Free budget apps that actually stay free past week one — what Cash Compass, EveryDollar, and NerdWallet each give you without paying.
Apple-native · No bank logins · iCloud sync
A lot of apps call themselves free but paywall the parts you need — multiple accounts, category limits, exporting, or even basic charts. We sorted these into three buckets: genuinely free with usable basics, free with significant limits, and free trials masquerading as free apps. The list below only includes apps in the first bucket, where you can actually budget without ever paying.
Mint did three things that defined the category: showed you category totals, showed trends over time, and didn't charge for either. The closest free replacements preserve that. Cash Compass keeps charts and category tracking free forever. EveryDollar's free tier covers basic manual budgeting. NerdWallet shows credit scores and aggregate spending. Each replicates a different slice of what Mint felt like.
Free tiers exist because they convert a small percentage of users to premium. That means premium-only features are usually the ones marginal users care most about: unlimited receipt scanning, CSV export, or family sharing. In Cash Compass, free covers manual entry, voice (limited), basic charts, and unlimited categories. Premium ($29.99/yr) adds unlimited voice and receipts, CSV export, and Apple Family Sharing for five members.
Voice, photo of a receipt, or 3-tap manual entry — every method takes under 5 seconds.
Cash Compass picks the category automatically. Override once and it learns your pattern.
Weekly chart shows where money went. Adjust caps before the month is over, not after.
Most are trials in disguise — they let you log a few transactions, then prompt you to upgrade for anything beyond a single account or category. A handful are genuinely free with usable basics. Cash Compass's free tier covers manual entry, basic charts, and category tracking with no expiration or ad pressure. EveryDollar (Ramsey Solutions) offers a free tier covering manual zero-based budgeting; their EveryDollar Premium adds bank sync at $79.99/yr. NerdWallet's app shows credit and aggregate spending free, monetized by financial product referrals rather than subscriptions. The pattern: free apps either get revenue from paid tiers (Cash Compass model) or referral fees (NerdWallet model). Neither is wrong, but it changes what's pushed at you inside the app.
Because some users want unlimited receipt scanning, CSV export for tax time, and Apple Family Sharing across five household members — and those features have real costs to provide (OCR processing, support, ongoing development). The free tier is designed to be usable indefinitely for one person logging a moderate volume of transactions. If you're a freelancer scanning 50+ receipts a month or a family with five iPhones, you'll outgrow free. If you're a single person logging 30 transactions a month manually or by voice, you won't. Premium is $2.99/wk or $29.99/yr — under most other apps' monthly prices. It's optional, not coerced, and the free tier doesn't get worse over time to push you toward it.
It depends on what the free app monetizes. Mint, when it existed, monetized via ads and lead-gen for credit cards and loans, which meant your data fed an ad-targeting system. Free apps with bank-sync typically share aggregated data with financial product partners. Cash Compass's free tier doesn't have ads and doesn't sell or share your data — the company makes money from premium upgrades, not data. NerdWallet earns via referral commissions when you click an offer, which they disclose. Read the privacy policy of any free finance app before installing. If it says 'we share anonymized data with partners' or 'serve personalized advertising,' your transactions are part of the product even if you're not paying cash.
If you exported your Mint CSV before the March 2024 shutdown, you can use it for historical reference even though most free apps don't directly import it. If you didn't export, your Mint history is gone — Intuit didn't preserve it after the migration window. Practical move: download 30-90 days of CSV statements from each bank or card account, sort them by category in a spreadsheet to spot patterns, then start your new app fresh from the current month. Don't try to backfill years of transactions; the value of budgeting is forward-looking. Cash Compass takes about five minutes to set up — pick categories, set a monthly target, and log your first few expenses. By the end of the first month you'll have enough data to start tuning.
Built native for iPhone, iPad, and Mac with iCloud sync. Works offline.
No bank logins, no Plaid, no data sales. All data lives in your iCloud.
Manual entry, charts, category tracking — all free, forever. Premium is optional.
Cash Compass's free tier covers manual entry, basic charts, and unlimited categories with no expiration.
Download Cash Compass on the App Store