What happened to Pocketbook? Alternatives for Australians

For a decade, Pocketbook was the default answer to a very Australian question: what's the free app that just shows me where my money goes?

It launched in 2012, grew to hundreds of thousands of users, and did the unglamorous things well. It synced accounts, categorised spending, and nudged you when bills landed.

Zip acquired it in 2016. Then, in July 2022, Zip announced the app would close, and the following month it did.

Years later, people still type its name into search bars, which tells you something about how well it did its job.

Why did Pocketbook shut down?

Zip never gave a detailed public reason, and it would be dishonest of us to invent one. Its explanation was that, as the business evolved, it periodically retired products from its offering.

The likely reading is simple. Pocketbook was free, Zip's core business is instalment payments, and 2022 was a bruising year for fintech balance sheets.

A much-loved product that doesn't make money is still a product that doesn't make money. Users copped the consequences of that arithmetic, and the export window closed with the app.

What should ex-Pocketbook users look for in a replacement?

It's worth pausing here, because "Pocketbook alternative" means different things to different people. Some loved the automatic feeds, others the categorisation, and others simply that it was free and Australian.

Decide which of these you actually need before you pick a replacement:

• Australian categorisation that recognises Woolies, Coles and your local cafe without endless manual correction.
• How the data gets in: automatic linked accounts, or files you upload yourself. This choice carries the privacy trade-off, and we've written about whether linking your bank is safe.
• A sustainable business model. Pocketbook's lesson is that free-forever tools can disappear. Paid tools with revenue, or free tools from companies whose main business funds them, tend to stick around.
• An exit. Whatever you choose, make sure your data can leave with you as a plain file.

What are the alternatives for Australians?

Here's our honest read on the field. We're in this list, so weigh our take on ourselves accordingly, and we've tried to be as fair to the others as we'd want them to be to us.

Deeper head-to-head comparisons deserve their own articles, so treat these as the short versions.

PocketSmith

PocketSmith suits power users. It offers automatic bank feeds including Australian banks, and its signature feature is forecasting: it can project your calendar of income and spending years into the future, up to 30 years, which nothing else on this list attempts.

The company has been building it for well over a decade. That depth has a cost, because it's a tool you invest time in, and casual Pocketbook refugees can find it more than they wanted.

WeMoney

WeMoney is probably the closest in spirit to what Pocketbook was. It's an Australian app, free at its core, that connects your accounts read-only and pulls everything into one place, with credit score monitoring and social debt-payoff features alongside.

It's grown to well over a million downloads. Its personality is louder than Pocketbook's was, with community features and offers in the mix, and it monetises partly by showing you financial products.

Frollo

Frollo is an Australian open banking company whose main business is enterprise infrastructure. It also runs a free consumer money app, Frollo for You, alongside that.

The app is capable and genuinely free, and the company's CDR pedigree is strong. Be clear-eyed that you're using the consumer showcase of a business-to-business company, so the app is not the company's main priority.

YNAB

YNAB (You Need A Budget) is the pick if you want a method. It's American, it costs US$14.99 a month or US$109 a year after a 34-day trial, and it doesn't have Australian bank feeds, so Australians run it on file imports or manual entry.

What you're really buying is envelope budgeting and the discipline that comes with it: give every dollar a job before you spend it. People who click with YNAB swear by it, and people who don't quietly stop after a month.

A spreadsheet

A spreadsheet remains the most underrated option on the list. It's free, it's private, it will never be acquired and shut down, and building it teaches you your own money better than any app does.

The costs are your hours and the categorising, which stays manual forever. If you enjoy the tinkering, genuinely, go well, though most people enjoy it for about two months.

Kleev

Kleev is us, so here's the pitch as plainly as we can make it. Kleev keeps the part of Pocketbook people actually miss, the tidy categorised picture of every account in one place, and swaps the linked feed for CSV uploads you make yourself.

Files are parsed in your browser and the raw file is never uploaded, so there's no bank connection to trust or revoke. On top of the spending picture, Kleev adds recurring-charge detection, property tracking and net worth tracking.

The trade-off is honest. You upload a file each month rather than syncing automatically, and Kleev makes its money from paid plans rather than from being free forever, which is also why it won't vanish the way free-forever tools can.

If the no-linking part appeals, start with how to track your spending without linking your bank account.

How do you avoid getting burned twice?

Take Pocketbook's real lesson with you whichever way you go: your money data should outlive any app that holds it. Export regularly, keep the files, and favour tools that treat your data as yours.

If you still have an old Pocketbook CSV export sitting in a downloads folder, it's worth trying in whatever you pick next. A plain file of dates, descriptions and amounts is exactly what Kleev reads. See your spending land in one place in Kleev →

Common questions

When did Pocketbook shut down?

Zip announced Pocketbook's closure in July 2022 and the app closed the following month, August 2022. Pocketbook had launched in 2012 and was acquired by Zip in 2016.

Why was Pocketbook discontinued?

Zip never published a detailed reason. Its explanation was that, as the business evolved, it periodically retired products from its offering, and Pocketbook was one of them. The app was free and Zip's core business was instalment payments, so a free budgeting tool sat outside its main line.

What is the closest Australian replacement for Pocketbook?

It depends on what you loved about it. WeMoney and Frollo are free Australian apps with linked accounts and automatic categorisation, which is the closest overall shape. PocketSmith is the power tool with bank feeds and long-range forecasting. Kleev matches the categorised, everything-in-one-place experience without linking your bank at all, using CSV uploads instead.

Can I still get my Pocketbook data?

The app and its export features went offline when the service closed in August 2022, so if you didn't export your history before then, it's gone. If you did save a CSV export at the time, most modern tools, Kleev included, can read a plain CSV of dates, descriptions and amounts.