Buckets

Buckets is built for people who are done paying a monthly fee just to track their own spending. The license costs $64 once, covers every computer in a household, and keeps working with no renewal, no upsell screen, and no feature suddenly moved behind a new paywall. It runs as real desktop software on Windows, Mac, and Linux, with a separate Android app for checking balances on the go, which is a different shape than the phone-first apps that dominate this category.

There’s no bank connection of any kind, live or otherwise. Every transaction gets entered by hand or imported from a CSV file you download from your bank’s website, and the budget itself is stored as a local file rather than on a company’s server, so you control backups and where the data lives. That setup makes Buckets a fit for privacy-conscious users and anyone who has grown tired of subscription pricing for budgeting software, though it asks for more manual upkeep than an app with live Plaid syncing.