YNAB alternative: track spending without linking your bank

YNAB and Bankless Budget side by side

YNAB details are from YNAB's pricing page and its help centre, read October 16, 2026. Check before you sign up, because they change.

What changes when your bank's alerts do the importing

With alerts, the purchase is already described in an email from your bank. Here is one, start to finish:

• No more file downloads. Nothing to export from your bank, and nothing that needs a computer or an iPad. The alerts are already in your Gmail.
• Catching up is one import. On the free plan you press Import when you like, and everything since your last import comes in at once, up to 30 days back. On Plus, each purchase comes in as your bank sends the alert.
• You still see every purchase. Each one lands in your transaction list with its category, so you can look over the week and fix anything that's wrong. You lose the typing, not the noticing.
• Alerts you already get can count. If your bank emails you alerts today, the Gmail filter can file the old ones too, so your first import starts with purchases already in it.
• Plus tells you when you go over. You can turn on an email for when new purchases put a category, or the month's total, over budget.

How it works

1. You turn on purchase alerts at your bank and have them sent to your Gmail address.
2. A Gmail filter puts them under one label.
3. Bankless Budget fetches the messages under that label, and only those. It sends each alert's text to Google's Gemini AI to pull out the merchant, amount, date, card and a suggested category, which you can correct.

Who sets that limit: when you sign in, Google asks you to approve read-only access to your Gmail. Google grants it for the whole mailbox, because it has no way to limit an app to one label. Our code is what limits it to the label you choose. The permission can't send, delete or change email. More in Why we built a budget app that never connects to your bank and our Privacy Policy.

Turning on the alerts and making the filter takes a few minutes per bank, once. Our guides walk through it for Chase, Capital One, American Express and more. After that you sign in with Google, enter the label's name and choose a budget.

What it costs

Bankless Budget Free: up to 100 imported transactions a month, brought in when you press Import. It doesn't ask for payment details.

Bankless Budget Plus: $7.99 a month or $79 a year, for up to 1,000 bank alert emails a month. Each purchase imports as the alert arrives, you can get an email when a budget goes over, and you get CSV and Google Sheets export and three years of history.

YNAB is $14.99 a month or $109 a year, after a 34-day free trial. Plus costs about half as much paid monthly, and $30 less paid yearly. If YNAB's price is the problem rather than linking, it's worth knowing that YNAB offers college students a free year.

Who Bankless Budget is for

• You want a clear picture of your spending, without a method to learn. One monthly amount for each category, and a dashboard that shows what you've spent, what's left, and whether you're on pace for the month.
• You use YNAB without linking, and the typing or the file downloads are where it slips.
• You'd like purchases to come in without typing them, but not by linking your bank.
• Your cards can email you purchase alerts, and you use Gmail.

Who should stay with YNAB

• The method, and the tools around it, are why you're there. YNAB is built around one question you ask every time you get money: “What's it for?” It also offers goal tracking, a loan planner, and spending and net worth reports. Moving to Bankless Budget means tracking spending against a monthly amount per category instead of assigning every dollar, without those tools.
• You want to see account balances. An alert reports a purchase, not what's left in the account, so we can't show one.
• Your bank is outside the US. Our setup guides cover US banks, and budgets count purchases in US dollars only.

What alert emails can't do

• Some alerts are thin. Not every bank names the store in its alert. When one doesn't, the purchase lands in a list for you to finish by hand.
• No alert, no transaction. Cash, and any card you haven't turned alerts on for, you add by hand in the app. Manual entries never count toward the free plan's limit.
• An AI reads the alert text. Gemini sees the content of each alert in your label, and nothing else from your inbox. We use Google's paid Gemini API, and its terms say Google doesn't use what we send to train its models or improve its products. Google keeps it only for a limited time, to check for misuse of the service.

For the wider set of ways to budget without connecting a bank, see Budgeting apps that work without linking your bank.