Budgeting Apps Track What You Spent. They Don't Tell You If You're Getting Richer.
By Zanket GroupPublished: August 10, 2026
The short version
Mint shut down in 2024, leaving millions of users to find a new place for their financial habits and history. At the same time, YNAB’s annual subscription, which started at $50 when the service moved to a subscription model, now costs $109 a year.
That has given plenty of people a reason to look around.
Most searches begin with:
“What budgeting app should I use instead?”
But that may be the wrong starting point.
Budgeting answers an important question:
Where did my money go?
There is another question that matters just as much:
Am I actually better off than I was a year ago?
Not just in one checking account, but across cash, bank accounts, cards, deposits, loans, debts, and every currency you hold.
We built ExtMoney around that second question.
And because the best financial picture is useless if keeping it current becomes a chore, we also built voice and photo entry to reduce the friction that makes people stop tracking in the first place.
Why people are looking again
Mint officially shut down on March 23, 2024. Millions of people who had used it to track spending, accounts, and financial goals had to move elsewhere.
Some moved to YNAB. Others chose Monarch, Copilot, spreadsheets, or another personal-finance tool.
At the same time, YNAB became substantially more expensive than it was when its subscription model began. The annual price moved from $50 to $84, then $99, and today is $109.
That does not make YNAB a bad product. YNAB has a clear philosophy, a loyal audience, and a budgeting method that works well for many people.
But when one major product disappears and another costs significantly more than it used to, people naturally reconsider what they actually need.
And that is where we think the interesting question begins.
Not:
What is the closest replacement for my old budgeting app?
But:
What do I actually want a personal-finance app to tell me?
Budgeting answers “where did it go.” Net worth answers “am I actually ahead.”
A budgeting app can tell you that you spent $340 on groceries in June.
That is useful.
But it is only one part of your financial picture.
Imagine that:
- your salary arrives in Canadian dollars;
- some savings are held in euros;
- another account is denominated in U.S. dollars;
- you have a credit-card balance;
- you are paying down a loan;
- part of your savings is earning interest;
- you keep some cash outside the banking system.
Now “how much did I spend?” is no longer the only interesting question.
You also want to know:
What am I actually worth today?
And:
Is that number moving in the right direction?
Some personal-finance apps already offer net-worth tracking, and some do it well. Our difference is that we do not treat it as a secondary report behind the budgeting experience.
In ExtMoney, it is the primary view.
Cash, bank accounts, cards, deposits, loans, and other balances roll up into a single net-worth figure.
If you use multiple currencies, current and historical exchange rates let the system compare values consistently over time.
Instead of maintaining your own spreadsheet to answer:
“Am I ahead of where I was six months ago?”
you can look at the trend.
Multi-currency lives need more than a category breakdown
Multi-currency finances are not an exotic edge case anymore.
A person might:
- earn in Canadian dollars;
- send money to family in euros;
- keep savings in U.S. dollars;
- have an account or debt in another currency.
In that situation, an excellent breakdown of groceries, restaurants, subscriptions, and transport still does not answer the whole question.
The harder question is:
What is everything I own, minus everything I owe, worth in one consistent view?
That is why we treat multi-currency net worth as a core capability rather than a power-user extra.
Budget categories still matter.
They just are not the whole financial picture.
The churn driver nobody puts on the feature comparison: typing
Ask why someone stops using a finance app after a good start and the answer is often surprisingly ordinary.
They miss a day of manual entry.
Then a few days.
Then a week.
The backlog grows, and opening the app starts to feel less like checking in on your money and more like unfinished homework.
At that point, the quality of the charts or categories may not matter anymore.
We think one of the best ways to make financial tracking sustainable is to reduce the effort required to keep it current.
Instead of opening a form and tapping through several fields, say:
“Coffee, six fifty, cash.”
Or photograph a receipt.
ExtMoney can use voice input or receipt recognition to prepare the transaction for you.
You review it before it is saved.
That distinction matters: AI-assisted entry should help you enter data, not silently rewrite your financial history.
The goal is not to add an AI chatbot simply because AI is fashionable.
The goal is much more practical:
Make the boring part faster.
Your language should be part of the product, not a translation layer
Voice entry becomes much less useful if the app only understands how one kind of user naturally talks about money.
ExtMoney supports voice input in multiple languages, including:
- English;
- Russian;
- German;
- Spanish;
- French.
The goal is not merely to translate interface buttons.
The goal is to let people enter financial information naturally in the language they actually use.
That matters especially for international and multi-currency users, where language, country, accounts, and currencies often cross borders together.
“GDPR-compliant” and “hosted in the EU” answer different questions
Privacy is another area where labels can hide useful distinctions.
“GDPR-compliant” is a legal and operational claim about how personal data is handled.
“Hosted in the EU” answers a simpler question:
Where does the core data actually live?
Those statements are not interchangeable.
EU hosting does not automatically make a product GDPR compliant.
And a GDPR-compliant service does not necessarily keep every piece of data inside Europe.
ExtMoney’s core infrastructure runs on servers in Germany, and our default architecture keeps the financial data at the center of the product — transactions, accounts, balances, debts, and net-worth calculations — in Europe.
For users who care about data residency, that is a concrete fact rather than a slogan.
Where other finance apps are genuinely good — and where our bet is different
There are many strong personal-finance products.
YNAB is excellent for people who want an active budgeting methodology.
Monarch and other modern finance dashboards offer broad account aggregation and net-worth views.
Regional products can have bank integrations and local knowledge that an international product cannot easily match.
And some platforms deliberately expand into a broader financial ecosystem with credit scores, financial products, cashback, or advisory features.
Those are legitimate product choices.
Our bet is simply different.
We want ExtMoney to answer three questions especially well:
What am I worth?
Why did that number change?
Can I keep the data current without turning financial tracking into a second job?
That leads us toward a particular combination:
- net worth as the central view;
- first-class multi-currency support;
- several account and debt types;
- current and historical exchange rates;
- voice and receipt-assisted entry;
- multilingual input;
- EU-hosted core financial data.
The individual features are not the point.
The way they fit together is.
Four questions worth asking before choosing a finance app
1. Does it show the financial picture you actually care about?
If your main goal is strict budgeting, choose a product built around strict budgeting.
If you want to understand whether your total financial position is improving, look closely at how the product handles net worth, debts, assets, and historical trends.
2. What happens when you miss a week?
A finance app can have an impressive feature list and still fail if catching up becomes painful.
Ask yourself what entering seven days of missing transactions will feel like.
That scenario may tell you more about long-term usability than another chart.
3. Does it work naturally with your currencies and languages?
Check whether multi-currency support is real or just cosmetic.
Check whether your language is part of the actual input experience, not only the translated interface.
4. Where does the data live?
Ask where transactions, balances, and account information are stored.
“Compliant” and “hosted here” are different kinds of answers.
Both can matter.
Where we'd push back on ourselves
A product article should also say where its own argument has limits.
Voice and photo entry are imperfect
Speech recognition can misunderstand words.
Receipts can be crumpled, poorly lit, or ambiguous.
Merchants and amounts can be read incorrectly.
That is why we use a propose, then confirm model.
Automation should remove repetitive work without pretending uncertainty does not exist.
Broader net-worth tracking creates more complexity
Supporting:
- multiple currencies;
- current and historical exchange rates;
- different account types;
- debts and loans;
- interest-bearing accounts;
creates more edge cases than a simple single-currency expense tracker.
That means more calculations to validate and more opportunities for subtle mistakes.
We think the broader scope is worth it.
But it also has to be earned through careful engineering.
EU hosting is an advantage, not a permanent moat
A well-funded competitor can build European infrastructure too.
Data residency is part of the product architecture, not an unbeatable competitive barrier.
We are new
ExtMoney does not yet have a decade of user history behind it.
What we can show today is the product we built, the architecture underneath it, and the problems we chose to prioritize.
The longer-term judgment has to come from users.
The question ExtMoney is built around
Budgeting matters.
Knowing where your money goes is useful.
But for many people, there is a bigger question sitting behind the monthly categories:
After all the income, spending, saving, debt, repayments, accounts, and currencies — am I actually moving forward?
That is the question ExtMoney is built around.
If your previous finance app could tell you exactly where your money went but never quite gave you one clear view of what you are worth and how that number is changing, you can start with ExtMoney for free.