Switching to Pare
You're already leaving. Here's the honest pitch.
Mint's gone, Monarch charges rent, YNAB is a different sport, and the spreadsheet is a second job. Whatever you're coming from, the question is the same: what does Pare actually do differently, and what won't it do for you? Straight answers below — and the importer that brings your history with you, three steps, no bank login.
Coming from Mint?
The company shut it down. Intuit killed Mint in 2024 and pushed users to Credit Karma — millions of people lost the tool they'd used for years, on someone else's timeline.
Pare can't do that to you. The whole app is open source and self-hostable, so it survives the company: if Pare-the-service ever goes away, you run Pare-the-code on your own machine and nothing changes. Bring your Mint CSV export through the importer below — full history, categories included — and from then on you feed it statement PDFs you already have. No bank connection to break, no aggregator to go dark.
Coming from Monarch?
$15/month, and it connects straight to your bank. Monarch relies on an aggregator for those live syncs, and its privacy policy allows sharing de-identified data. You're paying to be the product's input.
Pare never touches your bank. No aggregator, no stored credentials — you upload a PDF and it's parsed, then the PDF is deleted. Export your Monarch history to CSV and the importer below brings every transaction and category with you. Your data sits in a database that's only yours, and the code that handles it is public. Nothing about you is sold or shared.
Coming from YNAB?
YNAB is zero-based envelope budgeting: assign every dollar a job, before you spend it. That's a discipline, and for people who stick with it, it works.
Pare is a different paradigm, and we'd rather say so than pretend. It reads your statements after the fact and shows you where the money actually went — trends, categories, subscriptions, forecasts. It's analysis, not envelopes. If budgeting-before-you-spend is the habit you want, YNAB does that and Pare doesn't. If you want to see the truth of last month in ten minutes, that's Pare — and the importer below reads your YNAB register export.
Coming from a spreadsheet?
You built the thing yourself, which means you also maintain it: pasting exports, fixing formulas, re-categorizing rows, rebuilding the pivot table every month. The upkeep is the tax.
Pare is the spreadsheet you don't have to maintain. Drop a PDF and the category breakdown, month-over-month delta, and subscription list build themselves. You keep the control a spreadsheet gives you — export everything to CSV or JSON anytime, or self-host the whole thing — without the monthly rebuild.
The one-line version
- vs. Mint:it can't shut down on you — open source and self-hostable.
- vs. Monarch: no bank connection, no aggregator, nothing sold.
- vs. YNAB: analysis after the fact, not envelope budgeting before it.
- vs. a spreadsheet: same control, none of the monthly upkeep.
Bring your history. Keep your past.
The thing that locks you into a finance app is your history. Pare dissolves that lock: export your transactions from Monarch, Mint, or YNAB and import them here — every transaction and your categories — in three steps. No bank login, no aggregator, just the CSV you already have.
Monarch Money
CSV export → full history + categories
Mint
Transactions CSV (debit/credit aware)
YNAB
Register CSV (Outflow/Inflow)
Upload your export
Drop the CSV you exported. Pare auto-detects the source app and reads every row — nothing is written yet.
Map accounts & categories
Confirm which account is a card vs. chequing and how foreign categories map to Pare's. Sensible defaults are filled in.
Review & import
See a sample and the date range, then import. It's tagged for one-click undo, and later PDF uploads won't double-count the overlap.
Import your data
Pare reads only files you export yourself — there is no scraping or automated login. Your data is parsed and stored on the machine running Pare. See the Privacy Policy.