Say It or Snap It — Either Way, You're Not Typing
By Zanket GroupPublished: July 17, 2026
The short version
Millions of people lost Mint in 2024. At the same time, many long-time YNAB users have watched its annual price rise from $50 to $109 and started looking for alternatives.
Most of them are searching for “another budgeting app.”
That may be the wrong search.
Budgeting answers a useful question:
Where did my money go?
But it doesn't always answer the bigger one:
Am I actually better off than I was a year ago?
Not just in one bank account, but across every account, every currency, every credit card, every loan, and the cash you keep outside the banking system.
We built ExtMoney around that second question.
And because even the best financial picture is useless if keeping it up to date becomes a chore, we also built voice and photo entry to make getting data into the system as easy as possible.
Why the market is moving
Mint shut down in March 2024, forcing millions of users to find a new home for years of financial habits.
Some moved to YNAB. Others chose Monarch, Copilot, spreadsheets, or simply stopped tracking altogether.
At the same time, YNAB's pricing kept increasing. What was once a one-time purchase later became a subscription, eventually reaching $109 per year.
That doesn't make YNAB a bad product. It does mean that people who were perfectly happy with their financial setup a few years ago now have a reason to reconsider it.
A major product disappears. Another gets substantially more expensive.
Naturally, people start looking around.
But most comparisons still begin with the same question:
Which budgeting app should I switch to?
We think there is a more useful question to ask first.
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 last month.
Useful.
But imagine your financial life looks like this:
- salary arrives in Canadian dollars;
- some savings are held in euros;
- you still have money in another country's bank account;
- you carry a credit card balance;
- you're paying down a loan;
- you keep some cash for travel;
- part of your savings sits in a deposit earning compound interest.
Now the interesting question isn't just:
How much did I spend?
It's:
What am I actually worth today?
And:
Is that number moving in the right direction?
That's the primary view in ExtMoney.
Cash, bank accounts, cards, deposits, loans, and other accounts roll up into one net-worth figure.
If you hold multiple currencies, balances can be converted using current and historical exchange rates so you can see not only what you're worth today, but how that value has changed over time.
The result is simple:
Instead of building a spreadsheet to answer “am I ahead of where I was six months ago?”, you look at a trend line.
Multi-currency lives need more than a budgeting app
This becomes especially important for people whose financial lives cross borders.
Someone might:
- earn in Canadian dollars;
- send money home in euros;
- keep savings in U.S. dollars;
- still have assets or debts denominated in another currency.
That's not an unusual edge case anymore.
And for that person, a perfect category breakdown of groceries, restaurants, and subscriptions still doesn't answer the most important question:
What is everything I own, minus everything I owe, actually worth?
Multi-currency support shouldn't be a power-user feature hidden somewhere deep in settings.
For many people, it is the foundation of an accurate financial picture.
The churn driver nobody likes to talk about: typing
There's another problem with personal finance apps that has little to do with charts, categories, or AI.
Manual entry gets old.
People start with good intentions.
For a few weeks, every coffee, grocery trip, and subscription gets recorded.
Then they miss a day.
Then three days.
Then a week.
Suddenly there are twenty transactions waiting to be entered, and opening the finance app starts to feel less like checking in on your money and more like confronting unfinished homework.
That's often where the habit dies.
We don't think the solution is another chatbot sitting on top of the application.
The better solution is to make entering a transaction require less effort.
Say:
“Coffee, six fifty, cash.”
Or photograph a receipt.
ExtMoney can use that information to prepare the transaction for you.
Voice input works across supported languages including:
- English;
- Russian;
- German;
- Spanish;
- French.
Receipt recognition can extract details such as:
- merchant;
- amount;
- date.
You still review the result before it becomes part of your financial history.
The goal isn't to remove you from the process.
It's to remove the tedious part.
“GDPR compliant” and “hosted in the EU” are not the same thing
Most financial products targeting European customers talk about GDPR compliance.
They should.
But there is another question worth asking:
Where is my data actually stored?
Those are two different things.
Compliance describes how a company says it handles data under a legal framework.
Hosting location tells you where the infrastructure processing and storing that data actually runs.
For privacy-conscious users, particularly in Europe, that distinction matters.
Questions surrounding EU-U.S. data transfers have already spent years moving through regulators and courts, and the legal environment can change again.
Rather than making cross-border data transfer the foundation of our infrastructure strategy, ExtMoney runs its infrastructure on servers in Germany.
That's a much simpler fact to explain:
The financial data is hosted in the EU.
No marketing interpretation required.
Where many finance apps still fall short
There are plenty of good personal finance products.
Some are excellent at budgeting.
Some have exceptional bank integrations.
Some know their local market better than any international competitor could.
Others are becoming broad financial platforms offering everything from:
- credit scores;
- cashback;
- savings products;
- other financial services.
Those are legitimate directions.
They're simply solving a somewhat different problem.
Our focus is narrower:
Tell me what I'm worth.
Show me why that number changed.
Make it easy enough to keep the data current.
For us, that means treating multi-currency net worth as a core feature rather than an advanced one.
It means treating multiple languages as part of the product rather than a translation layer added later.
And it means spending engineering effort on reducing the friction of keeping financial records up to date.
Four questions worth asking before choosing a finance app
1. Does it show your net worth, or only your spending?
A spending report explains the past month.
A net-worth trend shows whether your overall financial position is improving.
2. What happens when you stop entering transactions for a week?
If catching up becomes painful, eventually most people won't.
3. Does the product actually work well in your language?
There is a difference between translated buttons and a product designed to understand how you naturally enter financial information.
4. Where is your financial data stored?
“GDPR compliant” is useful.
Knowing the actual hosting location gives you another concrete piece of information.
Where we push back on ourselves
There are trade-offs.
Voice and receipt recognition aren't magic
Background noise can confuse speech recognition.
Poor lighting can make receipts difficult to read.
Merchants and amounts can sometimes be ambiguous.
That's why ExtMoney treats AI-assisted input as:
“Here is the transaction we think you meant. Confirm it.”
Not:
“We silently changed your financial records.”
Broader financial tracking means more complexity
Supporting:
- multiple currencies;
- different account types;
- loans;
- deposits;
- historical exchange rates;
creates a larger engineering surface than building a simple expense tracker.
There are more calculations to validate and more edge cases to get right.
We think that scope is worth it because the broader financial picture is the point of the product.
EU hosting isn't an unbeatable moat
EU hosting is an advantage, not an unbeatable moat.
A well-funded competitor can build European infrastructure too.
ExtMoney is new
ExtMoney is new.
The ideas above describe the product we've built and the direction we're betting on.
We don't yet have years of customer history to point to.
That's something users should know too.
The question ExtMoney is built to answer
There will always be a place for budgeting.
Knowing where your money goes matters.
But eventually most people want to know something bigger:
After all the income, spending, saving, borrowing, repayments, currencies, and accounts — am I actually moving forward?
That's the question ExtMoney is built around.
If your previous finance app could tell you exactly where your money went but never quite told you what you're worth, you can start with ExtMoney for free.