Subscription

The free tier covers everything most people need to run a budget: accounts, categories, items, the planner, reports, history, and undo. Premium adds the features that take work behind the scenes (bank linking, AI assistance, sharing, and publishing) and increases a few limits.

This page covers what each tier includes, how billing works, the two kinds of credits attached to Premium, and what changes when Premium ends.

What is included free

Everyone gets these without paying:

• Up to 3 budget creation slots per calendar month. Deleting a budget in the same month frees one slot, and budgets you have already created stay forever.
• Up to 250 accounts, 250 categories, and 250 items per budget.
• The full Planner, in both Grid and Calendar views.
• The full Reports tab.
• Up to 5 years of transaction history. History keeps every resolved or deleted event for the current calendar year plus the previous five full years. The cleanup is by age, not by count, and the rule is the same for free and Premium.
• History and Undo for every resolved or deleted event that still has its originating item, account, category, and schedule.
• Manual transactions, entered inside the Edit Item Event dialog on the planner.
• File upload of transactions (CSV, TSV, or TXT, up to 3 files of up to 200 KB each) inside the Match Transactions dialog.
• Built-in themes and any community themes or icon sets you choose to install.
• The Bring Your Own AI path on flows that have an AI mode: the app generates a prompt for you, you paste it into the AI you already use, and you paste the response back. No subscription needed.

If your situation only needs this much, the app stays free.

What is included with Premium

Premium is $11.99 a month plus tax. It adds these features:

• Budget Sharing. Keep up to 5 people on a budget’s direct sharing list, including owners and pending invitations. See Sharing a Budget.
• Integrated AI Budget Creation and Reconciliation. Use Integrated AI to create a complete budget and to match transactions to events automatically. The AI mode appears in the Create Budget dialog (covered in Getting Started) and in the Match Transactions dialog (covered in Matching and Resolving).
• Bank Account Linking. Connect your bank accounts so Match can pull recent transactions from your bank. See Bank Linking.
• AI Theme Generation. Generate custom themes with AI to personalize your budget experience. See Themes.
• Community Publishing. Publish themes and public budgets to the community. Public budgets are perfect for sharing templates or educational models. Linked bank data cannot be published. See Publishing a Budget.
• Increased limits. A larger 10-budgets-per-month creation cap.

The same feature names appear inside the Upgrade to Premium dialog when you tap Subscribe.

New subscribers receive a one-time 100 complimentary Icon Generation Credits to generate custom category icons. The bonus is granted the first time you activate Premium and is not regranted on later renewals. See Icon Generation Credits.

How billing works

Essential Budget is a web/PWA, and billing runs through Paddle. Tap Subscribe on the Upgrade to Premium dialog, complete Paddle’s checkout in the in-app overlay, and your account flips to Premium when the payment succeeds. The subscription renews monthly until you cancel.

Open the Billing page from the hamburger menu to see your status. The Subscription Status card shows your plan, your monthly price, your Next Billing Date, and (if you have asked to cancel) a Will cancel at period end row. To change your payment method, view invoices, or cancel, tap Manage Subscription. A new browser tab opens to your Paddle customer portal; everything you need to manage the account lives there. See Your Account for the step-by-step.

Cancelling and what happens at the end of your paid period

When you cancel, your subscription stays Premium until the end of the current billing period. The Subscription Status card shows the cancellation as Will cancel at period end during the wind-down. If you change your mind before then, undo the cancellation in the same Paddle window where you cancelled, and the row goes away.

Premium can also end sooner if a payment fails: the subscription enters a “needs payment” state, and Premium features stop until you update your payment method in the Paddle portal. If the payment is never recovered, the cancellation cutover (described next) runs at that point instead of at the period end.

If you delete your account while you have an active subscription, the app cancels Premium for you immediately as part of the deletion, so you are not billed again. See Your Account.

Why this default? Cancelling does not delete data. The data is yours. The subscription pays for the features that interact with the data (Plaid, AI, sharing). Pulling the features does not justify pulling your records, your transactions, or your years of history with them.

When Premium ends

At the end of your paid period (or sooner if a payment fails), Premium drops to free and several things happen:

Bank linking is disconnected. Every Plaid connection on your account is removed. Already-imported transactions stay in your budgets (they are your records, not Plaid’s), but the live links themselves are gone.

Why this default? Bank links do not come back automatically. Resubscribing later restores access to the Connect Bank flow, but each bank still has to be re-linked from scratch. The connections are removed at cancellation rather than parked, because parked credentials would be a privacy and security risk for an account that is no longer paying for the feature that uses them.

Sharing changes depending on the budget. For each budget you own:

• If another owner of that budget is still on Premium, you are demoted to editor. The other owner keeps owning the budget. You receive a notification telling you this.
• If no other owner is on Premium, every editor and viewer on that budget loses access. They each receive a notification, attributed to “System (subscription expired)”.
• Budgets you have been invited to are unaffected by your own cancellation; they depend on whether the budget’s owner is still Premium.

You can still view existing share information after Premium ends. You cannot send new invites, change permissions, or change a budget’s access level until Premium is restored.

Public budgets stay public. A budget that was already public stays public, and people can still read it. You cannot publish a new public budget until Premium is restored, and you cannot change a public budget back to private during this time either.

AI features stop. The AI mode of the Create Budget dialog is hidden. In Match Transactions, Integrated AI is unavailable; the free file-upload path with manual matching, and the Bring Your Own AI path, still work. AI Theme Generation is gated. The 300-credit monthly Premium Subscriber Credits allowance is no longer granted.

The 100-credit signup bonus is revoked. If any of your one-time signup-bonus icon credits are still unused when Premium ends, they are removed. Purchased Icon Generation Credit packs keep their balance and their original 90-day expiration: cancellation does not touch them.

Free-tier features keep working. Manual transactions, file uploads in Match Transactions, the planner, reports, history, and undo all keep working. Your existing accounts, categories, items, transactions, and history are untouched, and the same 5-year history retention applies on the free plan as on Premium.

If you re-subscribe later, all the Premium features come back. Bank links must be set up again because the connections were removed at cancellation; everything else (sharing, publishing, AI, increased limits) becomes available again the moment Premium activates.

How AI works in this app

The app uses AI for three Premium features: AI Budget Creation (the AI mode of the Create Budget dialog), AI matching (the Integrated AI mode of the Match Transactions dialog), and AI Theme Generation (the AI Generated tab of the Create Theme dialog). Custom AI category icons are a separate purchasable feature, covered under Icon Generation Credits.

When you use one of these features, the app sends only what the feature needs to a Google Gemini model: the file you uploaded or the summary of your bank’s recurring transactions (for budget creation), the unmatched transactions and your planner items (for matching), or your colour and style preferences (for theme generation). The app does not send your bank login, your account balances, your account numbers, your full transaction history, or anything about other budgets you own.

You can turn AI off from the Settings page (hamburger menu, Settings, then the AI Budget Creation card). With it off, the AI mode of the Create Budget dialog is hidden; the Bring Your Own AI mode and the Manual mode stay available. The toggle is per account, so the same choice follows you across devices.

If you do not want any of your data sent to a third party AI, the Bring Your Own AI path is the alternative. The app generates a prompt for you, you paste it into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any other tool you already trust, and you paste the response back into the dialog. No data leaves the app from this path; the prompt and the response live in the AI tool of your choice. Bring Your Own AI is free, even on the free tier.

The AI features draw against an included monthly allowance, Premium Subscriber Credits, described next. They do not draw against the purchasable Icon Generation Credits packs.

Premium Subscriber Credits

Active Premium subscribers get a monthly Premium Subscriber Credits allowance for AI features. The credits panel on the Billing page shows your current balance.

• The allowance is 300 credits, equal to $3 of AI compute, per billing cycle. Each credit equals one cent of AI compute.
• These credits are spent on AI features: budget creation (about 12 credits per generation, depending on size), theme generation (about 2 credits), and AI transaction matching.
• The allowance resets each billing cycle. The progress bar on the Billing page shows how much of it you have used in the current cycle.

Why this default? The allowance does not roll over. Every cycle starts at 300 credits regardless of what you used last cycle. There is nothing to buy, nothing to refill, and nothing to lose: if you use only some of it this month, the unused portion does not carry over, and if you use a lot, the meter resets at the next cycle.

Free-tier users do not have a Premium Subscriber Credits allowance, because the AI features are part of Premium. Free-tier AI use goes through Bring Your Own AI instead, which has no per-month allowance because the app is not the one paying the AI.

Icon Generation Credits

Custom AI-generated category icons are billed separately, with Icon Generation Credits that you buy in packs. Open the Buy or Refill button on the Billing page (or the matching button on the Icon Sets page) to open the Purchase Icon Credits dialog.

Pack	Price	Discount
100 Icon Credits	$12.99 + tax	none
250 Icon Credits	$29.25 + tax	Save 10%
500 Icon Credits	$55.25 + tax	Save 15%
1000 Icon Credits	$104.00 + tax	Save 20%

• Each generated icon costs 1 credit (Fast), 2 credits (Standard), or 3 credits (High Quality).
• Icon credits expire 90 days after purchase, including the 100-credit signup bonus.
• The most credits you can hold at once is 10,000.

You do not need Premium to buy icon credit packs. The Purchase Icon Credits dialog is open to free-tier users too, so you can generate custom category icons without subscribing. The Premium-only piece is the 100 complimentary signup-bonus credits granted on your first Premium activation.

These credits are only spent when you generate an icon. If you never generate icons, you never spend them.

Why this default? You can spend your last credit on any quality. As long as your balance is at least 1 credit, the Generate button stays active for every quality level. The app deducts what each generation costs up to your remaining balance and stops at zero; balances never go below zero. So a 1-credit balance can still produce a Standard or High Quality icon. The Purchase Icon Credits dialog only opens the moment your balance reaches zero, not before.

What you do not pay for

These are free for everyone, regardless of tier:

• Reading a public budget that someone else published. Anyone with the link can preview it, and signed-in users can add and read it. Only the publisher needs Premium.
• Joining a shared budget that someone else invited you to. The owner needs Premium for sharing; you do not need Premium to accept the invite or to use the shared budget.
• The number of budgets you keep at once. The cap is on monthly net creations (3 per month free, 10 per month Premium), not on how many you keep open over time.
• Bringing your own AI for budget creation, matching, and theme generation.

Quick reference

If you want to…	Plan
Use the planner, reports, history (up to 5 years per budget), and undo	Free
Type or upload transactions (CSV, TSV, or TXT)	Free
Use Bring Your Own AI for budget creation, matching, or theme generation	Free
Manage multiple accounts and categories	Free
Use up to 3 budget creation slots per calendar month	Free
Buy Icon Generation Credits to generate custom category icons	Free (the credits are paid; the access is open)
Connect a bank account	Premium
Use up to 10 budget creation slots per calendar month	Premium
Share a budget with up to 5 people on its direct sharing list	Premium
Publish a theme or a public budget to the community	Premium
Use Integrated AI to create a budget, match transactions, or generate themes	Premium (draws from the included Premium Subscriber Credits)

Related pages

• Your Account for where to actually open the Manage Subscription, Backup, and Delete Account flows.
• Bank Linking for the Plaid connection flow.
• Sharing a Budget for collaborator invites and permissions.
• Publishing a Budget for public budgets and themes.
• Themes for AI Theme Generation and icon generation.
• Matching and Resolving for the free vs Premium paths in Match Transactions.
• Picks for the free-tier tab and the Premium toggle that hides it.
• Notifications for what arrives when shared access changes after a cancellation.