{"id":78,"date":"2025-12-24T15:56:47","date_gmt":"2025-12-24T15:56:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/moneywithkatie.com\/copilot-review-a-budgeting-app-that-finally-gets-it-right\/"},"modified":"2025-12-29T16:31:01","modified_gmt":"2025-12-29T16:31:01","slug":"copilot-review-a-budgeting-app-that-finally-gets-it-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moneywithkatie.com\/copilot-review-a-budgeting-app-that-finally-gets-it-right\/","title":{"rendered":"Copilot Money Review: A Budgeting App that Finally Gets it Right? [Updated for 2026]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before I was a person with way too many opinions about personal finance, I worked professionally in user experience strategy, design, and writing\u2014a field that I’ve joked saw me ascend the ranks to Associate Manager of Turning That One Button Blue So More People Would Click It. Why am I telling you this? Because when an app has a really stellar UI, I get jazzed. <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

For the first several years of my financial journey, I used Intuit’s clunky-and-now-defunct (but, crucially, free!) budgeting software Mint.<\/p>\n

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Copilot Money vs. Mint<\/h2>\n

While I was always a Mint purist (\u201cAnd if it doesn\u2019t work for you, you\u2019re just not trying hard enough!\u201d<\/em> I\u2019d say when people would tell me it just wasn\u2019t working), the more my recommendation was met with hesitancy, the more I felt compelled to find a solution for budgeting that would do for spending what Betterment did for investing. I was on the hunt.<\/p>\n

My friend Richard is a quintessential Silicon Valley tech buff (a 2x start-up founder, no less), and when I told him about Money with Katie, the first thing he said was: \u201cCool! Have you ever heard about Copilot? All my friends love it. The UI is fantastic\u2014one of the founders was a software engineer at Google.\u201d<\/p>\n

I downloaded it so quickly, my App Store almost crashed. Then I saw it: the price.<\/p>\n

\u201cAw, man. This costs money? Shit. Never mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

But I noticed the demo mode, and it was enough to pique my interest. I played around with the dummy data and immediately felt envious. Then, a few months passed, and curiosity finally got the best of me. I didn\u2019t want Copilot Money to be the one that got away.<\/p>\n

Now, five years later, I\u2019m especially glad I didn\u2019t let my cheapness get the best of me. Not to brag, but I’ve categorized 7,121 transactions<\/strong> (more on that below) since I began using Copilot Money in 2020:<\/p>\n

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And, as longtime budget freaks will know, Intuit shuttered Mint<\/a> at the end of 2023.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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How to budget, generally<\/em><\/h2>\n

While it may be obvious, I want to make sure we\u2019re on the same page here: I don\u2019t use the budgeting app to decide<\/em> what my budget should be (though Copilot Money will analyze your spending and give you accurate estimates for each category, including recommendations about how you should reallocate funds based on your actual behavior).<\/p>\n

I used my Wealth Planner<\/a> to make my spending and investing plan for the year, and then simply create identical groups and subcategories in Copilot Money so the app will automatically track my every transaction. (Doing this manually would be nightmarish, as I have a metric shit-ton of credit cards and accounts, as pictured below.)<\/p>\n

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You could definitely create and manage your budget all in one place using Copilot Money, but I like to have my own records as well. At the end of the month, I record the category totals in my Wealth Planner for accountability and record-keeping. The Wealth Planner is built to give you end-of-month and end-of-year summaries, because data is sexy and makes you rich. Obviously.<\/p>\n

The system, when working together, might look something like this. On the left, you’ll see my high-level goals for food spending in my big financial plan in the Wealth Planner, and on the right, you’ll see every restaurant transaction being captured.<\/p>\n

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A Quick Guide to Copilot Money Transactions<\/h2>\n

The software is very smart and can generally tell with ease what a transaction is\u2014whether it’s a regular expense, income, an internal transfer (like when your checking account pays off your credit card bill; that’s money that’s already been accounted for as ‘spent’ by the credit card transactions), or a recurring bill.<\/p>\n