Tiller vs a one-time budget spreadsheet: an honest comparison

Tiller is worth it if you want your transactions imported automatically and you are happy to pay for that every year. A one-time spreadsheet is worth it if you would rather spend ten seconds a day typing numbers than connect your bank and pay a subscription.

Last updated: August 2026

We make the one-time spreadsheet in this comparison, so here is the bias declared up front. We also think Tiller is a good product and we are not going to pretend otherwise — plenty of people should buy it instead of ours.

What is Tiller, exactly?

Tiller is a subscription service that pulls your bank and card transactions into a Google Sheet or Excel workbook automatically, every day, and gives you a set of templates built on top of that feed. You still own a spreadsheet; you just stop typing into it.

The pitch is straightforward: spreadsheets are flexible, importing transactions by hand is the boring part, so automate the boring part. It is a fair pitch, and for people with a lot of accounts and a lot of transactions it is genuinely the difference between budgeting and not.

What is a one-time budget spreadsheet?

A file you buy once. No feed, no login, no renewal. You type in what you spent — either as you go, or in one sitting while you scroll your banking app — and the sheet does the arithmetic and shows you where you stand.

How do they actually compare?

What does five years cost?

Tiller at $79 a year is $395 over five years. A one-time spreadsheet is $19 over five years, because there is nothing else to pay. That is a real gap, and it is also not the whole argument: $376 spread over five years is about $6.25 a month, which is a fair price for automation if automation is what keeps you budgeting.

How much work is manual entry, honestly?

For most households, less than people expect and more than nothing. If you enter as you spend, it is a few seconds per transaction. If you batch it, it is five to ten minutes once a week with your banking app open. It is not zero, and anyone telling you manual entry is effortless is selling you something.

There is a quiet upside people who budget manually tend to report: typing the number makes you notice the number. Automation removes the friction, but the friction is also the part that changes behaviour. Neither of those is a proven law, just a trade-off worth thinking about.

What about privacy and bank logins?

To import transactions, Tiller connects through a data aggregator, which means your bank credentials or a bank-issued connection sit with a third party. That is normal for the whole category — it is how every automated budgeting tool works — and Tiller is upfront about it.

A manual spreadsheet has no such connection to be uncomfortable about. Nothing links to your bank, nothing syncs, and the file lives in your own Drive or on your own machine. If bank connections are a hard no for you, that decides the question on its own.

Which should you choose?

• —Choose Tiller if: you have several accounts and hundreds of transactions a month, you are in the US or Canada, you want daily automatic data, and $79 a year is comfortable.
• —Choose a one-time sheet if: you want to pay once, you do not want any bank connection, you are outside the US, or you want the simplest thing that could work.
• —Choose neither yet if: you have never tracked anything. Start with a free template for a month, then decide which problem you actually have.

Both are legitimate answers. The failure mode is not picking the wrong tool — it is picking a tool, using it for six weeks, and quietly stopping.