Ledgerlite Home vs YNAB pricing: $297 vs $15 once

OneTimeSuite Blog · Published 2026-07-21

YNAB is $14.99/mo — $99 or more a year, forever — for envelope math on top of your transactions that does not need a server, a login or a rent payment. Ledgerlite Home does the same job locally: zero-based budgets, CSV imports and a net-worth tracker, all in a SQLite file on your own machine. $15, once.

This is the full pricing breakdown: what YNAB actually costs over one, two and three years, what Ledgerlite Home gives you for $15 paid once, and the honest cases where the subscription is still the right call.

What YNAB actually costs you

At $14.99/mo, one YNAB subscription adds up to $99 every year — $297 over a three-year window, for software you stop owning the day you cancel. Ledgerlite Home is $15 the day you buy it, and the meter never runs again.

Three years in, the gap is $282 — and every year after that adds another $99 to the subscription side of the ledger.

Ledgerlite Home vs YNAB, feature by feature

Price is only half the story — here's how the two line up on the things that decide day-to-day use:

What you get for $15, once

Local-first zero-based budgeting with CSV import, payee rules and net-worth tracking. The highlights:

• 💰 Zero-based budget — Assign every dollar of monthly income to a category envelope, with Income / Assigned / To-budget always in the header.
• 🪣 Rollover envelopes — Per-category toggle to reset monthly or carry unspent funds forward for sinking funds like Vacation or Car Repairs.
• 📥 CSV bank import — Fast manual entry plus CSV import of any bank export.
• 🗺️ Map columns once — Ledgerlite fingerprints each bank's header format and remembers your date/payee/amount mapping for next time.

One month of YNAB just about covers Ledgerlite Home, and your budget never pays rent again.

Switching is 3 steps

1. Buy once on Whop. One payment of $15 gets you the packaged Windows installer, or clone the MIT source at github.com/bensblueprints/budget-planner-personal-mvp and build it yourself for free.
2. Install and open. Run the desktop app; it stores each budget profile as its own SQLite file under your OS user-data directory.
3. Import your bank CSV. Map the columns once, let payee rules auto-categorize, and assign every dollar to an envelope.

When paying YNAB is still the right call

Being straight about it: the subscription earns its keep in three situations. If your team is large enough that YNAB's collaboration features, permissions and admin controls are genuinely load-bearing; if your workflow is built on its integrations and leaving means rebuilding that plumbing; or if you have enterprise requirements — SSO, audit logs, SLAs, a vendor to call — that a pay-once app doesn't come with. Everyone else is paying $14.99/mo for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.

If that's you, Ledgerlite Home is $15, once. For the deeper dive, read the Ledgerlite Home vs YNAB head-to-head.

Frequently asked questions

Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — Ledgerlite Home is MIT-licensed at github.com/bensblueprints/budget-planner-personal-mvp. The $15 buys the packaged Windows installer; building from source is free.

Where does my financial data live?
In SQLite files under your OS user-data directory. No account, no cloud, no telemetry — copy the files to back up or move machines. Note there is no automatic bank sync; you import CSV exports.

Is this a subscription in disguise?
No. $15 once, own it forever, no renewal and nothing ever leaves your computer.

More on YNAB pricing

Ledgerlite Home — product page, demo & full feature list · All OneTimeSuite pricing breakdowns