What’s in My Pocket? Picking a Personal Finance App

Podcast: Download

TEC355: Mint went dark in 2024 and roughly 3.6 million people had to go find something else. Two years on, the dust has settled — and the market that filled the gap looks almost nothing like the one it replaced.

Dom Bettinelli, Fr. Joseph Sund, and Tom Grelinger work through the best budgeting apps available now and sort them three ways: by platform, by budgeting philosophy, and by who actually holds your data.

Three things changed. Almost everything is subscription now — the free, ad-supported model Mint ran on wasn’t sustainable, and Tom argues that’s a good thing: the person paying the bills is the customer rather than the product. Bank connections keep breaking as banks tighten security. And a serious open-source tier arrived, so you can run a real budgeting system on your own hardware free.

The platform problem is the sharpest one. Almost nobody ships a real desktop app anymore — YNAB, Monarch, Simplifi, EveryDollar, PocketGuard, and Goodbudget are all browser-based. The exceptions are Copilot Moneyand Banktivity on the Mac. Linux users have exactly three options, all open source: Actual Budget, Firefly III, and GnuCash.

Then the philosophy split. Envelope budgeting gives every dollar a job before it’s spent — YNAB, Dave Ramsey’s EveryDollar, and Goodbudget. Both YNAB and EveryDollar have followings that behave a little like religions — which is the point, since the method only works if you commit to it. Fr. Joseph uses this exercise in marriage prep, because finances are the leading cause of divorce and young couples find money harder to talk about than how many children they want.

If you’d rather just see where the money went, that’s a different category: Monarch for households where two adults both need visibility and neither wants to be the family accountant, Copilot Money for the all-Apple house, Quicken Simplifi, and PocketGuard for the question most people ask — can I buy this today?

The self-hosted tier is where it gets interesting. Actual Budget is free, MIT-licensed, local-first, works with no network at all, and runs on a Raspberry Pi. Firefly III is real double-entry bookkeeping if Docker Compose sounds like a good Saturday. Tiller drives Google Sheets or Excel with a daily feed. The common thread: when a company shuts down the way Mint did, your data is still yours — which makes backups your job. Three copies, two methods, one off-site.

And Dom ends by revealing what he actually uses: an app he built himself with Claude Code. It pulls statements out of DEVONthink, reads the PDFs with the Claude API, and auto-categorizes on rules he adds as he goes. No bank sync, no extra features — because every extra feature is friction between him and the work that has to get done.

Get all new episodes automatically and for free:
Follow by Email | Listen to this episode and subscribe on YouTube.

Help us continue to offer Secrets of Technology. Won’t you make a pledge at SQPN.com/give today?

Links for this episode:

Picks of the Week:

Want to Sponsor A Show?
Support StarQuest’s mission to explore the intersection of faith and pop culture by becoming a named sponsor of the show of your choice on the StarQuest network. Click to get started or find out more.

Disclaimer: Hosts, panelists, and guests may have a financial interest in the companies discussed through investments or other means. Their opinions and recommendations are not affected and do not present a conflict of interest. We offer this statement in the interest of full disclosure.

by
Secrets of Technology