A budget app that never asks for your bank login

Monthly Shell is a budgeting app with no bank connection and no account. Every figure in it is one you typed, or one the camera read off a receipt on your own phone.

That is a decision, not a feature we haven't got to yet. This page explains why, what the app does instead, what it flatly cannot do, and which other apps are a better answer for a lot of people.

Why people stop connecting their bank

Aggregator connections expire and need re-authorising, in every app that uses them. A token lapses, a bank changes its sign-in, a multi-factor prompt interrupts the sync. You fix it, and a few weeks later you fix it again. A meaningful number of people quietly stop fixing it and their budget goes stale without ever announcing that it has.

The cost of an app you are renting keeps moving. Budgeting apps are mostly subscriptions now, and the subscription is the product's business model rather than a detail of it. Prices go up. People notice most when the thing they are paying for is a feed that keeps breaking.

Handing a third party the credentials to your bank is a decision some people simply do not want to make. Not because any particular company is careless, but because the answer to "who else can see this" stops being "me" the moment you do it, and never goes back.

And a feed that categorises for you removes the three seconds where you notice the money. An automatic app tells you what you spent last month. Typing the number tells you what you are spending now, while you can still do something about it. That trade is real in both directions, and which side of it you want is the whole question.

What Monthly Shell does instead

• One number on the home screen — Balance: your projected income for the month, minus what you've spent, minus what you've set aside, plus anything you chose to carry over. It resets on the 1st.
• Three seconds to log. Open, tap the amount, done. A tag if you want one; untagged is a perfectly good answer.
• A receipt scanner that reads the amount on the device. The photo is never uploaded, never stored, and is discarded once you confirm the number.
• Budgets that reset on the 1st, with leftovers carried forward only if you ask for it.
• Accounts for money you've set aside, so savings stop looking spendable.
• Repeating bills that can log themselves — switch it on and the bill is entered as an expense each time it comes round, tagged to its budget if you linked it to one.
• Home-screen widgets: Balance at a glance, the budgets underneath it, or the month on the large card.
• A coach capped at one message a day, in five voices from warm to nearly silent, including off entirely.
• Nothing red. Going over budget is information, not a moral failing — no alarms, no streaks to break.
• A CSV export and a full backup file, both free and both staying free. Everything you put in, you can take out.

What it does not do

This section matters more than the one above it, because it is the part that decides whether you should install the app at all.

• iPhone only, and it needs iOS 17 or later. No Android, and no Android work exists in what has shipped.
• No automatic import of transactions. Not from a bank, not from a CSV, not from a PDF statement. Every number is typed or scanned from a receipt.
• No investment tracking, no net worth, no credit score, no bill negotiation. It tracks a month, not a portfolio.
• No zero-based assignment. Budgets here reset monthly and carry over only if you ask — that is not the same discipline YNAB teaches.

If you want your transactions to arrive by themselves, this is the wrong app, and nothing else on this page will change that.

How it compares

No prices here, for us or for anybody else — they change, and a stale number in a table like this misrepresents somebody else's product. Each app publishes its own. This table is our understanding of how these apps work rather than a substitute for reading their pages; if something in it is wrong or out of date, tell us and we'll correct it.

When you should choose one of these instead

YNAB

The method is the product. Zero-based assignment, giving every dollar a job, and an enormous teaching apparatus and community around it. Monthly Shell does not implement that method at all — budgets here reset on the 1st and carry over only if you ask, which is a gentler and much less demanding discipline. If the YNAB method is the thing that changed your finances, keep it.

Monarch Money

A full financial picture: net worth, investments, several aggregators so a failed connection can be re-routed, and proper support for households with complicated money. It runs everywhere. Monthly Shell tracks a month, not a portfolio. If you need the whole picture in one place, Monarch is built for that and this app is not.

Copilot Money

The best-looking app in the category, with strong automatic categorisation and a real feel for Apple's platforms. If you want a bank feed and you want it to be a pleasure to use, that is the one to try.

Quicken Simplifi

A forward-looking spending plan and cross-platform access, from a company that has been doing personal finance software for decades. The safe mainstream choice if you want automation without a startup's roadmap attached.

PocketGuard

The closest competitor to the idea, honestly. Its "In My Pocket" reduces everything to one number, much as Balance does — but derives it from a live bank feed, so it needs no typing at all. If the one-number idea appeals and the typing does not, PocketGuard is the recommendation and we'd rather say so.

EveryDollar

Zero-based budgeting with a free manual-entry tier that needs no bank connection, wrapped in the Ramsey framework, on Android and the web as well as iPhone. If you want the zero-based method without paying for it, start here.

Goodbudget

The real envelope method: manual, no bank sync, shared between two people across devices, and on Android. Monthly Shell is not an envelope app — its budgets are monthly limits, not allocated envelopes — so if envelope budgeting is specifically what you want, Goodbudget does the actual thing.

Actual Budget

Free, open source, local-first and self-hostable. For someone technical it is more private than Monthly Shell, because you own the server and can read the code. The honest summary: Actual is the most private option if you are willing to run one; this app is the more private option if you are not.

Common questions

Can I import a CSV from my bank?

No. There is no import of any kind — not a CSV, not a PDF statement, not a bank feed. Export works in the other direction: you can get everything out as a CSV, an Excel workbook or a full backup file. Nothing comes in except what you type or scan.

Is there an Android version?

No. Monthly Shell is an iPhone app and needs iOS 17 or later. There is no Android version and none in the app as it stands. If you are on Android, Goodbudget, EveryDollar and Actual Budget all run there and all support manual entry.

Do I need an account?

No. There is no sign-up, no email address and nothing to verify. Family Sync, if you switch it on, uses the iCloud account already on your phone — it creates no account of ours and collects no contact detail.

Does it work with no internet?

The free app makes no network calls at all. Family Sync is the one exception, and only once you turn it on: it sends one profile to your own iCloud so the people you invited can see it. Everything else works with the phone in airplane mode.

Can my partner and I share a budget?

Yes, with Family Sync. One profile — its budgets, income, accounts, activity and bills — is kept in step between the people in it, through your own iCloud rather than a server of ours. It is part of a subscription, one person pays for a household, and everyone they invite joins free.

What happens if I stop paying?

Nothing you entered is deleted. Extra profiles and the Excel workbook become read-only and a household stops syncing, but everything already on your phone stays readable, exportable and backed up as before. The free CSV export and the full backup file are never behind a subscription.

Try it

If everything above still sounds like what you want, it takes about a minute to find out.

The app is free. The extras — the Excel workbook, extra profiles and Family Sync — are a subscription, and Apple shows you the price for your country.