Leaving YNAB?
A YNAB alternative for Mac, iPhone and iPad
$109 a year, or $39.99 once. You already know the first number — it leaves your account every year, whether or not you opened the app. Here is what the second one does to it, and what changes on a Mac.
One purchase costs what your subscription costs in 4.4 months.
Work out what YNAB costs over the years you expect to keep budgeting, and see every price it has charged since YNAB 4.
YNAB's prices are the ones published at ynab.com/pricing, read there on , before tax. The months figure uses their cheaper annual billing. $39.99 is what Fundkeep costs today, and it buys this version of the app outright.
On a Mac, YNAB is a browser tab
That is not our characterisation, it is theirs. YNAB's own help page on its apps says: “There is not a downloadable version of the app on laptop or desktop,” and tells Chrome and Safari users they can “install the page as an app to create a shortcut that makes it feel more like a standalone application”. Their app line-up page lists iPhone, Android and Apple Watch. Read on .
For plenty of people a browser tab is fine, and saying otherwise would be silly. It stops being fine when the budget is something you open twenty times a week: a tab has no dock icon that remembers where you were, no menu bar, no keyboard shortcuts of its own, and it is one accidental window-close away from being gone.
Fundkeep on a Mac is a Mac app — a menu bar and keyboard shortcuts, not a phone app in a window — and the same purchase covers your iPhone and iPad, kept in step through your own private iCloud.
Among the alternatives we name, MoneyCoach is also a native Mac app; Envy runs on a Mac as the iPad app; Actual Budget is a desktop download you run yourself; Zeroed ships both an App Store version and a direct download. The ranked comparison says what each costs and where each one beats us.
What works the same
The method is the method — it is older than either app, and Fundkeep does not have a clever reinterpretation of it.
- Give every dollar a job. Money that arrives sits in To Be Assigned until you have given all of it somewhere to be.
- Envelopes hold what is left, not what you hoped to spend.
- Overspend an envelope and the app says so, then carries the rest forward the way the method expects.
- Credit cards move money into the card’s payment envelope as you spend, so it is set aside before the bill lands.
- A month is a month. You move between them and each keeps its own assignments.
What you give up
Worth knowing before you spend anything, and worth knowing that we told you rather than letting you find out.
No bank connections
This is the big one, and it is deliberate rather than unfinished. Fundkeep will not fetch your transactions for you. You type them, or you export a CSV from your bank and pick that file. In exchange there is no bank login to hand over, no third party holding a read-only key to your accounts, and nothing to breach.
Apple devices only
iPhone, iPad and Mac, and no web app. If you budget from a Windows machine at work, this is not the app for you.
Simpler goals than YNAB’s targets
Fundkeep gives an envelope a monthly goal — how much to put in each month, and what is still missing. YNAB’s targets do more (by a date, refill up to, weekly); if you lean on those, that is a real difference.
One person’s devices
Your own iPhone, iPad and Mac stay in step through your private iCloud. Sharing a budget with somebody else is not in this version.
Bringing your budget across
Fundkeep reads a YNAB export and rebuilds your categories, accounts and history from it. Then — and this is the part that matters — it shows you a reconciliation report before you commit to any of it: what YNAB said each balance was, what Fundkeep makes it, and every difference it found.
You are not asked to trust an importer. You are asked to read a list of differences and decide. If the numbers do not agree, nothing has been saved and you have lost an afternoon rather than a budget.
Your own data stays yours on the way out, too: everything exports to CSV at any time, including after the 14-day trial ends and before you have bought anything.
$39.99, once
Free for 14 days with every feature working — YNAB gives you 34 when you sign up on its own site, so you can run both and see. After the trial Fundkeep becomes read-only until you buy it: what you entered stays visible, and exporting keeps working. The other apps you can buy outright are on their own page.