A free YNAB alternative built around your paycheck
YNAB is the best-known zero-based budgeting app, and it’s genuinely good. Its published pricing at the time of writing (August 2026) is $14.99 a month or $109 a year, with no free tier, and it asks for a level of ongoing maintenance that some people find hard to sustain.
Pricing and features change — verify both against ynab.com before deciding. Nothing below is based on non-public information.
If you’ve tried YNAB and bounced off it — or you like the philosophy and can’t justify the price — this is an honest look at where Even Cents differs.
What YNAB does that Even Cents doesn’t
Starting here, because the list is real and you should weigh it before switching.
- Bank sync. YNAB imports transactions automatically. Even Cents doesn’t.
- Native mobile apps. YNAB has polished iOS and Android apps. Even Cents is a web app.
- Reporting. YNAB’s reports — net worth over time, spending by category, income vs. expense, Age of Money — are genuinely strong. Even Cents has basic trends.
- Goals with progress tracking. YNAB’s target system is more sophisticated.
- Community and education. YNAB has years of workshops, forums, and a large user base. If you like learning a method with support, that has value.
- Credit card handling. YNAB’s model for credit cards is careful and well thought through.
If several of those matter to you, YNAB is worth $109. This page isn’t going to argue otherwise.
Where the two differ philosophically
Both apps do zero-based budgeting — every dollar gets a job. The disagreement is about the unit and the maintenance.
YNAB budgets by month, into categories. You maintain a set of categories, assign money to each, and move money between them when you overspend. That category structure is the app’s core abstraction, and keeping it accurate is the ongoing work.
Even Cents budgets by paycheck, into payees. Your unit is the pay period — the stretch between one check and the next. You send money to named payees (Mortgage, Amex, Savings), not category buckets. There’s no category structure to maintain because there are no categories.
That’s the whole difference, and whether it’s an improvement depends entirely on which failure mode you have.
The maintenance question
A frequent theme in user discussion of category-based budgeting — YNAB included — is falling behind rather than disliking the method. The category system is powerful precisely because it’s granular, and granular systems need upkeep. Miss two weeks and you may face a reconciliation backlog, a pile of uncategorized imports, and category balances that no longer reflect reality. Some people quit there; others find the structure is exactly what keeps them consistent.
Even Cents has less to fall behind on. There are no categories to reconcile and no envelope balances to true up. A pay period is a short, self-contained list: what came in, what’s committed, what’s left. If you skip one, the next one still makes sense on its own.
The cost of that simplicity is that you get less analytical power. You can’t ask “what did I spend on restaurants last quarter,” because nothing is categorized. If that question matters to you, YNAB is the better tool and it isn’t close.
The timing question
YNAB budgets a month at a time. If you’re paid biweekly, your income doesn’t arrive monthly — it arrives on a 14-day cycle that drifts through the calendar. YNAB handles this fine once you’re a month ahead, which is what its Rule Two is largely about. Getting to a month ahead is the hard part, and it’s where a lot of people stall.
A paycheck budget sidesteps the problem rather than solving it. You never budget money you haven’t been paid, so there’s no buffer to build before the system works. It works from the first check. Carryover then builds the buffer quietly over time, without it being a prerequisite.
Privacy
YNAB stores your linked financial data on servers it can read. That’s not a criticism — it’s a requirement for bank sync to work at all.
Even Cents encrypts your data under a key derived from your password, so the operator can’t read your transactions in the database or in backups. The trade-off is that there’s no password reset that recovers your data — you get a recovery code at signup and losing both means the data is gone.
Some people care about this a great deal and some not at all. It’s worth knowing which you are.
Price
| YNAB | Even Cents | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $14.99 | Free |
| Annual | $109 | Free |
| Free trial | 34 days | n/a |
| Household sharing | Up to 6 people | Included |
YNAB figures are its published rates as of August 2026 and may have changed since — check ynab.com for current pricing.
Who should stay with YNAB
- You use and value the reports
- Bank sync is what keeps you consistent
- You need category-level spending analysis
- You budget monthly and it works for you
- You’re already a month ahead and the system is humming
- You want mobile apps
Who should try Even Cents
- You liked zero-based budgeting but drowned in category maintenance
- You’re paid biweekly or weekly and the month has never been the right unit
- You never got to “a month ahead” and stalled out
- $109/year is a real consideration
- You want your financial data encrypted from the operator
- You want the plan, not the analytics
Moving over
Even Cents reads YNAB’s CSV export directly, including its separate Outflow and Inflow columns, so no reshaping is needed. Before writing anything it shows how many rows land in pay periods you already have, and offers to create the missing ones from your pay schedule. Spreadsheet imports (.ods) work too.
Honestly, most people switching don’t import history. A paycheck budget starts working at your next check, and the previous year of categorized data doesn’t feed into it.
Free to set up, and you can keep your YNAB subscription running while you try it — the two don’t conflict, and a pay period is a short enough test that you’ll know inside a month.