Finly is a free Goodbudget alternative with no tiers, no caps and no bank connection. It records what you spent, shows it against monthly category limits, and keeps a khata for money lent and borrowed. What it does not have is the envelope method.
Goodbudget is envelope budgeting, made digital. You divide your income into envelopes before you spend it, and each purchase draws down the envelope it belongs to. Its free tier works without connecting a bank at all, since you enter the balances yourself, which makes it one of the few mainstream budgeting apps that respects the same privacy line Finly does. The paid tier lifts the envelope and account caps and adds account linking.
Where Goodbudget is genuinely better
Envelope budgeting is a real method, and Finly does not have it. Deciding where money goes before you spend it is a fundamentally different discipline from recording where it went afterwards. For people who overspend, the envelope is doing the work: the constraint exists at the moment of the decision, not in a report at month end.
Goodbudget is also built for sharing. Envelopes sync between partners, which is one of the main reasons couples pick it. Finly is single-user.
If envelope budgeting has ever worked for you, do not switch to a tracker to save money. You would be trading a method that changes behaviour for a report that describes it.
Side by side
| Goodbudget | Finly | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free tier, capped | Free, uncapped |
| Approach | Envelopes, allocate first | Track, with limits |
| Free limits | Envelopes and accounts | None |
| Bank login | Not on free tier | Never |
| Entry speed | Manual | Speak or type |
| Partner sharing | Yes | No |
| Money lent | Envelope workaround | Khata, per person |
| Investments | No | Stocks, crypto, gold |
| Works offline | Partly | Fully |
When Finly is the better fit
- You hit the free-tier caps and will not pay to lift them. This is the single most common reason people look for a Goodbudget alternative, and it is a fair reason.
- Allocating money in advance has never stuck for you. Envelopes only work if you actually maintain them. A tracker asks less and therefore survives longer for some people.
- Your income is irregular. Envelope budgeting assumes you know what is coming in. If your month is unpredictable, allocating in advance is guesswork that has to be redone constantly.
- You want the ledger for lending. Money you lent to a cousin is not an expense and does not belong in an envelope. Finly keeps it as a balance owed.
- You want voice entry. Speaking an expense in Urdu, Hindi or English removes most of the friction that kills manual tracking.
The thing both of these get right
It is worth naming what Goodbudget and Finly agree on, because almost nothing else in this category does: neither one requires you to hand over bank credentials to an aggregator to get started.
That is the trade at the centre of budgeting apps. Automatic sync is genuinely convenient and it costs you read access to your entire financial history, held by a third party you did not choose and cannot audit. Goodbudget's free tier and Finly both take the other side of that trade. If you are choosing between these two, you have already decided the important thing: the rest is method versus no method.
Moving across without losing the habit
If you are leaving Goodbudget because of the caps, the migration is straightforward: your envelopes become categories, and your allocated amounts become monthly limits on those categories.
What you lose in translation is the allocation step. In Goodbudget, money moves into an envelope and is then spent from it. In Finly, the limit is a line you are measured against rather than a pot you fill. Some people find that the line is enough. Others find that without physically moving the money, they stop paying attention, and for those people, paying for Goodbudget is the correct answer.
The honest part about free
Finly has no paid tier, which means no revenue and no obligation. No support desk, no service commitment, one developer.
Goodbudget's caps exist because someone has to pay for the servers, and being upfront about that is more respectable than the alternative business models in this category. Finly avoids the question by being small and self-hosted, and by writing your data to your device first so a CSV export always gets you out.
Common questions
Does Finly do envelope budgeting?
No. It has monthly per-category limits, not envelopes you allocate income into before spending. If the envelope method is what works for you, Goodbudget does it and Finly does not.
Does Finly have a free-tier limit on categories or accounts?
No. There is one tier and it is free, with no caps on categories, entries or history.
Does Finly require a bank login?
Never, at any tier. Goodbudget's free tier also works without linking, which is why these two are the closest comparison on this site.
Can my partner and I share it?
No. Finly is single-user. Goodbudget syncs envelopes between people and is the better choice if that matters.
Can I import my Goodbudget data?
No bulk import yet. Envelopes translate to categories manually, and CSV export out of Finly works.
What does Finly do that Goodbudget does not?
Voice entry in nine languages, a khata ledger for lending and borrowing, investment tracking with live PSX quotes, full offline use, and no tier caps.