I was reassessing my financial situation when I noticed that my YNAB subscription was about to renew. With limited funds available, I thought I’d try to replicate YNAB’s features using Google Sheets.
I invested a lot of hours coding Google Apps Scripts and creating formulas with ChatGPT. While I got close to completing it, there were still many small complications. Tracking funds and transferring money across different budgeting categories turned out to be much more challenging than I anticipated.
In the end, I acknowledged that the effort wasn’t justified. You can’t really achieve YNAB’s clean and user-friendly design. I decided to go ahead and subscribe to their monthly plan for $15 instead.
If anyone else is considering building a budgeting solution, take a moment to evaluate how much time you’re really dedicating to it.
By the way, someone pointed out Actual Budget in the comments. It looks appealing and is more affordable than YNAB, plus it offers better goal tracking. However, YNAB, especially with the toolkit extension, feels far more straightforward to use. When I access it, I can instantly gauge my budget situation. In contrast, Actual Budget makes me work harder to understand my numbers.
So while Actual Budget is a promising option, I’m sticking with YNAB for the time being.