UK money apps compared: which ones look forward?

These four connect to your accounts through Open Banking and tell you about money that has already moved. They are good at it, they are cheap or free, and for a great many households they are the only money app needed. None of them is trying to be a forecast.

Snoop is free at its core, with Snoop Plus at £5.99 a month or £47.99 a year on snoop.app. It is owned by Vanquis Banking Group, which completed the acquisition on 07/08/2023, and Vanquis reported 335,000 active users on 30/07/2026, up 7% year on year. Its own description of the job is cutting the cost of living and building savings, and the bill switching is the part people stay for.

Snoop looks forward in two places. Its own app listing says it builds a timeline showing your bills against your bank balance for the rest of the month, and warns you if it thinks you might not have enough. Separately, version 11.3 of its iOS app introduced Future You, described in its release notes as showing where your savings could be over the next 15 years based on your savings rules. Both are real. Neither is a household forecast: the first reaches month end, and the second projects savings from savings rules rather than projecting a household across income, bills and balances. Future You is also described by Snoop as rolling out gradually, and at the time of writing it appears in the app listing and not on snoop.app, so check whether you can actually see it before it decides anything for you.

Emma is a London company, incorporated in 2017 and active. Free for two bank connections, then Plus at £4.99 a month, Pro at £9.99 and Ultimate at £14.99, with net worth tracking only from Pro upwards. It is very good at finding subscriptions you have forgotten. On forecasting, Emma's own answer is the clearest source there is: when Money Dashboard closed and users asked what replaced its Forecast feature, Emma answered with budgeting, True Balance and everyday balance. True Balance, in Emma's own words, shows how much you would have left in an account after recurring and subscription payments are taken. That is a cleaner statement of today, not a projection.

Plum is an automated saver first, and its pricing needs one sentence more than most, because there are two sets of plans running at once. A UK user signing up today sees Basic free, then Plus at £3.99 a month, Boost at £7.99 and Max at £14.99, monthly only with no annual option. Anyone who registered before 7 July 2025, and anyone outside the UK, stays on what Plum calls its four classic subscriptions: Basic free, Pro at £2.99, Ultra at £4.99 and Premium at £9.99. Plum's own help centre says it still offers those, so a page quoting Pro or Premium is describing a real plan somebody is paying for rather than a dead one. Its algorithm decides how much to move into savings by learning from your past transactions, which makes it the most backward-looking engine on this page and, for the job it is doing, the right design. It does project, though. Plum announced goal-based planning in September 2025 as part of Plum AI, described as helping customers create, track and achieve short and long-term financial goals, and Plum Plan has been live on its site since at least June 2026, projecting an outcome against a retirement age you choose. Two things about it are worth having before you weigh it against anything else. Plum's own page repeats four times that the projections are illustrative and not guaranteed, and says the tool can suggest financial plans based on your goals but does not provide financial advice. And what it hands back is a single monthly contribution figure, so it answers how much to put away rather than what your balance does month by month. It is also built for one person: the page's own heading is built for your goals, no-one else's, and nothing on it describes a joint or household plan.

Monzo is a bank, and its budgeting lives in Trends, which replaced Summary on 21 December 2025. It aggregates personal, joint and connected accounts from other banks. It has exactly one forward-looking number, described by Monzo as how much money you have got left to spend in this period, with a horizon Monzo puts as one payday to the next. Nothing longer ships. Its plans are Free, Extra at £3 a month, Perks at £9, and Max from £19, where the word from is doing real work: Max rises by an extra £4 a month for family cover and carries a three-month minimum, while Extra and Perks are flat. If you are reading a page that quotes a Monzo Plus or Premium price, it is describing something you cannot buy: in Monzo's own words it has stopped selling Plus and Premium, existing holders can keep using them, and anyone who cancels one, even by accident, cannot rejoin.

YNAB does not forecast, and that is a position rather than a gap. Its guide for irregular income carries a section headed Why Forecasting Doesn't Work, which opens by saying YNAB are not big fans of forecasting, and goes on to say that forecasting is tempting when your income varies but often leaves you in the rain without an umbrella, and that it can result in a false feeling of financial control. All three were checked on ynab.com on 14/08/2026. The guide itself is titled Irregular Income, and the forecasting section sits inside it as a chapter. Its method is to give every pound you already hold a job. For someone whose income is unpredictable and whose problem is overspending, that is very likely the correct advice, and it is the reason YNAB changes behaviour in a way a chart does not. It is also priced in US dollars, $14.99 a month or $109 a year, which a UK customer pays at their card's exchange rate. There is a fuller comparison on CrestCast vs YNAB.

PocketSmith is the one product here that forecasts in the same sense CrestCast does, and it is the closest genuine competitor. It projects each account balance forward from that account's current balance by adding and subtracting your scheduled budgets, and the horizon is a tier: six months free, ten years on Foundation, thirty on Flourish, sixty on Fortune. One detail worth having before you pay for sixty years, from PocketSmith's own documentation: it displays daily balances up to three months out, and weekly balances beyond that. It bills UK customers in pounds and it has the bank feeds CrestCast does not. There is a fuller comparison on CrestCast vs PocketSmith.

There is a third question worth asking of anything in this half of the table, and it only shows up once a projection runs for longer than a month or two: what does it do when the account runs dry? It has to do something, because a household would. Nobody watches a current account sink for four years without moving money across from savings, so a projection that shows exactly that is not describing anyone's life. CrestCast's answer is a rule you write once, which is a minimum to hold, an order to raid your pots in, and where a surplus goes. The forecast then obeys it every month for ten years. That is the difference between a projection and a plan, and it is worked through in why your forecast should not go overdrawn.

Moneyhub switched off its consumer app on 31/07/2026, saying it was pivoting its focus toward supporting enterprise businesses. Users were told to migrate to WPS LifeStage Money, at £1.49 a month or £14.99 a year after a 30-day trial, or to export a CSV and close the account, and that accounts left untouched would be deleted. If you are only finding this out now, the export window has closed. There is a fuller guide on Moneyhub alternatives.

Money Dashboard closed its apps on 31/10/2023, saying it could not find a sustainable business model for them. It was free, and monetised by selling anonymised market research rather than subscriptions. The company survives as part of ClearScore's business-to-business arm.

Both were free or near-free to the user, and both were switched off when the other revenue line stopped working. The lesson applies to every app on this page: ask who is paying for the one you are about to put ten years of your financial life into, and what happens to your data when they stop. Judge each of them on whether it lets you get your data back out.

Every other app on this page connects to your bank and CrestCast does not. That is one decision with a lot of consequences: no automatic transaction import, no categorisation, no balance that updates itself, and typing to do before you see anything. What it buys is a model containing exactly what you chose, with no credential shared and no feed to break. Here is the reasoning.

Snoop will find you money on your bills, which CrestCast does not do. Emma is better at surfacing a forgotten subscription than anything else here. Plum will move money into savings without you deciding to, which is worth more than any chart to somebody who does not get round to it. Monzo is the actual bank account, so its picture of today is always right. YNAB has a teachable method and years of refinement behind it, and it changes behaviour. PocketSmith forecasts, has bank feeds, and is a mature product where CrestCast is a new one.

CrestCast also does not do retirement planning. It models only the UK, and it stops at ten years rather than selling you thirty. If one of those is the thing you need, one of the products above is the better answer.

If the question is where did it all go, take a tracker. Snoop free, or Emma if you want subscriptions hunted down, or just Monzo Trends if you already bank there. You will not need anything else and you should not pay for anything else.

If the question is how do I stop overspending, take YNAB and give it the fortnight it needs to teach you the method.

If the question is can we afford this, you need a forecast, and the field is two products wide: PocketSmith if you want bank feeds and account-level balance projection, CrestCast if you want a UK household modelled as one thing across cashflow, profit and loss and net worth, with both incomes, the mortgage and the children in one picture. A good place to start on the general question of what order to do things in is the UK personal finance flowchart, which sets out the priority order before any app is involved.