CrestCast vs Money Dashboard

No. Money Dashboard announced in early October 2023 that both of its apps, Neon and the older Classic, would close, and they shut down permanently on 31/10/2023. The websites and app store listings are gone, and moneydashboard.com now redirects to data.one, a business-to-business open banking service aimed at lenders rather than a consumer app.

Users were given until 31/10/2023 to export their transaction history to CSV from the web app. After that date bank connections were severed, accounts were closed, and the company said it would delete or fully anonymise the personal data it held, subject to its legal and regulatory obligations. If you exported a CSV back then and still have it, it is not useless: CrestCast can import CSV data.

For the forward half, and it is the half a spending tracker is not built for. CrestCast forecasts where your household is heading, models decisions before you make them, and shows when debts clear. The backward half, aggregation, is the part CrestCast deliberately does not do: it never connects to a bank, so nothing is pulled in automatically. If what you miss is automatic transaction tracking, that job now belongs to a bank-connected app. If what you miss is having one place where your whole financial picture lives, that is exactly what CrestCast is for.

It depends which half you want back. For the planning half, the forward view a spending tracker is not built for, CrestCast forecasts a UK household ten years out as cashflow, profit and loss and net worth; PocketSmith is the other option and there is a comparison on this site. For the aggregation half, Snoop and Emma connect to your accounts through Open Banking. Snoop was the only app Money Dashboard itself named to departing users, offering a three-month trial of Snoop Plus, its paid tier, and that offer belongs to the 2023 closure rather than to anything running today. Moneyhub, which was on most of those 2023 lists, has since closed its own consumer app.

Because the business model was the problem. Money Dashboard was free, and in its own words it made money by providing insight and market research services to other companies, having fully anonymised the banking data first. ClearScore took control in early 2022, with Companies House recording the incoming ClearScore directors in February of that year, launched a business-to-business open banking unit built on the technology, and then closed the consumer apps in October 2023, saying it could not find a sustainable business model for them. It is a useful warning about free money apps: if you are not paying for it, the product can be withdrawn the moment the other revenue line stops working.

No. You enter what you want CrestCast to know, or import a CSV, and nothing is read from your accounts automatically. If the automation is the thing you loved, that job now belongs to a bank-connected tracker; the forecasting job never depended on it.