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Almost every subscription tracker is built for one person with one phone and one bank login. A household is not that. It’s two adults, two card statements, a kid’s game subscription billed to whichever parent set up the tablet, and a streamer nobody remembers signing up for.
So the price that matters isn’t the sticker price. It’s the sticker price times the number of people who need to see the list. The cheapest of these apps is $95 a year for one person — and $190 a year if both adults need their own login. The one built for households is $99.99 a year no matter how many of you there are.
That gap is the whole article.
The second-login problem
There are two ways an app lets a partner in, and they are not the same product.
Shared household access gives the second person their own login to the same data, included in the price. Shared credentials means you both use one account: one password, no record of who changed what, and an awkward afternoon if the relationship ends.
That distinction decides which of these is a family tool and which is a single-user tool two people take turns with.
What each one costs a household
All figures read from each company’s own pages on 29 August 2026.
| App | Annual cost | Second adult | Free trial |
|---|---|---|---|
| Copilot | $95 | Access to the same account | Free “test drive”, trial offered |
| Monarch Core | $99.99 | Included free | 7 days |
| Monarch Plus | $199.99 | Included free | 7 days |
| YNAB | $109 | Up to six people included | 34 days |
| Rocket Money Premium | You pick the price | Not offered | 7 days |
| Bobby | $2.99 once | Same Apple ID only | Free app |
The apps that include a partner cost almost exactly the same as the one that doesn’t — and the free tier does more than most people assume.
Monarch: the one actually built for two adults
Monarch‘s pricing page lists Core at $99.99 a year (shown as $8.33 a month, billed annually) and Plus at $199.99 a year. Both tiers include a 7-day free trial, and both list “Add a partner for free” under access and collaboration.
That last line is why it’s first here: a second adult with their own login, at no extra charge, on the cheaper tier. Skip Plus unless you have a side business. It doubles the price to add retirement forecasting, business P&L tracking and tax exports, none of which help you find a forgotten $14.99 charge.
YNAB: six people, one subscription
YNAB charges $14.99 a month or $109 a year, with a 34-day free trial and no card required to start. A single subscription can be shared with up to six people.
Six is a different proposition from two. If you have teenagers with their own debit cards and app-store habits, YNAB is the only app here that puts all of them under one bill.
The catch is that YNAB isn’t a subscription tracker. It’s a zero-based budgeting system that asks for real effort every week — you assign every dollar a job by hand. It surfaces recurring charges as a side effect of a method some people love and many quietly abandon by month three. Paying $109 a year for an abandoned habit is the failure mode this site exists to warn about.
Note the billing gap too: $14.99 monthly is $179.88 a year, against $109 paid annually. Paying annually cuts 39% off the monthly rate — far wider than the 15–20% typical of the subscriptions we’ve measured; see annual vs monthly billing for why that gap exists and when it’s worth taking.
Copilot: cheapest sticker, single-user product
Copilot is $95 billed yearly, displayed as $7.92 a month. It’s the lowest annual price of the automatic trackers here.
But its own help centre frames partner access as sharing your account rather than adding a second member — it recommends granting a partner access with a magic-link sign-in rather than handing over your password. Security-wise that’s the right call. Household-wise it’s still one account with two people in it, not two members.
Copilot’s own pages show only the yearly figure and name no price for a second household member. The monthly-billing rate wasn’t visible to us, so we’re not quoting one.
Rocket Money: the free tier is the part families should care about
Rocket Money‘s own help centre is unusually blunt about pricing: subscription tracking, budgeting and bill reminders are on the free plan, and Premium is a sliding scale where you choose what you pay.
We could not find any dollar figure for Premium on Rocket Money’s own pages today — not on its terms, not in its help centre. When we compared Rocket Money with Bobby earlier this month, its own pages carried a $4-to-$14-a-month range; they no longer show one. Treat any specific number you see quoted elsewhere as unconfirmed, and read the slider carefully at signup.
For a household the honest recommendation is this: the free tier already finds your recurring charges. Connect the accounts, read the list, cancel what’s dead, then decide whether the paid tier is worth anything. Bill negotiation, the main paid draw, is billed separately as a one-time fee of 35–60% of your first year’s savings if it succeeds.
Bobby: $2.99, one phone, no bank connection
Bobby is free to download with a $2.99 in-app purchase (“All-in-one Pack v2”) that removes the limits. Apple’s listing shows it syncing via iCloud across devices on the same Apple ID, and supporting Family Sharing on some purchases.
Same Apple ID is the limit that matters. Two adults with separate Apple accounts keep two separate lists, and a hand-maintained list is one somebody stops maintaining. Bobby is excellent value for a single organised person and not a household tool.
The calculation: what has to die for this to pay for itself
Run this before subscribing to anything. Ten minutes, and it’s the only number that matters.
- Pull three months of statements for every card and account in the house.
- Circle every recurring charge nobody in the household actively wants.
- Add them up and divide by three. That’s your monthly dead spend.
Compare that to what the tracker costs per month:
| App | Annual | Dead spend needed to break even |
|---|---|---|
| Copilot | $95 | $7.92/mo |
| Monarch Core | $99.99 | $8.33/mo |
| YNAB | $109 | $9.08/mo |
If your dead spend is under about $9 a month, a paid tracker costs more than it saves — every year, while the subscriptions you cancel only need cancelling once. That’s the trap: the tracker becomes the subscription. Our breakdown of what US households spend is a sanity check on whether your number is unusually high.
Note what this does to the two-adult case. Two Copilot accounts at $95 each is $190 a year, needing $15.83 a month of dead subscriptions to justify. Monarch Core covers both of you for $99.99. Same job, $90 a year apart.
The version that costs nothing
A shared note or spreadsheet — service, price, renewal date — plus instant transaction alerts switched on in both banking apps. Total cost $0, and it catches new charges the day they happen, faster than any monthly review.
It fails the moment one of you stops updating it, which is why paid trackers exist. For a household running everything through one joint card it’s enough, and it’s where we’d start. Our cancellation guide covers the harder part — getting out of the ones you find.
The verdict
Two adults who both want their own login: Monarch Core, $99.99 a year. A free partner seat is the most useful family feature here, and it’s on the cheap tier. Take the 7-day trial first.
More than two people spending: YNAB, $109 a year. Six people on one subscription is unmatched — but only if you’ll do the budgeting method. The 34-day trial is long enough to find out honestly.
One person managing the household money alone: Copilot at $95, the cheapest automatic tracker here, if you accept it’s a single-account product.
Don’t pay anything yet if your dead spend is under about $9 a month, or everything already runs through one joint card. Start with Rocket Money’s free tier or a shared spreadsheet, cancel what turns up, and revisit in three months. That choice is between a $100-a-year app and a one-afternoon audit that costs nothing — and the audit wins.
Don’t buy Bobby as a family tool. At $2.99 it’s the best value here for one person on one Apple ID, and the wrong shape for two adults with separate Apple accounts.
Verified 29 August 2026. Monarch, YNAB and Copilot prices were read from monarch.com/pricing, ynab.com/pricing and copilot.money that day and are exact. Bobby’s price comes from Apple’s App Store listing. Rocket Money publishes no dollar figure for Premium on its own pages, so we quote none. Where we couldn’t confirm a figure at source — Copilot’s monthly-billing price, any Rocket Money Premium amount — we say so rather than printing a number.