How to Connect Your Bank to a Budget App for Free (Read-Only, Password Stays With the Bank)

You can connect your bank to a budget app without paying the app a monthly fee for the privilege. Budgetfold does it on every plan, including the free one, through SimpleFIN Bridge: an independent, read-only feed that you set up once, pay $15 a year to SimpleFIN directly, and paste into the app as a token. The app can read balances and transactions; it never receives your bank password and cannot move money.

Why most apps charge for bank sync

Bank connections are not free to run. Behind YNAB, Monarch, Copilot and most other budget apps sits an aggregator (Plaid, MX, Finicity and similar) that charges the app per connected account every month. Apps roll that cost into a subscription, which is a big reason the going rate for a synced budget app is now $95 to $109 a year. The free plans you see almost always leave bank sync out, so "free" in practice means typing every transaction by hand.

SimpleFIN takes a different route. Instead of each app paying the aggregator, you pay SimpleFIN once, and SimpleFIN hands you a token that any supporting app can use. The app's cost for your connection drops to zero, so there is no reason to gate it behind a paid plan. That is why Budgetfold can offer sync on the free plan and add no fee on top.

What "read-only" actually means

A read-only connection can see your account names, balances and transaction history. It cannot start a transfer, pay a bill, change a password or open an account. When you connect through SimpleFIN:

• You log in to your bank on SimpleFIN's side, once, when you add the bank there. Budgetfold is never part of that step and never sees the credentials.
• SimpleFIN gives you a one-time setup token. You paste it into Budgetfold, which claims it once; a used token cannot be claimed again by anyone else.
• Budgetfold stores the resulting access key encrypted (AES-256-GCM) and uses it to pull new transactions every 12 hours.
• Disconnecting in Budgetfold deletes that key. Revoking the app on SimpleFIN's side cuts access from the other end.

That is the whole privacy story in one line: your password stays with your bank, and the app only ever holds a revocable, read-only key.

What it costs, line by line

Budgetfold earns no commission from SimpleFIN and adds no markup. Compare that with a synced app at $109 a year: for a single person with two or three accounts, the SimpleFIN route is roughly $94 cheaper in the first year, and the gap stays the same every year after.

Step by step: connect your bank in about ten minutes

1. Create a SimpleFIN Bridge account at bridge.simplefin.org and pay the yearly fee.
2. Add your bank there. SimpleFIN covers thousands of US and Canadian banks and credit unions. If yours is missing, stop here and use statement import instead (see below).
3. Make a setup token. In SimpleFIN go to Apps, choose New, and copy the token it shows you. It is a long string that starts with a URL.
4. Paste it into Budgetfold. Open Bank sync from the top navigation (or Settings, Bank sync card) and paste. Budgetfold claims the token and lists the accounts SimpleFIN found.
5. Map each bank account to a Budgetfold account. Pick an existing account or create a new one. Nothing imports until you map, and a new account gets an opening-balance row so it matches the bank from day one.
6. Let it run. Transactions arrive every 12 hours; Sync now is available when you cannot wait (it is rate-limited to once every 15 minutes). Pending transactions are skipped until they post, so you do not get duplicates.

On the free plan the usual limits still apply: this month only, 2 accounts and 100 transactions. A sync that would push you past 100 transactions fills the remaining room, pauses, and shows the upgrade card with the one-time $10 import offer on Plus. You lose nothing; the rest comes through as soon as you upgrade or make room.

What arrives, and what you still do yourself

Synced transactions land in the register with the payee name cleaned up (so "SQ *CORNER CAFE 0043" becomes "Corner Cafe"), and once you assign a payee to a category, later transactions from that payee default to it. Paycheck-sized inflows go straight to Ready to assign. Transfers between two synced accounts still need a quick match on your side, and categorizing a brand-new payee is still a click. The point of zero-based budgeting is that you look at the money; sync removes the typing, not the looking.

Everything else about Budgetfold is unchanged. Typing a purchase on your phone still works, so a cash coffee shows up next to the synced card transactions. Importing a CSV, OFX, QFX or QIF file still works, and so do the one-upload importers for YNAB, Mint, Monarch, Goodbudget, Rocket Money, EveryDollar, Copilot and Tiller. If you would rather keep no bank connection at all, that is a setting you simply never turn on, not a different plan.

When statement import is the better choice

SimpleFIN only covers US and Canadian banks. If you bank in the UK, Australia or elsewhere, download a CSV or OFX from online banking once a week or once a month and drop it on the import page; the generic bank CSV importer reads date, amount and description columns, and the app de-duplicates on re-import. The same goes for a small local credit union that SimpleFIN has not added yet, or for anyone who simply prefers a monthly review to a daily feed.

Checklist before you connect any bank anywhere

• Is the connection read-only? Look for the words in the app's privacy policy, not the marketing page. Budgetfold's privacy policy lists exactly what sync stores: an encrypted access key, institution name, account names, balances, transactions and the last sync time.
• Can you revoke it from both ends? You should be able to disconnect in the app and cut access at the provider.
• Who holds your password? With SimpleFIN or Plaid, the answer is the bank and the aggregator, never the budget app.
• What does the app charge for the privilege? If sync is the thing that moves you from a free plan to $100 a year, do the arithmetic against a $15 SimpleFIN subscription.
• Can you leave with your data? Budgetfold exports a zip of CSVs on every plan, whenever you like.

Frequently asked questions

Is SimpleFIN safe?

SimpleFIN Bridge is a small, long-running service built around a published read-only protocol; it exists precisely so that budgeting tools can read bank data without holding bank logins. As with any aggregator you are trusting a third party with read access to your statements, so check their security page, use a unique password on your SimpleFIN account, and revoke tokens for apps you stop using.

Does the free plan really include bank sync?

Yes. The SimpleFIN connection works the same on Free and Plus. What Plus adds is room: unlimited months, accounts and transactions, up to six people in one budget, and instant Plaid connections as those switch on.

Will I get duplicates if I also import a CSV?

Synced transactions carry a bank transaction ID and the importer de-duplicates CSV rows on date, amount and description, so overlap is handled in the common case. If a bank changes a description after posting you may occasionally need to delete one copy.

How often does it sync?

Every 12 hours automatically, plus a manual Sync now that you can press once every 15 minutes. Banks themselves typically post card transactions one to three days after the purchase, which is the delay you will notice most.