Short answer: if you don’t want your transaction history sitting on a budgeting company’s server, the two real options in 2026 are Okane (your budget is a Google Sheet on your Drive — Okane never holds the data) and Actual Budget (free if you self-host, encrypted end-to-end if you use their cloud). YNAB, Monarch, Copilot, and Credit Karma all store your data on their servers; that’s the standard model and it’s not going away.
Most budgeting apps work the same way: you connect your bank, they pull every transaction, and they keep it. Forever. The privacy policy will say something like “we may retain transaction data for analytics and product improvement,” and there’s no way to budget without that data getting stored.
If that bothers you — and it should at least give you pause — you have two real choices.
Option 1: Okane — Data in Your Google Sheet
Okane’s privacy model is that there is no Okane database. Your budget is a Google Sheet on your Drive. The app reads and writes it. Okane the company never holds a copy.
Bank sync (Premium) does pass through Plaid, the same intermediary YNAB and Monarch use. Plaid sees your bank credentials briefly during the link flow, then passes Okane a token. The transactions land in your Sheet. Plaid is the standard for this — there isn’t really a more private bank-sync option that actually works.
The AI categorization is on-device. Your transactions are categorized by a model running on your phone. No server roundtrip. No “we use your data to improve our models.” No anonymized-but-not-really aggregation.
If you skip Premium and stay on the free tier, no third party touches your financial data at all. Manual entry only, into a Sheet only you can see.
Option 2: Actual Budget — Self-Hosted, Open Source
Actual Budget is the most private serious budgeting app available. The whole codebase is open source. You can run it on your own server — a Raspberry Pi, a VPS, whatever — and your data literally never touches anyone else’s infrastructure.
The hosted version (actualbudget.org) does put your data on their servers, but it’s encrypted end-to-end. They can’t read it.
The cost is setup. You need to be comfortable running a small server, or following a Docker guide. Most people aren’t. If you are, this is the privacy gold standard.
What the others do
| App | Where your data lives | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Okane | Your Google Sheet | Free tier never touches Okane servers. AI runs on-device. |
| Actual Budget (self-hosted) | Your server | Open source. No external data flow. |
| Actual Budget (hosted) | Their server, E2E encrypted | They can’t read it. |
| YNAB | YNAB servers | Standard cloud model. |
| Monarch | Monarch servers | Standard cloud model. |
| Copilot | Copilot servers | Uses cloud LLMs for categorization. |
| Credit Karma | Intuit servers | Ad-supported. Spending data informs offers. |
| GnuCash | Local file on your computer | Desktop only. No cloud at all. |
What “private” actually means
Privacy in budgeting apps is a spectrum, not a binary. The questions worth asking:
- Where does the data live by default? Their server, your device, your cloud storage?
- Who else gets to see it? Plaid (basically every bank-sync app), advertisers, ML training pipelines?
- What happens if you cancel? Do you get a real export, or a CSV of just transactions with no budget structure?
- What’s their business model? Free with no premium tier usually means you’re paying with data.
If you want maximum privacy and you’re technical, self-host Actual Budget. If you want privacy plus a normal phone app and don’t want to run servers, that’s why I built Okane. If you’re using any of the others, it’s worth at least reading the privacy policy.
The thing most people don’t realize: “we don’t sell your data” is not the same as “we don’t keep it.” Most apps don’t sell. All of them keep.
I built Okane because I wanted budgeting that didn’t require me to hand my financial history to anyone. Free on iOS and Android.