EveryDollar charges $79.99 a year for bank-sync on top of the Ramsey zero-based method. Cash Compass is free, voice-first, and skips the method-loyalty test.
Apple-native · No bank logins · iCloud sync
EveryDollar Premium is $17.99 a month or $79.99 a year for bank-sync and the full feature set. Cash Compass Premium is $29.99 a year flat, with Apple Family Sharing for 5 people included. The free tier covers manual entry, voice within a monthly limit, basic charts, and category caps forever, without the EveryDollar paywall on bank import.
EveryDollar enforces the Ramsey zero-based method: every dollar gets a planned line before the month begins. That works if you bought in to the baby-step framing. Cash Compass uses category caps and three-second voice logging instead. Say "twelve dollars on coffee" and the app parses amount, merchant, and category. No reassignment ritual mid-month.
EveryDollar requires a Ramsey Solutions account and syncs through their servers, where it sits alongside their broader Financial Peace funnel. Cash Compass syncs through your own iCloud container, encrypted by Apple. No new account, no upsell to a debt-snowball course, no marketing list. The trade-off is honest: EveryDollar Premium auto-imports transactions, Cash Compass asks you to log them.
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.
EveryDollar has a free tier where you enter every transaction by hand, with no bank-sync and no balance projections. Premium is $17.99 a month or $79.99 a year and adds bank connections through a third-party aggregator, paycheck planning, and a few reporting views. Premium is also bundled inside Ramsey Solutions' broader Financial Peace and SmartDollar memberships, which run higher. If you're already inside the Ramsey ecosystem and following the baby steps, the Premium price is part of the package and may already be paid. If you're shopping standalone, $79.99 a year is on the high end for a budget app without a free Premium trial period long enough to know whether the method sticks for you.
Partially. EveryDollar Premium supports CSV transaction export from the web app, and you can screenshot your planned-budget categories from the mobile app. Cash Compass doesn't auto-import EveryDollar files yet, but you can recreate your category list (usually 12 to 18 lines in a Ramsey-style budget) as Cash Compass category caps in about ten minutes. What doesn't transfer cleanly is EveryDollar's mid-month reassignment workflow, because Cash Compass shows cap balances without forcing you to reallocate from one line to another. If the daily-logging habit is what you want to keep, Cash Compass picks up there. If the strict zero-based reassignment was the part that worked, EveryDollar Premium is the truer continuation.
Yes, with a smaller data surface. EveryDollar's free tier is manual-only, which means no bank credentials in the pipeline at all, similar to Cash Compass. Where they differ is account architecture. EveryDollar stores your budget under a Ramsey Solutions account on their servers, which keeps a record of you as a customer regardless of how you use the app. Cash Compass syncs through your existing iCloud account, encrypted by Apple. We have no user database holding your spending, no analytics on individual entries, no ad network. EveryDollar Premium, once you turn on bank-sync, passes transactions through an aggregator on the way to Ramsey's servers, which expands the chain again.
No, not strictly. EveryDollar's whole design is built around the rule that planned income minus planned spending must equal zero before the month starts, then reassignment during the month keeps it at zero. Cash Compass uses category caps that you can set to total your monthly income if you want, but the app won't block you from leaving a gap or force a reassignment when you overspend a category. If the discipline of zero-based reassignment is what works for you, EveryDollar Premium is the right tool. If you've tried zero-based budgeting and quit because the reassignment friction got old, category caps with three-second voice logging are the gentler version.
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.
Install Cash Compass, set category caps that match your usual EveryDollar lines, and log this morning's coffee by voice.
Download Cash Compass on the App Store