YNAB alternatives

Envelope budgeting: give every dollar a job before you spend it.

4 of its 6 core features can be rebuilt with AI. Here is one, working, below.

They makeRevenue estimate on Sensor Tower: $300K a month
You pay: $109 a year
AI can rebuild: 4 of 6 core features

Try it

Visual demo only. Copy the prompt below to get the app.

Build it yourself

Real files on your machine, a real database, and it is yours. This one carries the interface as well — the layout, the colours and the shape of the real app, read off its own screens.

Each opens with the prompt loaded and waiting — nothing is sent until you press enter. It is copied at the same time, in case the app is not installed.

Build me a local envelope budgeting app I own, to replace YNAB.

- A web app I run on my own machine: a single Node process serving one page, data in a SQLite file next to it.
- Model it properly: accounts, categories, monthly category budgets, transactions, and transfers. Every transaction belongs to an account and a category. Assignment is its own table so the history is auditable.
- Implement the four rules: give every dollar a job, embrace your true expenses with monthly targets, roll with the punches by moving money between categories, and age your money by tracking days of buffer.
- Import bank CSVs with a per-bank column mapping saved to the database, and dedupe on date plus amount plus description.
- A rules engine that auto-assigns a category based on the description, learned from what I chose last time.
- Reports: spending by category over time, net worth, and age of money.
- One command to export everything to CSV, and one to back up the SQLite file.
- Runs on localhost only. No accounts, no telemetry, no network calls at all. This is financial data and it never leaves the machine.
- Skip: bank connections, a mobile app, and multi-user sharing.
- Include a README with setup, where the database lives, and how to back it up.

## Look and feel

YNAB's own — a strong violet-purple as the brand colour, not a pale blue, with a lime-green second accent it actually uses for illustrations and highlights. Headings and figures in a very dark indigo-navy rather than black. Category rows sit in a rounded container: each group opens with a band in a warm cream-grey carrying the group name on the left and "Available" right-aligned, then one row per category — an emoji, the name, and the amount right-aligned in a soft pill. Hairline dividers between rows, nothing boxed in. Primary buttons are fully rounded pills in the purple. Red only for overspent. Generous spacing, clear hierarchy, big tap targets, phone-readable type, system font. Keep the text dark enough to read at a glance: the softness of a palette belongs to the shapes and the fills, never to the words. Nothing I need to read — dates, numbers, labels — in pale grey on white.

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Feature by feature

Every feature, whether AI can rebuild it, and what you would be signing up to keep running if you did. The paid app does that last column for you, and that is most of what the money buys.

Feature	Core	AI can rebuild	You'd maintain
Give every dollar a jobThe famous part is a rule, not a technology: money you have, minus money you have assigned, must equal zero.	Yes	Yes	Nothing
Categories with monthly targets	Yes	Yes	Nothing
Log transactions against categories	Yes	Yes	Nothing
Move money between categories when you overspend	Yes	Yes	Nothing
Automatic bank importConnecting to banks means paying an aggregator like Plaid, and being trusted by them. This is the one thing you cannot do from a prompt.	Yes	No	You would type transactions in
Spending and net worth reports	No	Yes	Nothing
Goals and savings targets	No	Yes	Nothing
Sync across phone and laptop	No	No	You would host it somewhere
A nudge when a transaction lands"The notifications for new transactions are the reason I remember to stay on track" — and notifications are not available here.	Yes	No	Nothing

What you give up

transactions appearing on their own, without typing them in
your budget on your phone in the shop
the community, the workshops and the method being taught to you
somebody else keeping years of financial history safe

Why people still pay

YNAB's method is four rules you could write on a napkin, and they publish them for free. What people pay for is the bank connection that removes the typing, and the fact that paying makes them actually do it.

Or use one somebody already built

Free and open source. No prompt, no building, no subscription.

Actual Budget: The same envelope method, open source, runs on your own machine or server, with optional bank sync. The closest genuine replacement on this whole site. (web, windows, macos, linux, ios, android)
Firefly III: A heavier self-hosted personal finance manager with budgets, rules and reports. More setup, more power. (web, linux)

Other apps people are freeing

Questions

Can AI really replace YNAB?: 4 of its 6 core features, yes. The demo above is what one prompt produced. What it cannot do is on this page too.
What does YNAB cost?: About $109 a year on the YNAB plan. None. There is a trial, then it is paid.
Is there a free alternative to YNAB?: Yes: Actual Budget, Firefly III. They are listed below, and they are somebody else's finished work rather than yours.