Barnacle

Rocket Money alternatives that don't link your bank

Last updated: 16 August 2026

Rocket Money works by reading your bank account. You connect your checking account and cards through an aggregator, it scans the transaction history for repeating charges, and it shows you what you pay for. The scanning is the product, and the bank connection is what makes the scanning possible. If you are not willing to hand over that access, the feature you are shopping for does not exist in that form, and every alternative below asks you to type your subscriptions in yourself.

That is the honest trade, and it is worth knowing before you install anything.

What the bank link buys you, and what it costs

Automatic detection is genuinely useful. It catches the gym membership you forgot in 2023 and the streaming service billing a card you no longer think about. Rocket Money also uses the connection for bill negotiation and for cancelling things on your behalf, which needs account access to work at all.

The cost is that a third party holds a live read on your account. Your full transaction history, not the subscription lines, is what gets shared, because the app cannot find recurring charges without seeing everything. You are also paying for it. Rocket Money's premium tier runs between $6 and $12 a month at the time of writing, which is its own recurring charge on a list you are trying to shorten.

The manual options

Manual trackers ask you to enter each subscription once: name, price, billing date, how often it renews. From then on they do the arithmetic and the reminding. Setup takes about ten minutes if you have a dozen subscriptions and a decent catalog to autofill prices.

• Barnacle (iPhone and iPad). One payment, no subscription, no account, and no servers. Your data sits in a database on the phone and is never uploaded. Free for 5 subscriptions.
• Bobby (iPhone). The long-standing option in this category, free with a paid tier. No Android version.
• A spreadsheet. Costs nothing and does everything except remind you, which is the part people actually need.
• Your bank's own app. Several banks now flag recurring merchants inside the app you already trust with the data. Coverage varies and the reminders are usually weak, but the privacy question is already settled.

How to pick

If you want the forgotten charges found for you and you accept the account access, Rocket Money does that job and does it well. Nothing on this page replaces it.

If the bank link is the part you object to, decide what you want from the app after setup. Most people want two things: one number that says what they pay each month, and a warning before a charge lands. Both work fine on typed-in data. The entry cost is real and it happens once.

Where Barnacle sits

I built Barnacle because every tracker I tried either charged me monthly or wanted my bank login, and both felt wrong for an app whose whole job is telling you to stop paying for things. It stores everything in a database on your phone. There is no backend, no account, and no sign-in. The only network call it makes is the App Store billing check when you unlock it, and a check in the build pipeline fails the release if any code in the app reaches for the network.

What you give up: no automatic detection, no sync between phones, and no cancelling on your behalf. What you get: nobody sees your money, and you pay once.

Barnacle on the App Store