Looking for YNAB alternatives.
YNAB is a genuinely excellent budgeting method, well taught and well built. People search for alternatives mostly over price, and over the one thing it was never built to do: splitting a bill with someone who is not on your budget.
| YNAB | Spendthrift | |
|---|---|---|
| Method | Zero based, four rules | Zero based, envelope |
| Price | $14.99/mo or $109/yr | One time payment |
| Free trial or cohort | 34 day trial | First cohort, free permanently |
| Shared budget | Up to 6 people, one subscription | Shared envelopes, one ledger |
| Splits a shared bill | No, needs a second app | Yes, in the same ledger |
What YNAB does well.
YNAB's four rules, give every dollar a job, embrace true expenses, roll with the punches, age your money, are a genuinely good teaching of zero based budgeting, and its shared budget already covers up to six people on one subscription at no extra cost, which fairly answers the couples-sharing-a-budget question. It is a strong, mature product.
Where it stops.
YNAB has no splitting feature. Its own support pages walk users through manually re-entering Splitwise totals to keep a shared budget in sync with a separate splitting app, because the two products do not talk to each other. Anyone running both is doing by hand what Spendthrift does automatically: a shared bill's paid share lands in the payer's own envelope as real spending, and the rest is recorded as owed back, in the same ledger.
Actual Budget is worth knowing about too if price, not splitting, is the reason you are looking: free, open source and built around the same envelope idea as YNAB. See Actual Budget compared.
The one thing none of them do.
Where Spendthrift fits
A shared bill paid by one person becomes two things at once: real spending in a budget, and money owed back. YNAB and a splitting app each show one half, kept in sync by hand or not at all. Spendthrift is the one place both halves live.
What an envelope with a target and a rollover rule looks like.
Drawn as our own chart
One envelope, a target amount, and the rollover rule that carries what is left into next month.
One envelope, with a target and a rule on it.
The target and the rollover rule live on the envelope itself, so next month opens at the right figure without a separate plan kept in step by hand.
What an envelope does at midnight.
Carry the balance, hand it back to be assigned elsewhere, or refill to the target. You choose once, per envelope, and it holds.
An envelope that receives a share.
A shared ₹4,800 dinner moves the eating out envelope by ₹1,200, your share. The other ₹3,600 is a receivable and never spending.
See the zero based budgeting guide for the method itself, Actual Budget compared for a free, open alternative, or Monarch Money vs YNAB for how those two compare to each other.