Budgeting Apps Track What You Spent. They Don't Tell You If You're Getting Richer.

The short version

Millions of people who lost Mint in 2024, and thousands more quietly cancelling YNAB as its price climbed from $50 to $109 a year, are shopping for "another budgeting app." That's the wrong search. Budgeting answers where your money went last month. It doesn't answer whether you're actually ahead of where you were a year ago — across every card, every currency, every debt you're carrying. We built ExtMoney around the second question, with voice and photo entry so getting the data in stops being the reason people quit before they find out.

Why the market is actually in motion

Mint closed in March 2024. Millions of people who tracked their spending there had to find somewhere else to put their financial life, and a lot of them landed on YNAB, Monarch, Copilot, or a spreadsheet.

Then YNAB kept raising its price. What launched as a one-time $60 purchase became a $50-a-year subscription, then $84, then $99, then $109 — people who signed up early are now paying more than double what they started at. That's not a rumor; it's one of the most common complaints in user reviews and community threads.

None of this is ExtMoney's doing. It's just what happens when a category goes through a shutdown and a string of price increases at once: a lot of people who were happy with their tool six months ago are now actively looking, whether or not they'd admit it.

Budgeting answers "where did it go." Net worth answers "am I actually ahead."

Here's what almost nobody switching apps right now is explicitly shopping for, even though it's the question underneath the question: am I getting richer?

A budgeting app can tell you that you spent $340 on groceries in June. It generally can't tell you, in one number, what you're worth right now — across the checking account, the savings account in a different currency, the credit card balance, the loan you're paying down, the cash you keep for a trip home. Most tools treat that as an advanced feature, if they treat it at all. We treat it as the primary view: every account type — cash, bank, card, deposit with compound interest, loan with either payment structure — rolls up into one net-worth figure, converted at live and historical rates if you hold more than one currency, with a trend line so "am I ahead of six months ago" is a glance, not a spreadsheet you build yourself.

This matters more than it sounds like it should for a specific, common situation: multi-currency lives. Someone earning in one currency, sending money home in another, and holding savings in a third doesn't have a "budgeting" problem so much as a "I genuinely don't know what I'm worth" problem — and that calls for a different tool than a category-tagging app, however good the categories are.

The churn driver nobody names in their pitch deck: typing

Ask why someone quietly stops using a finance app after two good months, and the honest answer is almost never "the categories weren't smart enough." It's that they missed a few days of manual entry, the backlog felt like a chore, and opening the app started to feel like admitting failure instead of checking in on their money.

We think the actual unlock is removing that moment of friction, not adding another AI chatbot on top of it. Saying "coffee, six fifty, cash" out loud — in English, Russian, German, Spanish, or French — or just photographing a receipt and letting the amount, date, and merchant get read automatically, is a different task than opening an app and tapping through five fields. It doesn't ask you to change how you live to fit the app.

"GDPR-compliant" is a checkbox. "Hosted in the EU" is a fact you can verify

Nearly every US-built finance app that wants European users puts up a page about GDPR compliance. Far fewer can tell you, specifically, which country their servers are actually in — and after the last few years of legal back-and-forth over EU-US data transfers, that distinction has stopped being a technicality for a lot of privacy-conscious users.

As of this month, that distinction is more than theoretical. Following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling at the end of June 2026 that changed how independent U.S. regulators can be from the president, the EU-US Data Privacy Framework — the mechanism a lot of US companies rely on to legally move European data to American servers — is under open legal challenge from European privacy advocates, who've asked the European Commission to withdraw its adequacy finding. The framework is still formally in effect while that plays out, but "still in effect for now, under active legal challenge" is exactly the kind of sentence that should make anyone building for a European audience nervous about depending on it as their only answer.

Our infrastructure runs on servers in Germany. That's not a claim in a privacy policy; it's a fact about where the hard drives are.

What most competitors — budgeting or not — still get wrong

To be fair to the field: plenty of apps do expense categorization well, and some regional players know their local market deeply. The gap, consistently, is treating multi-currency net worth as a power-user afterthought rather than the actual point, and treating non-English input as a translation layer bolted onto an English core rather than something built in from the start.

And a few players have drifted the other direction — from tracking into becoming a financial everything-app: credit score, cashback, savings products. That's a legitimate business strategy, but it's a different product than "tell me, honestly, what I'm worth and whether that number is moving in the right direction," which is still the actual job most people switching apps right now are hiring one to do, whether they'd phrase it that way or not.

Practical recommendations (for anyone evaluating a finance app right now, including ours)

• Ask if it shows net worth, not just spending. A single trend line across every account and currency you hold answers a different question than a category breakdown of last month.
• Ask what happens the day you miss a week of manual entry. That single scenario predicts churn better than any feature comparison.
• Check whether your language is a first-class citizen or an afterthought, if it isn't English.
• Ask where the data actually lives, not just whether the vendor "is GDPR compliant." Compliance is a legal claim; hosting location is a fact you can ask for directly.

Where we'd push back on ourselves

• Voice and photo entry are genuinely imperfect, and they'll misfire. Background noise, bad lighting, ambiguous receipts — real failure modes, which is why we treat both as "propose a transaction, then confirm it," not "silently create a transaction."
• Net worth across multiple currencies and account types is a wider surface than pure expense tracking, and wider surface is more that can go subtly wrong. We think it's the right scope; it's also more to get right than a single-currency spending app.
• "Hosted in the EU" is a real advantage, but it isn't a permanent moat by itself. A well-resourced competitor could stand up EU infrastructure too.
• We're just launching. Everything above is the architecture and the bet; it doesn't have years of user history behind it yet.

---

If "what am I actually worth, across every account and currency" sounds like the question your last budgeting app never answered, start for free at ExtMoney.