Cash Compass works as a free budget app forever — unlimited manual entry, basic charts for a week, and no ads — without any subscription needed for the core experience.
Apple-native · No bank logins · iCloud sync
Tap the plus button, enter amount, category, merchant — save. Repeat as often as you want. There's no daily limit, no monthly cap, no free trial that quietly expires. The core habit-building loop of expense tracking is on the free tier permanently. Most competitors require a subscription from day one (Copilot, Monarch, YNAB) or place hard caps on the free version that push you toward paying.
Beyond manual entry, the free tier includes three voice transactions and three receipt scans to let you try the premium capture flows. After those, you can keep using manual entry indefinitely or upgrade. The free trial is generous enough to actually test the workflows, not a teaser that locks you out after one try. Charts are also free for the first seven days, giving you a full week of dashboard time.
Many "free" budget apps recoup their cost through ads — banner ads, full-screen takeovers, "upgrade now" interstitials. Cash Compass's free tier has zero ads. The business model is straightforward: free for basic users, premium ($29.99/year) for power users who want unlimited capture, exports, and family sharing. There's no third revenue stream from selling your data or showing you Plaid-targeted upsells, because we don't have your bank data to target with.
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.
Unlimited manual entry of expenses and income, the full dashboard (income/expenses summary, recent transactions list), category tracking, transaction history, dark mode, and three voice entries plus three receipt scans to try the premium capture flows. Charts are free for the first seven days after install. There are no banner ads, no popup ads, no third-party tracking SDKs phoning home. The free tier is genuinely usable — many users budget on it for months or years without paying. The features that require premium are the ones that involve heavier compute (unlimited voice and OCR), Apple's CloudKit sync (multi-device), and exports for tax or accountant handoff. The free experience is not a teaser; it's a real product.
Three honest situations: you use voice capture heavily (the three free trials run out fast — premium unlocks unlimited); you have multiple Apple devices and want iPhone-iPad-Mac sync (CloudKit sync is premium); or you need CSV export for taxes, an accountant, or your own spreadsheet workflow. Family Sharing for up to five household members is also premium, which is the use case for couples and families. If you don't need any of those — you log by hand, you use one device, you don't export — the free tier covers you forever. The seven-day chart access is the one limit that affects everyone eventually, but the dashboard's recent-transactions view stays free, so you still see what's happening day to day.
Mint was free but ad-supported and shut down in 2024. EveryDollar is free for manual entry but heavily upsells to its $99/year tier for bank linking. Goodbudget is free with limits on envelope count (10 envelopes free, more requires $8/month). PocketGuard's free tier is functional but pushes the $7.99/month plan aggressively. NerdWallet's app is free but ad-heavy. YNAB and Monarch don't have free tiers at all. Cash Compass sits in the small group of apps that are usable indefinitely on the free tier without ads — closer to Goodbudget's philosophy but with faster capture methods (voice and OCR) and a higher cap on what's free.
No. We commit to the free tier staying real — unlimited manual entry, no ads, no surprise quotas on the dashboard. The free version of Cash Compass today does what it did at launch, and we expect that to hold. The revenue model is straightforward: premium pays for development, the free tier exists because we believe a budget app you don't pay for is more honest than one that promises free and then nags you constantly. Where the free tier could change over time: we might adjust the trial counts for voice and receipts (currently three each) up or down based on usage data, or move some premium features down to free as on-device compute gets cheaper. Direction is toward more free, not less. The seven-day chart trial is the one that may extend in future updates.
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.
Unlimited manual entry, no ads, no trial countdown. Pay only if you want unlimited voice, receipts, or iCloud sync.
Download Cash Compass on the App Store