Why do you need another budgeting app?
Short answer
- No other app auto imports transactions from any bank.
- No other app auto imports without authorizing a third party to access your bank.
- YNAB and apps like it are SaaS.
Full answer
I've been using YNAB since 2013, when it was a desktop app that you paid for once. It was fine, if quirky, but it was 2013 and we didn't mind. In those days, I briefly tried Mint, but I was concerned about privacy. Since I wasn't paying anything, I understood that my data and my attention were the product. It was also slower than dial-up from the Congo.
In 2015, YNAB switched to a SaaS business model. I held out. YNAB4 worked fine. In 2017, the auto import feature eventually won me over. I loved not having to log in to my bank, hunt for an export button, massage the downloaded file into the format YNAB liked, and repeat for 5 banks.
The importance of import
Auto import was problematic, though. It was the early days before many banks had rolled out OAuth, so aggregators relied on storing your bank password, forwarding SMS codes, and scraping websites. It was insecure and brittle.
In 2019 I hatched a plan to write my own budgeting app. I made FundLog, "a self-hosted budgeting app that integrates with Plaid".
Image: A screenshot of FundLog, my first go at a budgeting app
I made some progress, but never really used it. The app had conflicting requirements: I wanted it to be local AND have auto import. Auto import meant integration with Plaid. Integration with Plaid meant running a web service. Running a web service locally is cumbersome. Plus, another app was doing the same thing and went open source. My app gathered dust.
The Ensaasification of YNAB
In 2021, YNAB angered me and many others when they doubled their legacy subscription price from $45 to $90 with no prior communication and no additional value. Such rent-seeking felt like a betrayal, and society now has a shared vocabulary for what happened to YNAB. I'm not against SaaS. I'm against treating customers like taxable royal subjects. The default SaaS playbook is to capture users and then extract value, but it doesn't have to be.
I canceled YNAB but a year later rejoined with a scowl. My wife likes it, and it helped us coordinate our delicate early-marriage finances. Still, I never forgot.
What now?
It's now 2026. YNAB is $109/year. Import is still problematic. I still have finances to manage. However, I'm a professional software engineer, and LLMs are here. I made an app.
Surebeans and Beanscrape are not vibe-coded by any means. I've written extensively on the risks of AI. I have a Master of Science in computer science. I've been coding for over 20 years, and I'm passionate about what I create.
These days, we have excellent browser automation tools. This makes it feasible to fetch transactions from your bank website.
Surebeans is still in beta, but I'm dogfooding it daily. My favorite thing about it is auto import. I don't have to agree to third party terms or share any data or credentials with them. It's just me and my banks.
I'm looking forward to canceling YNAB for good. The very first feature I added was 'Import from YNAB'.
You too can budget privately and with the convenience of auto import. Buy a copy of Surebeans today!
Not ready to buy? Try Beanscrape. It's free. It's the private and secure program Surebeans launches to automate a browser. You teach it how to grab transactions from your bank's website. You can import the resulting data into any budgeting app, even YNAB!