A YNAB alternative that lives on your computer.
YNAB rents you a budget for $109 a year and asks for your bank login. The Household Purse is a single HTML file. You buy it once, you own it forever, and your money's business stays on your machine.
If you've come here from a YNAB renewal e-mail, welcome. This page isn't a takedown — YNAB's method is genuinely good. It's a comparison for the sort of person who's tired of subscribing to their own household finances, and who never quite got comfortable handing a third party read-only access to every account they own.
What you're really paying for
Most of what YNAB charges for isn't the budgeting method — the method is free, and taught for free on their blog. What you're paying for is hosting your own household's financial history on their servers, plus the automatic bank connection. If those two things matter to you, YNAB is genuinely good software. If they quietly bother you — and they bother a lot of people — the Household Purse removes them.
How the envelope method works here
The Household Purse gives you a monthly frame: money in, money out, envelopes for the categories you actually spend on, and a running "left to assign" figure that behaves the way YNAB's does. You type transactions in as they happen (or paste them from a CSV). The maths is the same. The tab that would've held your bank connection simply isn't there.
The thirty-day out
Every knife on Offline.Ltd carries a thirty-day, one-e-mail refund. Try the Household Purse for a month; if it doesn't fit the way you keep house, we send the money back and the file stays on your computer either way. It's an HTML file — we couldn't reach in and take it back if we wanted to. That's rather the point.
The catch, plainly
You type your own transactions. That is the whole catch. For some people it's a chore; for others it's the feature — the friction is what turns budgeting into noticing. We won't pretend it suits everyone. It suits people who already suspected they'd budget better without a live bank feed doing it at them.
Common questions
Is this really a full YNAB replacement?
For the envelope method — inflows, category assignments, rollover, monthly reset — yes. If your entire relationship with YNAB is its automatic bank sync, this is not that; nothing offline can be. If your relationship with YNAB is the discipline, the Household Purse gives you the same discipline with none of the subscription and none of the account linking.
Can I import my YNAB history?
You can paste CSV exports from YNAB (or any bank) into the Household Purse's transactions tab. There's no automatic migration button — this is a single HTML file, not a service — but the columns line up cleanly.
What happens when Offline.Ltd goes out of business?
Your file keeps working. It's already on your computer; it doesn't call home. The whole product is designed so the company vanishing changes nothing about your ability to keep budgeting.
Two people, one household. How does that work?
Either share the same file over a private folder (Dropbox / iCloud / a USB stick), or gift-forge a second copy dedicated to your partner. There's no seat pricing; the file is the file.
Do I pay every year?
No. Once. The Household Purse is part of the Pocket Knife tier at $49, or the Swiss Knife at $95 if you want it beside other Blades. Reforging — bringing it back for changes as your life changes — is free within your tier, forever.