Budgeting that never touches your bank.
Upwardo is the envelope method, sealed on your phone. No account, no bank login — your numbers are yours, end to end.
$49.99/year · $6.99/month
Payday, not a bank feed
One ledger, several currencies
A budget that behaves like cash,
not like a bank.
Nothing to sign into
No signup or bank credentials. Your ledger works offline. Sync sends encrypted ledger contents, with device and entitlement metadata kept separately. Limited analytics exclude ledger contents.
Receipts never leave the phone
Receipt images and recordings stay on your device. Text you confirm into an entry follows the encrypted ledger-sync path.
Billing with dignity
Prices before the quiz, not after. No weekly plans, no dark patterns, one-tap cancel. If you leave, your history stays readable and exportable forever.
Type it, scan it or say it.
Nothing counts until you confirm.
Typing an expense is free. With Plus, a receipt photo or a spoken expense fills in the draft on your phone. Every entry still ends in a confirm card you approve.
Enter
Type the amount. With Plus, photograph the receipt or say “twelve twenty, metro card”. Recognition runs on your device.
Confirm
A scan or voice entry arrives as a draft. Check the amount, pick the envelope and fix anything before saving.
File it
Save it to its envelope and the balance updates. If a scan can't read the total, type it in.
CAFFE LATTE 5.25
OAT MILK .70
TOTAL 6.50
Month sealed · JulyGive every dollar a job,
then seal the plan.
- Stuff your envelopes on payday — fixed, living, flex and savings each get their share, and whatever is unassigned stays on top, visible.
- Seal the month with a long press — the wax stamp is your commitment device. Sealed envelopes stop you from quietly rewriting the plan.
- Review without the shame — “Eating out is $23 over”, never “you failed again”. Numbers are facts; the tone stays on your side.
What you hand over
to budget the other ways.
Not a scoreboard. A bill. Every budgeting app asks you for something before it is any use, and most of it is not money. So here is the itemised version, one line at a time, with our own line printed at the bottom like everyone else's.
- Your bank login
- Bank-sync budgeters
- Not to the app — to a third-party aggregator sitting between it and your bank, holding credentials for both. Nothing in the product works until you do this.
- An email address and an account
- Manual budget apps
- No bank connection to give, so the entry price is your identity and a row on their servers, where the numbers sit in plain text.
- $109 a year, renewing
- YNAB
- Monarch is $99.99, Copilot about $95. All list prices for an individual annual plan, and all historically climbing.
- 34 days, then the decision
- YNAB's trial
- There is no free tier underneath it. When the trial ends, the choice is $109 or start again somewhere else.
- Everything past ten envelopes
- Goodbudget, free plan
- Ten is enough for a first month and not enough for a real one, which is the point at which the plan stops being free.
- Your own history, on the last billing day
- Both kinds
- Editing stops when the subscription does; export before the final day or don't bother. EveryDollar keeps CSV export behind its $79.99 tier, so getting your records out is itself a purchase.
- Total
- A bank credential, an email address, roughly a hundred dollars a year, and the right to read your own records after you stop paying.
Upwardo's line on the same bill
No bank login: the product has no bank connection to hang one on. No email, no account, nothing to sign into. $49.99 a year, or $6.99 a month.
And nothing is repossessed at the end. The ledger was written on your device, so it stays there and stays readable, searchable and exportable, whether or not there is ever a next payment.
Competitor prices and limits are list prices for an individual annual plan, checked 30 July 2026. If one of them has moved since, write to us and we will move the line.
1,731
one-to-three-star reviews we read across six rival budget apps
496
of those reviews complain about the price
390
of those reviews complain about bank syncing
Our own read of App Store and Google Play reviews for YNAB, Monarch, Copilot, Rocket Money, EveryDollar and Goodbudget, 30 July 2026. The two loudest complaints in this category are a price and a bank connection. Upwardo costs $49.99 a year and has no bank connection — that is the product, not a coincidence.
No weekly plans. No surprises.
Pick once, budget on.
The yearly plan starts with 7 days free if your store account hasn't used it. Monthly has no trial.
- Share one ledger with your partner, up to 4 devices
- E2E encrypted sync
- Monthly review of every envelope
- Everything in Monthly
- 7-day free trial, a reminder 24 hours before it ends
- Cancel in one tap, anytime
Free tier, no card: one device, full local budgeting, lossless CSV export and restore — free forever, not a trial in disguise.
Upwardo is not released yet, so every plan button opens the download page. Plans are bought inside the app — nothing is charged on this site.
The fine print, in large type.
Holding a question this list doesn’t answer?
Ask us directlyNever — that’s the whole point. There is no account and no bank login anywhere in Upwardo. You log what you spend; the ledger lives on your device and works fully offline.
Your history is never locked. After a short grace period, only multi-device sync and the monthly review pause — every past transaction stays readable and exportable on your device, forever, at no cost.
Ledger contents reach our server as end-to-end encrypted ciphertext when you use sync. The service also receives device and entitlement metadata. PostHog receives limited app and server events, never ledger contents. Receipt images and recordings stay on your device. Text in confirmed entries follows the encrypted ledger-sync path. Read the privacy policy for analytics and website data.
Devices pair by scanning a QR code. Ledger contents are end-to-end encrypted. Paired devices hold the ledger key. Our server stores encrypted ledger copies alongside readable sync-control metadata, not a readable ledger.
No. Weekly subscriptions and weekend-length trials exist to be forgotten and billed — so Upwardo doesn’t offer them. You get 7 real days, a reminder 24 hours before it ends, and one-tap cancel inside the app.
Yes to both. CSV export is free forever, in a format Upwardo itself can restore. “Delete everything” removes local data and requests deletion of the server group. The service reports completion, then clears its pending deletion record after delivery or the retry limit. This does not erase analytics already sent to PostHog.
Install it, log one expense.
The month is open from there.
No account to make and nothing to connect — the ledger is created on the device you install it on. Each platform's store link appears on the download page the day that build ships.
Split a paycheck in the envelope planner, or read how to budget without linking a bank account.
iOS · Android · macOS · Windows — one ledger, sealed everywhere.