application VS actual

You could use Budget with Buckets. It's free to use, but you can get a license too. Downside: it doesn't have an app (well, it does, but it's read only and sucks big time).

I use buckets https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com/

I track my balances across various sources, updating once a month. I also set my outgoings.

Funnily enough I don't really use the buckets feature too much, simply the graph over time of savings, and ability to set goals / monthly costs for review is enough.

Right now I'm testing software called Buckets, and I am liking it so far. It's a one-time payment, and the dev seems pretty cool by offering an extremely generous demo. It's kind of a hybrid between manual and automatic, with some macro import options and statement import options that can be helpful. It also has the option to import financial data automatically using SimpleFin for only a fraction of the monthly price of YNAB and Aspire. So far I'm really liking it.

Buckets - I just started to look at this app. It is very basic from what I have seen so far. And while writing this I learned the iOS app is a closed beta. Unlimited FREE trial until you determine it works for you. After that, there is a one-time fee of $49. In September the price is going up to $64.

You might look into budget with buckets

I haven't used it, but the team (person?) that makes [Buckets](https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com) makes [SimpleFIN](https://www.simplefin.org), which seems like it exposes exactly what you want: simple transaction data from arbitrary banks.

Plaid offers [transactions APIs](https://plaid.com/products/transactions/), but I guess to your point these APIs are geared towards fintech companies, not personal use.

I’ve been happy with Budget with Buckets as a YNAB alternative - https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com/

There is some experimental work being done with SimpleFIN integration[1] for US banks but I can't comment on how well that works.

Personally, I add each transaction manually. It allows me to stay on top my budget.

[1] https://github.com/actualbudget/actual/issues/2272

If you know how to self host, or have someone to teach you, you should check out Actual, https://actualbudget.org

Please upvote the feature request: https://github.com/actualbudget/actual/issues/2042

ActualBudget

But several months ago I went back to check out Actual budget which was a sort of YNAB-clone whose author decided to release as open source. If you are comfortable with a bit of command line work, you can install it easily enough running as a hosted service in the free tier of a provider. I'm running in fly.io (docs for that are here). It was a bit fiddly trying to get set up for the first time, but the docs are detailed, and since I got it working it's been flawless and easy.

The repo is pretty active too, wonder if there’s a follow up blog post about the transition. https://github.com/actualbudget/actual