Monarch's free tier is gone, its monthly price is 50% higher than it was in 2022, and retirement forecasting now sits in a $199.99 tier. Six alternatives — ranked, priced from each vendor's own page, and clear about who holds your history when you stop paying.
Ranked for the reason people actually leave Monarch: what a year costs, what happens at renewal, and who holds the record once you stop paying.
Free core · hosted Premium $99.99/yr
Plain-text double-entry accounting: the record is a file you own, so no tier above you can ever hold a feature hostage.
Best for: People who left over the tiering rather than the features, and want a record that keeps working the day they unsubscribe.
Free self-hosted · from about $2/mo managed
The genuinely free answer: MIT-licensed, local-first envelope budgeting you can self-host for nothing.
Best for: People who mainly used Monarch to budget and would rather pay nothing at all.
$3.99/mo first year · $6.99/mo billed annually after
The cheapest polished hosted all-rounder — budgeting, cash flow and an investment view for well under Monarch Core.
Best for: People who want Monarch's convenience at a lower regular price and don't mind another vendor's cloud.
$95/yr, or $13/mo
The best-looking automatic tracker, marginally cheaper than Monarch — if you live entirely inside Apple.
Best for: Apple-only households who want the nicest interface and categorization that learns.
$109/yr, or $14.99/mo
Costs more than Monarch, and earns it only if what you want is the method rather than the dashboard.
Best for: People whose real problem is spending behaviour, not reporting.
Free
Free forever, with no budgeting to speak of — and free because the tools are the front end of an advisory business.
Best for: Net-worth and portfolio watchers who want a dashboard at no cost and are comfortable declining a sales call.
What actually decides this when the bill arrives. Prices checked August 2026.
| What matters | Beancount.io | Actual Budget | Quicken Simplifi | Copilot Money | YNAB | Empower Personal Dashboard |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What a year costs | Free core; hosted Premium $99.99/yr if you want sync | $0 self-hosted; about $2/mo managed | About $83.88/yr at the regular rate | $95/yr, or $13/mo | $109/yr, or $14.99/mo | Free |
| What happens at renewal | Nothing to renew — the ledger works unsubscribed | No renewal at all; an MIT licence doesn't lapse | Jumps from $3.99 to $6.99/mo after year one | One plan, no tier above it | One plan, no tier above it | Free, but the advisory pitch is the renewal |
| Is there a free path? | Yes — the open-source core, forever | Yes — self-host at no cost | No, subscription only | No, one-month trial then paid | No, 34-day trial then paid | Yes — the whole dashboard is free |
| Who holds your data | You do — plain-text files on your own disk | You do — a local budget file you sync yourself | Quicken's cloud; CSV export | Copilot's cloud; CSV export | YNAB's cloud; CSV export per budget | Empower's cloud; CSV export of the current view |
| Getting your Monarch history in | Free converter for Monarch's CSV, in date slices | CSV import, one account at a time | CSV import per account | CSV import per account | CSV import into a fresh budget | Links accounts fresh; no history import |
The head-to-head: what Monarch's sync and apps genuinely do better, and what a plain-text ledger does that no subscription can.
Read comparisonTwo ownership-first options side by side — envelope budgeting in a local file against double-entry in plain text.
Read comparisonIf net worth and investments matter more to you than the monthly budget, the same ranking for readers leaving Empower Personal Dashboard — formerly Personal Capital.
Read comparisonMonarch downloads transactions per account, capped at 10,000 rows a time. Paste each CSV here and get balanced double-entry transactions back, in your browser.
Open the converterIt depends which part of Monarch you are replacing. For the same kind of polish at a lower regular price, Quicken Simplifi is about $83.88 a year against Monarch Core's $99.99. For a genuinely free replacement, Actual Budget is MIT-licensed and local-first — self-host it and it costs nothing. And if what pushed you out was watching the free tier disappear and features move up to a $199.99 tier, the structural answer is Beancount.io: the ledger is a plain-text file you keep, so there is no tier above you.
Two, and they are free in different senses. Actual Budget is free and open source; run it on your own machine and you pay nothing, or take a managed pod for around $2 a month if you would rather not. Empower's Personal Dashboard is free in the funded sense: the tools cost nothing because they introduce you to an advisory service that charges 0.89% a year on the first million. Beancount is free software with a plain-text ledger; hosted extras like bank sync are optional and priced separately.
Core is $99.99 a year or $14.99 a month, and Plus is $199.99 a year. It has gone up. In early 2022 Monarch charged $9.99 a month or $89.99 a year and offered a free tier alongside it. Today the free tier is gone, the monthly price is 50% higher, and the Plus tier holds retirement forecasting, advanced investment analysis and business income tracking above the plan most people are on. If you subscribed for the forecasting, that is now a $199.99 feature.
Yes, as CSV, but in pieces. The export you want is per account — Accounts, then the account, then Edit, then Download transactions — and each download caps at 10,000 rows, with Monarch recommending you stay under 5,000. So a long history comes out as a series of date-range files rather than one archive. Pull them all, then convert each one with our free Monarch CSV converter; Beancount reads the date on every transaction, so the order you paste them in does not matter.
For plenty of households, yes. The sync coverage is broad, household sharing is included in Core, and the apps need almost no upkeep. The reasons to leave are not feature reasons. They are that the price has risen, the free tier was withdrawn, capabilities have moved to a costlier tier, and your entire financial history lives in a database you rent. If those are what brought you here, the fix is a format you own rather than a cheaper subscription.
Start free with a plain-text ledger you keep forever — bank sync, mobile apps and imports are there when you want them.
