maintains itself while you ignore it — then link your bank. Something like YNAB or Monarch will serve you better than anything described on this page, and you should stop reading. The rest of this is for people who have decided that a few minutes a month is a fair price for keeping a third party out of their financial history.

It's worth being precise about what those minutes buy, because the usual framing is wrong. Bank-linked apps are, for the most part, secure. The industry has moved away from storing your password and scraping your bank's website, toward tokenized connections through the bank's own API — read-only, revocable, and the developer never sees your credentials. That's a real improvement and it deserves credit.

The problem was never security. It's privacy. A linked account means a company other than your bank holds a durable copy of every transaction you make: what you buy, where, when, from whom. That copy has a retention policy, a breach surface, an acquisition risk, and a business model — none of which you control, and none of which better encryption fixes. Security is about who can steal your data. Privacy is about who has it, legitimately, forever. Aggregators solved the first problem. They are the second problem.

The three ways to budget without a bank connection

Method 1: Manual entry

You buy a coffee, you open the app, you enter the coffee.

The friction is not a bug. For a certain kind of spender, entering the transaction is the intervention — the two seconds of typing "$6.40, coffee" is the moment you notice you've bought coffee four times this week. No bank-linked app can give you that, because by the time it shows up in a feed, the moment has passed.

Manual entry works when you have one or two accounts, spend mostly on a single card, and your problem is behavioral rather than clerical.

It fails predictably when life gets complicated. Three cards, a joint account, a dozen subscriptions on different billing days — you will miss things. And a manual budget with a missed week is worse than no budget: the numbers are wrong, you don't know by how much, so you stop trusting them, and then you stop opening the app.

Method 2: File import — the middle path most people don't know about

Here's the part the listicles leave out.

Your bank will hand you your transactions. Log in to your own bank, in your own browser, find "Download transactions" or "Export activity," pick a date range, and choose a format. You get a file. That file contains the same data an aggregator would fetch on your behalf — except no third party was involved, no credentials went anywhere, and no copy was left behind on anyone's server. You are exercising your own access to your own data.

Three formats matter:

• .QFX / .OFX — the old Quicken/Open Financial Exchange formats. Structured: date, amount, payee, and a unique transaction ID all sit in known fields. A good importer reads one with no configuration, and uses that ID to avoid importing the same transaction twice. If your bank offers QFX, take it. (See how to open a QFX file without Quicken.)
• .CSV — universal, and messy. Every bank names its columns differently, and they can't agree on whether a debit is negative. A CSV import is only as good as the app's column-mapping step, where you say which column is the date, which is the amount, which is the description. (See importing a bank CSV into a budget app.)
• .JSON — rare from banks, useful if you're migrating out of another tool.

Finding the export. It's usually one level deeper than you expect: open an account, look for Statements & Documents, Activity, or a small download icon near the transaction list. Some banks put it behind the printer icon. Available history varies — some give you years, some only the last 90 days, so grab it before it ages out.

Why is this so rarely offered? Because it's unglamorous. Bolting on an aggregator SDK is a weekend; writing a tolerant OFX parser and a CSV column-mapper that survives two hundred banks' idiosyncratic exports is not. So the market split in two — apps that link your bank, and apps that make you type — and the middle path was abandoned to Quicken and spreadsheets.

Method 3: The hybrid most people actually land on

Almost everyone who sticks with this eventually converges on the same rhythm:

1. Once a month, download a file from each account and import it. This is your ground truth: it catches the subscription you forgot, the annual fee, the thing your partner bought. Your totals now match the bank.
2. In between, hand-enter only the spending you want to feel — restaurants, takeout, impulse purchases. Not to keep the books; the import does that. To keep your attention.

You get the accuracy of a bank feed and the awareness of a manual system, and you pay for it with fifteen minutes on the first Sunday of the month.

How Money Map does it

Money Map is built on that third path. It runs on iPhone and Mac, and it has no bank connection at all — no Plaid, no Yodlee, no Finicity. It also has no account: no signup, no email, no password.

Data gets in exactly two ways. You type it, or you import a file you downloaded from your own bank — QFX (no field mapping required), CSV (with a column-mapping interface), or JSON.

From there it's a real budgeting app: categories and subcategories, budgets set as fixed amounts or percentages, recurring transactions, month-over-month comparison, charts, and every account in one view. If you're coming off desktop software, the Quicken alternative for iPhone and iPad guide covers the migration.

Money Map is free up to 100 transactions. Beyond that, unlimited transactions require a subscription.

And the things it does not do, so you don't discover them later: nothing auto-refreshes, there's no investment tracking, no bill pay, no credit score, and no AI that categorizes your spending for you. Those are the trade-offs of the model, not oversights we intend to fix.

Where your data actually lives

Money Map keeps your transactions in your own iCloud account, encrypted and managed by Apple, under your Apple ID. RationalBit operates no server that holds your financial data. We cannot read your transactions, produce them under subpoena, sell them, or lose them in our breach, because we do not have them. You can lock the app behind Face ID or Touch ID.

One clarification, because plenty of apps in this category blur it: Money Map is not an offline, on-device-only app. It syncs through iCloud, which is a cloud — Apple's. That's what lets your iPhone and your Mac show the same numbers. If your threat model requires that no data ever leave the device, there are fully offline budget apps, and you should use one of those. Our claim is narrower: the cloud your data lives in is yours, not ours, and not an aggregator's.

Honest comparison: Money Map vs Goodbudget vs YNAB

All three are good. They're good at different things.

Choose YNAB if the method matters more to you than the plumbing. It is the strongest behavior-change system of the three, and — a fact often lost in privacy debates — you can run it without ever linking a bank, using file import and manual entry. You'll pay the most, and you will have an account on their servers.

Choose Goodbudget if envelopes are how your brain works. Its free tier is genuinely usable rather than a demo, and, unusually for this category, it imports QFX on the free plan. Note that its paid tier does use Plaid, so "Goodbudget" and "no aggregator" are only the same thing on the free plan.

Choose Money Map if you want no account anywhere, native apps on iPhone and Mac, budgets expressed as percentages rather than envelopes, and file import that isn't reserved for a paid tier. Its honest weaknesses: unlimited transactions require a subscription, nothing refreshes itself, there's no investment tracking, and it's a small independent app with a shorter track record than either of the other two.

The real decision isn't which app. It's which of the three methods you'll still be doing in March. Pick that first, honestly, and the app mostly picks itself.