The budget app built native for iPhone

Cash Compass requires iOS 17 or later, which covers iPhone XS and newer — most phones from 2018 onward. The app is universal, so a single App Store download runs on iPhone and iPad with the same account. On iPhone you'll see a single-column layout tuned for one-handed use; on iPad it expands to take advantage of the wider screen. There's no separate purchase per device. If you're on an older iOS version, the App Store will offer the last compatible release of Cash Compass rather than blocking the install entirely, though some newer features may be missing. We test against the latest two iOS versions and the public beta of the next one.

Free forever: unlimited manual entry, category tracking, the dashboard, transaction history, dark mode, and three voice entries plus three receipt scans to try the capture flows. Charts and trends are free for the first seven days after install. Premium is $2.99/week or $29.99/year and unlocks unlimited voice transcription, unlimited receipt OCR, CSV export, iCloud sync across iPhone and iPad, Apple Family Sharing for up to five members, and continued chart access after the trial. There are no ads on either tier. Most users who pay do it for unlimited capture; the export and family sharing land later. You can use Cash Compass for years on the free plan if manual entry is your speed.

Mint shut down in March 2024 and didn't have voice capture; Cash Compass picks up that gap and adds iCloud sync. Monarch and Copilot are subscription-only with bank linking via Plaid — they auto-import transactions but charge $13-15/month and require sharing bank credentials with a third party. YNAB uses an envelope-style method that's powerful but takes weeks to learn and costs $99/year. Cash Compass keeps the entry side fast (voice, photo, manual) and skips bank-sync entirely, so there's nothing to breach and no subscription required for the core experience. The honest trade-off: you log expenses yourself instead of importing them automatically.

No. Cash Compass uses Apple's on-device Speech framework for voice (the same one used by Siri dictation), so transcription runs locally on your device — no audio gets uploaded to a server. Receipt OCR uses Apple's Vision framework, also local. The app's data lives in a small Core Data store that takes up a few megabytes even after a year of tracking. There's no background bank-syncing process to drain battery, no location tracking, no analytics SDKs phoning home. On a 2020-or-newer iPhone, the app launches in under a second and capture latency is essentially instant. Most user reports about battery use trace back to other apps.