Bank sync, budgets, AI insights — all the power of a SaaS finance tool, none of the trust required. Vaultly is a desktop app for Windows that keeps your data on your disk and your bank credentials with the people who actually issued them.
Built for the people who run their own household budget AND the small-business owners who keep books separate from personal — same app, different data, both private.
Tag accounts as Personal or Business. Reports stay separate, dashboards stay clean, tax categories stay correct. No second subscription.
SQLite database on your own disk. No vendor cloud, no aggregator holding your bank password, no analytics phoning home. The only network call is license validation.
Bring your own Claude or OpenAI API key. Vaultly never proxies through our servers — your transactions never leave your machine until you decide to ask a question.
Eleven modules covering the things you'd otherwise need three apps and a spreadsheet to handle.
Connect via SimpleFIN Bridge for read-only daily refreshes from 10,000+ banks. Or skip aggregators entirely and import OFX/QFX files — the same format your bank's "Download to Quicken" button has produced for two decades.
Auto-categorization rules clean up cryptic merchant names ("AMZN MKTPLC US*XV3W2" → "Amazon Shopping") and remember corrections. Splits, transfers between your own accounts, and recurring detection are built in — not paid add-ons.
Monthly budgets per category with progress bars, "spent so far" projections, and over-budget warnings. Sub-categories let you drill in without losing the parent view. Compare months side-by-side to see your real trend.
The Sankey-diagram cash flow view shows your income sources flowing into expense categories at a glance. No personal finance app does this — it makes the deficit problem viscerally obvious in a way that bar charts can't.
The Finance Advisor analyzes your debts, spending patterns, and crypto holdings to surface specific actions. "Credit Card Crisis: $42K at 20%+ APR — attack American Express first with avalanche method." Concrete, math-backed, and you can ignore it without a guilt-trip nag.
Avalanche vs. snowball strategies, custom extra payment allocation, and the actual debt-free date including interest. See "if minimums only" vs "with your plan" side-by-side — turning out you're 27 years from debt-free at minimums and 8 years with $500/mo extra is a wake-up call.
Honest about where each tool wins and where Vaultly fits.
| Vaultly | Mint | Quicken | Spreadsheet | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Data on your machine | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Bank sync | ✓ | discontinued | ✓ | manual |
| AI insights | ✓ BYO key | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Personal + business | ✓ same app | personal only | separate $ | ✓ |
| Pricing model | $49 once | $0 (ads) | $59/yr forever | $0 |
| Currently active | ✓ | shut down 2024 | ✓ | ✓ |
Click any tile to view full-size. Eleven modules, one $49 license.
No subscription. No per-account fees. No "premium" tier. The price you pay today is the only price you'll ever pay.
Vaultly never asks for your bank password. The supported sync methods are:
SimpleFIN Bridge — you authorize SimpleFIN at your bank's website using their normal login flow. SimpleFIN holds a read-only token; Vaultly receives transactions through that token. Your password never leaves your bank.
OFX/QFX file import — you download the file from your bank yourself. Nothing networked, nothing stored elsewhere.
In a SQLite file on your own machine, by default at %APPDATA%\Vaultly\vaultly.db. You can move it, copy it, audit it with any SQLite browser, or back it up to whatever cloud you trust. Nothing about your transactions ever touches our servers.
The only network call Vaultly makes during normal use is license validation (~once per launch, falls back to a 30-day offline cache).
The app keeps working. Forever. Your license never expires.
What expires is your access to future updates. After the year, Vaultly still launches, syncs, categorizes, and reports — same as the day you bought it. If you want the latest features, you'll have the option to renew updates for another year. If you don't, that's totally fine; many users skip a year and pick up updates later.
Mint was free because you were the product. Intuit (Mint's owner) made money by selling your aggregated financial data to advertisers and by upselling you into Quicken / TurboTax / Credit Karma. When that ad model stopped working, Intuit shut Mint down in 2024.
Vaultly's $49 buys you the actual software, once. We don't have your data to sell, we don't run ads, and we won't be quietly shut down because the ad model collapsed.
Not yet. Vaultly is currently Windows only (Windows 10 1809 or newer, x64). It's built on Avalonia which is theoretically cross-platform — Mac and Linux versions are on the roadmap but aren't shipped yet.
If you'd find a Mac version useful, email support@deselt.com and tell us. Demand drives priority.
Three layers of protection:
Daily automatic backups — Vaultly creates a backup file every day to a folder you control. Configurable retention.
The .db file is portable — copy it to your new machine, install Vaultly, point it at the file. You're back in business in 5 minutes.
License recovery — your license key was emailed to you when you bought it. From the License Manager you can also deactivate the dead machine and re-activate on the new one without contacting support.
Only when you ask it a question. The AI Advisor uses your own Anthropic Claude or OpenAI API key — Vaultly never proxies these requests through our servers, so your transaction data goes directly from your machine to Anthropic/OpenAI, never to us.
If you don't want any AI in the loop, you can leave the API key field blank. The other 10 modules work fine without it.
Quicken is the legacy tool — comprehensive, ancient codebase, $59/year subscription, focus on tax prep. Vaultly is the modern alternative: fewer features but cleaner UX, one-time pricing, and AI-aware analysis Quicken doesn't offer.
If you need investment portfolio tracking with brokerage sync and tax-lot accounting, Quicken is currently better. If you want budgets / cash flow / AI insights / debt planning in a privacy-respecting tool, Vaultly is faster and more focused.
Two routes:
Shared license, separate machines — your $49 license includes 1 seat by default. Need a second seat for a spouse / partner? Contact support and we'll add it for $20.
SQL Server network mode — for households / small businesses with multiple users editing the same data, Vaultly supports SQL Server 2017+ as the backend instead of SQLite. Multiple installs all read/write the same database. Documentation is in the app's Settings → Bank Connections section.
30 days, no questions asked. Email support@deselt.com with the email address you used to purchase, we refund the full $49 and revoke the license.
That said, the 30-day free trial covers the same window — most people who would have refunded just don't activate at the end of the trial. Trial first, save us both the email round-trip.
Honest answer: probably yes, but if it isn't, you're fine.
Vaultly is built on a sustainable model — one-time license, no servers to keep running, low overhead. The app doesn't depend on our infrastructure to keep working: even if Deselt vanished tomorrow, your installed copy of Vaultly would continue to run forever, your data would still be on your machine, and OFX/QFX file imports would still work for bank sync.
Compare this to any cloud finance app, where vendor shutdown = your data is locked / lost.
OS: Windows 10 build 17763 (October 2018) or newer. Windows 11 fully supported.
Architecture: x64 only.
Framework: .NET 8 (auto-installed if missing).
Disk: ~150 MB for the app, plus your database (typically < 50 MB even with years of data).
RAM: 4 GB minimum, 8 GB recommended.
Full features, real bank sync, complete AI integration — for 30 days, no card required. If it doesn't change how you see your money, walk away owing nothing.