Monarch Money

What Is Monarch Money?

Monarch Money is a premium personal finance app that aims to be the single place where you manage all your money. It connects to your bank accounts, credit cards, loans, and investment accounts to give you a unified view of your financial life — including budgets, spending, net worth, and debt balances.

The app gained significant momentum after Mint shut down in early 2024, positioning itself as the natural upgrade for people who wanted more than Mint offered. Monarch is subscription-only with no free tier, which keeps the product focused on paying customers rather than ad-supported free users.

Multi-user support is a standout feature. You can invite a partner, spouse, or family member to share the same financial dashboard, with both people seeing the same accounts, budgets, and transactions in real time.

Who Is Monarch Money Best For?

Couples managing finances together. Monarch’s multi-user feature is genuinely collaborative. Both partners have full access to the shared financial picture — accounts, budgets, spending, and debt. Unlike some apps that bolt on sharing as an afterthought, Monarch was designed with collaboration in mind from the start.

People who want the big picture. If you have bank accounts, credit cards, student loans, a mortgage, and a 401(k), seeing all of that in one dashboard is powerful. Monarch connects to all of these and shows you a comprehensive net worth that includes everything. Watching your net worth climb as your debt drops is genuinely motivating.

Design-conscious users. This is one of the best-looking finance apps available. The charts, graphs, and dashboards are clean, thoughtful, and actually pleasant to look at. If design matters to you — and for an app you’re opening daily, it probably should — Monarch sets the standard.

Former Mint users. If you lost your Mint setup and want something better, Monarch is the most commonly recommended upgrade. It does everything Mint did and adds investment tracking, better categorization, and multi-user support.

Pricing

Monarch Money costs $9.99/month or $99.99/year, with a 7-day free trial. There’s no free tier. Every user gets the full feature set — there are no locked features behind higher tiers.

For couples, one subscription covers both users, which makes the per-person cost $5/month on the annual plan. That’s reasonable for what you get, though it’s still more than debt-focused alternatives.

Our Take

Monarch Money is excellent at what it does. The design is beautiful, the bank syncing is reliable, and the multi-user collaboration is the best in its class. If you want a single app to manage your entire financial life — budget, spending, investments, and debt — Monarch is a top contender.

But if your primary goal is paying off debt faster, Monarch is overkill. It tracks your debt balances and lets you see them alongside everything else, but it doesn’t help you build a payoff strategy. There’s no snowball vs. avalanche comparison, no optimized payment scheduling, and no debt-free date projection based on extra payments.

Think of Monarch as the financial dashboard and a dedicated debt app as the payoff strategy engine. They complement each other well. Use Monarch to see the big picture and your debt app to execute the plan.

The lack of a free tier is the biggest barrier for people already stretched thin. At $9.99/month, Monarch is asking you to spend money to manage your money, which is a harder sell when you’re trying to put every extra dollar toward debt. If debt payoff is your singular focus right now, a free or cheaper debt-specific tool will serve you better until the debt is gone.