Bought once
Budget apps you buy once
They run from nothing to $199.99, and the number is the least interesting thing about them. What separates them is what the word "once" turns out to mean: two of the apps below sell you this year's version and then sell you next year's. What none of them do is fetch your transactions for you — that is the trade, and it is the whole of it.
Every figure was read from the company's own page or Apple's own listing on . The list is not every app ever sold — it is the ones whose price we could read at the source, ours included. The table scrolls sideways.
| App | Price | Paid again? | Runs on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fundkeep (ours) | $39.99 | No | iPhone, iPad and Mac |
| Actual Budget | Free | No — you run the server instead | The web, Windows, Mac and Linux |
| Envy | $6.99 | No | iPhone and iPad; on a Mac, as the iPad app |
| Zeroed | $19.99 | No | iPhone, iPad, Mac, Windows and Android |
| Moneydance | $49.99 | Not for this version | Mac, Windows and Linux. The phone app needs the desktop one |
| Moneyspire | $59.99 a sale price that day, down from $99.99 | Yes — a new major version yearly, at $49.99 | Mac and Windows. The phone app is a companion to it |
| MoneyCoach | $199.99 Lifetime Premium; the free tier costs nothing | No, at that price. Otherwise a subscription | iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch |
What the subscription costs instead
YNAB is $109 a year. Over the 5 years most people keep budgeting, that is $545.00 — and it has gone up four times since 2015, which is a habit rather than an accident. Every price it has charged, with the sources, and a calculator for your own number, is on its own page here.
A purchase has the opposite habit: $39.99 today is $39.99 for this version of the app for as long as you use it. The honest asterisk is that a purchase buys a version, not a promise — a future major version may be a new purchase, and nobody in this category can promise otherwise.
Where "once" is not once
Two of the apps above are sold outright and then sold again. Moneyspire's own purchase page says a new major version is released every year, optional, at $49.99 — so the $59.99 on the shelf becomes rather more than that over the 5 years this page keeps talking about, and that page was also showing a sale, down from $99.99. Moneydance sells the current version at $49.99 the same way. Neither is a trick; both are a different deal from the one the phrase "one-time purchase" puts in your head, and the difference is worth knowing before you compare it with a subscription.
The other thing a price hides is what the phone gets. On Moneydance and Moneyspire the iPhone app is a companion: their own pages say the desktop version is required to use it, so the budget lives on a computer and the phone reaches it. That is a fair design and a long-standing one. It is also the opposite of ours, where the iPhone is the whole app and the Mac is the same app again.
What you give up when nobody bills you
Automatic transactions. A bank connection costs money every month to run, so apps that charge once mostly do not have one. You type what you spend, or import the CSV your bank already gives you. If that sounds like the part you were paying to avoid, a subscription is the honest answer and we are not it.
Shared budgets. YNAB covers up to six people on one subscription. Among the apps above, that kind of sharing is the exception rather than the rule — Fundkeep keeps one person's budget in step across their own devices, and no further.
Somebody else's roadmap. Subscription money pays for continuous work. A purchase pays for what exists the day you buy it. Read the version history before you buy anything here, ours included.
Where Fundkeep fits
It is the envelope method on iPhone, iPad and Mac, $39.99 once, free for the first 14 days. It never connects to a bank, it reads a YNAB export and shows every difference before saving, and what you entered stays visible for good because the app is bought rather than rented. It sits in the middle of the table above — cheaper than the two desktop apps and dearer than the two phone ones — it runs on Apple devices only, and a budget belongs to one person — the ranked comparison says where each of the others beats it.
