Tiller alternative: free and one-time budget spreadsheets

Tiller pulls your bank transactions straight into a spreadsheet — for about $99/year after a 30-day trial. If the automation is what you want, it's good at it. If you'd rather not pay a yearly subscription to budget, here's the honest alternative and exactly what changes.

	Tiller Money	One-time / free spreadsheet
Cost	~$99/year after a 30-day free trial (2026)	Free (Google Sheets) or one-time ~$7–15
Bank-feed automation	Yes — its main feature; auto-imports transactions	Manual entry, or paste bank exports weekly
Setup	Connect accounts; ongoing feed	Open and start — nothing to connect
Privacy	Links a third party to your bank	Your data stays in your own file
Control & layout	Tiller's templates and structure	Total — change any category or formula
Ongoing cost	Recurring every year	None after the one-time (or free) start
You own it	Feed stops when the subscription ends	Yours forever — no dependency
Best for	Hands-off users who want auto bank sync	Control, privacy, and no recurring bill

What Tiller actually sells

Tiller's one real advantage is automated bank feeds into Google Sheets or Excel — your transactions flow in and you categorize them. That's genuinely convenient, and for people who won't keep up with manual entry it can be worth the ~$99/year. Everything else Tiller offers — templates, dashboards, categories — a good spreadsheet already does.

What you keep by skipping the subscription

Money. Free in Google Sheets, or a one-time template — versus ~$99 every year, forever.
Privacy. You're not linking a third-party service to your bank account. Your numbers stay in your file.
Control. Your categories, your rules, your layout — change any formula you like.
Ownership. A subscription's feed stops when you stop paying. A spreadsheet you own never does.
Awareness. Entering a purchase makes you notice it — the small friction that actually changes spending, and the thing full automation quietly takes away.

The honest catch (and the easy workaround)

The real thing you give up is auto-import. The common workaround: once a week, download your transactions from your bank and paste them into the sheet — most of the time-saving, none of the subscription or the shared bank access. If auto bank feeds are truly non-negotiable for you, Tiller is a fair buy; if not, you're paying yearly for a step that takes two minutes.

From the founderDaniel GilFounder, ToolWise Digital — I build these tools

I made a deliberate choice with our budget tools that I should just own up to: they don't pull your bank feed automatically, and Tiller does. That's the one real thing you give up going this route, and I won't pretend otherwise.

I left auto-sync out on purpose. Automatic bank feeds mean handing a third-party service access to your accounts, and they mean a subscription that stops working the day you stop paying. I'd rather you own your file outright and spend two minutes pasting a weekly export. There's a quieter reason too: typing in a purchase makes you actually notice it — and that noticing is the part that changes how you spend. If hands-off auto-sync is genuinely what you want, Tiller does it well and I'll say so plainly. If you'd rather have a budget that's yours, with no yearly bill, that's the one I built.

Tiller alternative: free and one-time budget spreadsheets

What Tiller actually sells

What you keep by skipping the subscription

The honest catch (and the easy workaround)

Tools that do this for you

Get a free Monthly Budget spreadsheet.