Mint Alternative With No Subscription Fee

After Mint died everything good costs $15/month and everything free is kind of garbage. That's basically the landscape.

I hate subscriptions. Not in a principled way, just in a "I have 12 already" way. Adding one specifically for tracking my spending felt too ironic.

Tried the free tiers of a few apps. PocketGuard nags you constantly to upgrade. Others have account limits or locked history or weird data practices. Nothing felt like it was actually trying to be a real free product.

DrakeAI doesn't have bank sync which is the tradeoff for being free. You type in what you spent. I was sure this would be annoying - it's not really, like 2-3 mins a day usually. Entering stuff while I'm waiting for coffee or whatever.

There are things I gave up. Bill reminders I just do in my calendar now. Investment tracking I use Empower for separately, which is free. Net worth I check maybe twice a year in a spreadsheet, which is plenty.

The subscription apps are better. That's just true. YNAB and Monarch have features I don't have. I've made peace with that. The question was whether those features are worth $120-180/year to me and the answer for my use case is no.

If you're in the same spot - hate subscriptions, don't need investment tracking, can handle typing a few things a day - free manual entry works. If you need sync or the full feature set, pay for something good rather than using a bad free version.