{"slug": "ynab", "name": "YNAB", "category": "finance", "category_name": "Finance", "description": "", "recommenders": 4, "commenters": 9, "warners": 1, "score": 3.47, "rising": -1.31, "first": "2025-11-21", "latest": "2026-08-01", "why": "I've been using You Need a Budget for well over a decade, and it is probably the last subscription I'd ever give up.", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 4, "neutral": 4, "compare": 0, "warn": 1}, "spark": [1, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "I've been using You Need a Budget for well over a decade, and it is probably the last subscription I'd ever give up.", "icon": true, "domain": "ynab.com", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://www.ynab.com", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["YNAB"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 786226912, "item_id": 49139182, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49139182", "by": "dmix", "date": "2026-08-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use YNAB (https://www.ynab.com/) for budgeting so I already had all of my financial data in a single source.", "excerpt": "I use YNAB (https://www.ynab.com/) for budgeting so I already had all of my financial data in a single source. Exporting the CSVs locally and asking Claude to be my financial advisor legitimately gave me good advice. Not just nagging me to save more (which is always useful), but how to organize my budget categories better, detecting longer term spending patterns I wasn't thinking much about, researching credit card r", "context": "", "use_case": "budgeting", "switched_from": "", "story": "From MIT: AI financial advice is surprisingly good"}, {"id": 743459858, "item_id": 46466241, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46466241", "by": "spiffytech", "date": "2026-01-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I found YNAB's philosophy helpful", "excerpt": "I used Ledger for a while, then some other tools. Now I'm on Actual Budget, a nice FOSS envelope budget app that can import transactions from my bank. I find value in tracking everything, tracking it by hand, and tracking it with precision (our household budget has 68 categories). When I've tried easing up in the past (e.g., with Mint's lightweight approach) I was left with a budgetary black box where I felt like I n", "context": "", "use_case": "budgeting methodology", "switched_from": "", "story": "One Number I Trust: Plain-Text Accounting for a Multi-Currency Household"}, {"id": 743426976, "item_id": 46464186, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46464186", "by": "huhkerrf", "date": "2026-01-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I've been using You Need a Budget for well over a decade, and it is probably the last subscription I'd ever give up.", "excerpt": "I get that people on here don't like subscriptions, and I understand why, but I've been using You Need a Budget for well over a decade, and it is probably the last subscription I'd ever give up. The automatic import of expenses is so valuable for my family and keeping track of how much we've spent and how much we have left for the month. We used the fixed-cost version for years beyond when it was officially supported", "context": "family budgeting for over a decade", "use_case": "family budgeting", "switched_from": "", "story": "One Number I Trust: Plain-Text Accounting for a Multi-Currency Household"}, {"id": 736110624, "item_id": 46006914, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46006914", "by": "joshstrange", "date": "2025-11-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I'm a huge fan of You Need A Budget, it was instrumental in giving me control over my finances.", "excerpt": "Clickable link: https://ynab.com I'm a huge fan of You Need A Budget, it was instrumental in giving me control over my finances. It feels like a superpower to see all my money in one place and not care which bank account the dollars actually reside. Also makes it easier to take advantage of various offers (Credit card or things like HYSA) since I know all the records will live in YNAB and I have full control there, e", "context": "", "use_case": "personal budgeting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Wealthfolio 2.0- Open source investment tracker. Now Mobile and Docker"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 786250033, "item_id": 49140627, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49140627", "by": "throw0101a", "date": "2026-08-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I have no interest in paying a subscription for YNAB5 when I have no need for cloud-access or cross-device syncing.", "excerpt": "> I use YNAB I was happy to pay for YNAB4, which was local-only data. I have no interest in paying a subscription for YNAB5 when I have no need for cloud-access or cross-device syncing. If YNAB5 was one-time purchase plus optional syncing, I'd consider the one-time outlay.", "context": "", "use_case": "budgeting", "switched_from": "", "story": "From MIT: AI financial advice is surprisingly good"}]}], "who": [{"by": "huhkerrf", "context": "family budgeting for over a decade", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46464186", "date": "2026-01-02"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["budgeting", "family budgeting", "personal finance", "personal finance tracking", "budgeting methodology", "budgeting with csv import"], "compared": [{"slug": "claude", "name": "Claude", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49139102", "title": "From MIT: AI financial advice is surprisingly good", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46463407", "title": "One Number I Trust: Plain-Text Accounting for a Multi-Currency Household", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46006016", "title": "Show HN: Wealthfolio 2.0- Open source investment tracker. Now Mobile and Docker", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47654062", "title": "Ask HN: Any Interesting Niche Hobbies?", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47406569", "title": "Show HN: Trackm, a personal finance web app", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46566663", "title": "Ask HN: What frustrates you most about personal finance apps?", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"recommend": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {"recommend": 2, "neutral": 1}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-04": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {"recommend": 1, "warn": 1}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {}}, "quotes": [{"id": 786250033, "item_id": 49140627, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49140627", "by": "throw0101a", "date": "2026-08-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I have no interest in paying a subscription for YNAB5 when I have no need for cloud-access or cross-device syncing.", "excerpt": "> I use YNAB I was happy to pay for YNAB4, which was local-only data. I have no interest in paying a subscription for YNAB5 when I have no need for cloud-access or cross-device syncing. If YNAB5 was one-time purchase plus optional syncing, I'd consider the one-time outlay.", "context": "", "use_case": "budgeting", "switched_from": "", "story": "From MIT: AI financial advice is surprisingly good"}, {"id": 786226912, "item_id": 49139182, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49139182", "by": "dmix", "date": "2026-08-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use YNAB (https://www.ynab.com/) for budgeting so I already had all of my financial data in a single source.", "excerpt": "I use YNAB (https://www.ynab.com/) for budgeting so I already had all of my financial data in a single source. Exporting the CSVs locally and asking Claude to be my financial advisor legitimately gave me good advice. Not just nagging me to save more (which is always useful), but how to organize my budget categories better, detecting longer term spending patterns I wasn't thinking much about, researching credit card r", "context": "", "use_case": "budgeting", "switched_from": "", "story": "From MIT: AI financial advice is surprisingly good"}, {"id": 763098416, "item_id": 47693651, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47693651", "by": "evklein", "date": "2026-04-08", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use YNAB for our family budgeting", "excerpt": "Not sure if this is an established hobby or something I've just come up with myself, but I've been \"dashboarding.\" Essentially I have a Blazor webapp that integrates lots of data sources (some manual, some automatic) from areas of my life and I use that to visualize and analyze goals and habits. The main page consists of rolling-weekly stats that deliver \"integration scores.\" Each score contributes to an overall scor", "context": "", "use_case": "family budgeting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Any Interesting Niche Hobbies?"}, {"id": 758513136, "item_id": 47407071, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47407071", "by": "deweller", "date": "2026-03-16", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use YNAB.", "excerpt": "I use YNAB. I thought about building my own now that AI coding make this feasible. But the moat that I can't cross is the integration with my bank accounts. Plaid and the like are too expensive and don't cater to one-off users like me. Has anyone been able to find a personal financial data provider that has a reasonable price?", "context": "", "use_case": "personal finance", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Trackm, a personal finance web app"}, {"id": 745067345, "item_id": 46566709, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46566709", "by": "MattiaHall", "date": "2026-01-10", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I\u2019ve tried Mint, YNAB, and a couple of smaller apps.", "excerpt": "I\u2019ve tried Mint, YNAB, and a couple of smaller apps. I usually quit after a few months because keeping everything categorized and up to date feels like work, not help. Auto-sync breaks, rules need constant tweaking, and once you fall behind it\u2019s hard to catch up. The only features that really mattered long-term were reliable transaction import, simple rules, and a clean mobile UI. Most apps try to do too much instead", "context": "", "use_case": "personal finance tracking", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What frustrates you most about personal finance apps?"}, {"id": 743459858, "item_id": 46466241, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46466241", "by": "spiffytech", "date": "2026-01-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I found YNAB's philosophy helpful", "excerpt": "I used Ledger for a while, then some other tools. Now I'm on Actual Budget, a nice FOSS envelope budget app that can import transactions from my bank. I find value in tracking everything, tracking it by hand, and tracking it with precision (our household budget has 68 categories). When I've tried easing up in the past (e.g., with Mint's lightweight approach) I was left with a budgetary black box where I felt like I n", "context": "", "use_case": "budgeting methodology", "switched_from": "", "story": "One Number I Trust: Plain-Text Accounting for a Multi-Currency Household"}, {"id": 743426976, "item_id": 46464186, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46464186", "by": "huhkerrf", "date": "2026-01-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I've been using You Need a Budget for well over a decade, and it is probably the last subscription I'd ever give up.", "excerpt": "I get that people on here don't like subscriptions, and I understand why, but I've been using You Need a Budget for well over a decade, and it is probably the last subscription I'd ever give up. The automatic import of expenses is so valuable for my family and keeping track of how much we've spent and how much we have left for the month. We used the fixed-cost version for years beyond when it was officially supported", "context": "family budgeting for over a decade", "use_case": "family budgeting", "switched_from": "", "story": "One Number I Trust: Plain-Text Accounting for a Multi-Currency Household"}, {"id": 736159040, "item_id": 46009940, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46009940", "by": "vladde", "date": "2025-11-21", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "i ended up abandoning YNAB's CSV import and use their API to remove transactions", "excerpt": "is there any way to remove entries with the CSV import function? my bank includes transactions that are yet not final (preliminary transaction where currency conversion still isn't final). these rows change both in both the title and the amount, but i can do some guessing on how a row updates. however: when i import my transaction a couple days later again, i need to manually keep track and remove preliminary transac", "context": "", "use_case": "budgeting with CSV import", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Wealthfolio 2.0- Open source investment tracker. Now Mobile and Docker"}, {"id": 736110624, "item_id": 46006914, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46006914", "by": "joshstrange", "date": "2025-11-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I'm a huge fan of You Need A Budget, it was instrumental in giving me control over my finances.", "excerpt": "Clickable link: https://ynab.com I'm a huge fan of You Need A Budget, it was instrumental in giving me control over my finances. It feels like a superpower to see all my money in one place and not care which bank account the dollars actually reside. Also makes it easier to take advantage of various offers (Credit card or things like HYSA) since I know all the records will live in YNAB and I have full control there, e", "context": "", "use_case": "personal budgeting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Wealthfolio 2.0- Open source investment tracker. Now Mobile and Docker"}]}