YNAB costs $14.99/mo — and unlike a tool you buy once, that bill never stops. Over three years that's roughly $297 for software doing a job your own hardware could just as easily do.
Where the subscription actually goes
$14.99/mo is the sticker price. It compounds: cancel and you typically lose access to your own history, and most plans ratchet the price up as you add usage, seats or storage — the bill rarely stays flat for long.
Ledgerlite Home: the pay-once alternative
Ledgerlite Home does the same core job for $15, once. Local-first zero-based budgeting with CSV import, payee rules and net-worth tracking.
| Ledgerlite Home | YNAB | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $15 once | $14.99/mo |
| Your data | Local SQLite file on your disk | Their cloud |
| Works offline | Always | Limited |
| Account required | No | Yes |
| Zero-based envelope budgeting | Yes | Yes |
| CSV bank import w/ saved mappings | Yes | Yes |
| Automatic bank sync | No (import CSV exports) | Yes |
| Payee auto-categorize rules | Yes | Yes |
One month of YNAB just about covers Ledgerlite Home, and your budget never pays rent again.
Is the subscription ever still worth it?
If you need YNAB's specific ecosystem, integrations or managed infrastructure and that's genuinely load-bearing for you, the subscription earns its keep — that's a real trade-off, not a trick. Ledgerlite Home is for everyone else: people paying every month for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.
Try Ledgerlite Home — $15, once
Local-first zero-based budgeting with CSV import, payee rules and net-worth tracking.