Ascent

What Is Ascent?

Ascent is a debt payoff app built for people who want more than the basics. While most debt apps offer two or three strategies (usually snowball and avalanche), Ascent gives you nine — including stress-based prioritization, where you can rank debts by how much anxiety they cause and build your plan around emotional reality, not just math.

The app is designed with privacy in mind. Your financial data stays in your iCloud account and never touches Ascent’s servers. There’s no account to create, no email to hand over, and no data harvesting.

Who Is Ascent Best For?

Couples managing debt together. Ascent’s standout feature is PartnerSync, which lets two people track shared or individual debts in a single plan. Each partner controls what’s visible to the other — so you can collaborate without giving up financial privacy.

BNPL users. If you have balances on Affirm, Klarna, or Afterpay, Ascent tracks promotional deadlines and alerts you before deferred interest kicks in. Most debt apps treat BNPL like any other debt — Ascent understands the promotional period mechanics.

Strategy explorers. If you’re not sure whether snowball or avalanche is right for you, Ascent lets you compare all nine strategies side by side with your actual numbers. The what-if tool makes it easy to see the tradeoffs before you commit.

Pricing

Ascent uses a one-time purchase model at $29.99 for lifetime access to all core features. PartnerSync requires a Premium subscription (for both partners) to enable shared debt tracking.

This pricing is unusual in the app space — most competitors charge monthly subscriptions starting at $5-14/month, which adds up to significantly more over time.

Our Take

Ascent fills a real gap in the market. The couples sync feature is genuinely unique, and the breadth of strategies goes well beyond what other apps offer. The BNPL tracking is a smart addition as buy-now-pay-later usage continues to grow.

The biggest limitation is platform availability — iOS only means Android users and people who prefer a web interface are out of luck. If you’re in the Apple ecosystem and want a thoughtful, privacy-focused debt tracker, Ascent is worth a look.