Mint Alternative That Does Not Require Bank Access

The "connect your bank" step was always the part of finance apps I felt weird about. Not weird enough to not do it - I did it with Mint for years. But every time I reconnected a broken sync I'd think about what I was actually authorizing.

After Mint shut down I decided to try something that doesn't need it at all.

DrakeAI: you type what you spent, it categorizes and tracks. No bank connection, no Plaid, no third-party data aggregation. Your expense data lives in the app and nowhere else.

The obvious question is whether manual entry is sustainable. I've been doing it for about five months and yeah, it works. Not glamorous but works. Most days it's a minute or two of logging while I'm doing something else. The things that were always invisible to bank sync - cash, Venmo, splitting dinner - are now actually in my data.

The limitations are real. No investment tracking. No bill reminders. No automatic anything. If you need those features you need a different app.

But if what you want is a simple record of where your money goes without authorizing external access to your accounts, that's doable. Banks change their APIs, aggregators get breached, apps get acquired - the more links in that chain the more that can go wrong. Removing bank access from the equation removes a category of risk entirely.

Not the right tradeoff for everyone. For me it's been fine.