Budget Apps That Never Ask for Your Bank Login

There are two reasons someone looks for a budget app that does not connect to a bank. Either they do not want to hand banking credentials to a third party, or they tried the connected kind and it kept breaking.

The second reason is more common than the first, and in Europe it is not the app's fault.

The apps that genuinely never ask are Portofelo (ours), Money Manager, Monefy, Bluecoins and Actual Budget in its default configuration. Everything else in the category either requires a connection or nudges you towards one until you give in.

Why European bank sync breaks

In the EU, an app cannot simply log into your bank on your behalf. It goes through PSD2 open banking, which is better for security and much worse for the experience.

Three things follow from that.

Consent expires. You must re-authenticate with the bank on a schedule. Until July 2023 that was every 90 days; Regulation (EU) 2022/2360 extended it to 180. Twice a year, then, every connected app stops updating until you go and log into your bank to renew it. The UK went the other way in 2021 and lets you confirm with the app instead, which is why British reviews of these apps read so differently. Coverage is patchy. PSD2 obliges banks to provide an interface, not a good one. Large banks are generally fine. Regional banks, credit unions and newer neobanks are frequently missing from a given aggregator, and an app can honestly advertise "European bank sync" while not supporting yours. Failures are silent. A broken connection rarely announces itself. Your spending simply stops appearing, you assume you had a quiet fortnight, and you find out at month end that a third of your transactions never arrived. That is worse than manual entry, because manual entry at least fails loudly — you know when you did not log something.

What you actually give up

Being honest about it: a bank connection is genuinely better at one thing, and it is a big thing.

Completeness. Sync captures the direct debit you forgot about, the subscription that renewed at 3am, and the card payment you made while tired. Manual entry captures what you remember to enter. If your goal is an accurate ledger of every euro, sync wins and it is not close.

You also give up automatic balance reconciliation, and you take on a small daily habit. Anyone telling you manual tracking is effortless is selling something.

What you get back

It works. No re-authorisation, no unsupported bank, no silent failure. The app does the same thing in month nine that it did on day one. Cash exists. In a sync-only app, cash is invisible. In much of Europe cash is still a meaningful share of everyday spending, and a "complete" picture that omits it is not complete. You notice. This is the underrated one. Automatic tracking is convenient because it is invisible, and invisible is also its weakness. Plenty of people with perfectly synced apps have no idea where their money goes, because nothing ever made them look at a purchase. Typing in €14 makes you notice €14. Your data survives the company. If the database is on your phone and you can export it, you keep your history whatever happens to the developer. Mint had roughly 20 million users when Intuit closed it in 2024.

The apps

Prices checked August 2026. Monefy's paid tier and Bluecoins' unlock are priced per store and region and move with promotions, so check the listing rather than this table.

Which one to pick

Portofelo if you want the receipt handled for you. It is the only one here that reads the individual line items off a till receipt and categorises each, which is the main answer to "manual entry is tedious" — the tedious part is the supermarket shop, and that is exactly the part it removes. Free tier has no caps on transactions, budgets or accounts, and 50 scans a month. Pro is €2.99. It is iPhone only, which rules it out for a lot of people. Money Manager if you want the most mature manual tracker and you are on Android. It is offline-first and fast, has proper double-entry-flavoured accounts and multi-currency, and the free tier carries ads. Sync is an optional paid subscription rather than a requirement. Monefy if entry speed matters more than anything else. Two taps and an amount. It has no real budgets and its "sync" is a backup file on your own Google Drive, which works until two devices write at once. Bluecoins if you want serious reporting and will pay once. The most analytically capable app here and the least attractive. Actual Budget if you are comfortable running a server. Genuinely excellent envelope budgeting, genuinely a sysadmin task.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a budgeting app that does not require a bank connection?

Yes, several. Portofelo, Money Manager, Monefy, Bluecoins and Actual Budget all work with manual entry and never require bank credentials. Portofelo and Actual Budget do not require an account either.

Why do budget apps keep disconnecting from my bank in Europe?

Because PSD2 requires you to re-authenticate the connection with your bank every 180 days, and because bank interfaces are inconsistent enough that connections also break between renewals. The re-authorisation period was 90 days until Regulation (EU) 2022/2360 took effect in July 2023.

Is manual expense tracking actually sustainable?

For most people, only if the friction is low enough. The habit dies on the supermarket shop, which is the longest thing to type and the most interesting to categorise. That is the specific problem receipt scanning solves, and why it matters more in a manual app than in a synced one.

Is a manual app less accurate than bank sync?

At capturing every transaction, yes — sync is more complete, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. At representing your actual spending, not necessarily: sync misses cash entirely and tells you nothing about what was inside a €62 supermarket transaction.

Can I use a no-bank app and still track cards?

Yes. You create the card as an account and enter the transactions, either by hand or by scanning receipts. What you lose is the automatic import, not the ability to track the card.

Where to go next

If you want to test whether an app is really offline rather than merely cached, the best offline budget apps has a three-question test that takes five minutes. If your reason for going manual is the receipt itself, budget apps with receipt scanning compares six of them on whether they read line items or just totals. And if this is about travel rather than principle, tracking expenses abroad with no signal is the more specific version of this article.

For the two head-to-heads: Portofelo vs Monefy and Portofelo vs Money Manager.

Prices and rules checked August 2026.