Aurum Review (2026): Pricing, Features & Honest Verdict

TLDR

Aurum is a privacy-first personal finance dashboard that tracks spending, debt, net worth and bills with no bank connections, you enter the numbers yourself. We found it clean and genuinely cheap, but the manual entry and young feature set are real trade-offs. Best for: manual trackers who refuse to link bank accounts. Price: Free; Pro $9/mo. Rating: 7.6/10.

What is Aurum?

Aurum is a personal finance dashboard built around one deliberate choice: it never connects to your bank. Where Monarch, YNAB and Copilot link your accounts and pull transactions automatically, Aurum asks you to enter your numbers by hand. In exchange, your bank credentials and transaction history never touch a third-party aggregator. It consolidates spending, debt, net worth, bills and cash flow into a single interface, replacing the usual mess of a budgeting app plus a debt calculator plus a net worth spreadsheet.

It is made by Aurum Labs LLC and is still early, with the site citing 275+ users, so you are looking at an indie product rather than a venture-backed incumbent. The positioning is sharp: it is “built for people who already track their finances, just not across 4 different tools.” That tells you the target user. This is not for someone who wants money management on autopilot. It is for the spreadsheet crowd who already do the work manually and want a nicer, more unified home for it. The manual approach is a feature, not a limitation, if privacy is why you avoided the big aggregators in the first place.

What Are Aurum’s Key Features?

Smart dashboard and 50/30/20 coach

The core of Aurum is a single dashboard that shows income, expenses and cash flow at a glance. On top of that sits a 50/30/20 budgeting coach that splits your spending into needs, wants and savings. Pro also adds a “Want vs Need” classification and a savings-rate insight, so you can see not just where money went but whether your ratio is healthy. It is the kind of overview people usually build by hand in a spreadsheet, packaged into one screen. Because you enter transactions yourself, the categorization is as accurate as your own tagging, which some people will prefer over the noisy auto-categorization that aggregators are notorious for getting wrong.

Debt strategy tool

Aurum includes a dedicated debt payoff planner that supports both the avalanche method (highest interest first) and the snowball method (smallest balance first). This is a genuine differentiator. Most budgeting apps treat debt as just another expense line, while Aurum gives it a real strategy engine. For someone digging out of multiple balances, having the payoff plan live in the same dashboard as net worth and cash flow is a meaningful convenience.

Net worth and forecasting

Pro unlocks net worth tracking plus financial runway forecasting and 30-day balance projections. The runway view answers the question every freelancer asks: how long does my money last at the current burn rate. The 30-day projection looks ahead based on your known bills and income, so you can spot a tight month before it arrives rather than after. These are forward-looking tools, not just historical logging, which is where a lot of cheaper finance apps stop.

Bill calendar and goals

A bill calendar tracks upcoming payments so nothing slips, and goal tracking lets you set savings targets. The free plan caps these at 5 bills and 5 goals, which is fine for a trial but tight for real use. Pro removes the caps entirely. Several deeper features, including multi-month analytics, a Forecast Mode and household sharing, are still marked coming soon, so the roadmap is clearly ahead of the current product. We like that the roadmap is public, but it does mean you are buying partly on promise rather than what ships today.

How Much Does Aurum Cost?

Aurum starts free, and it is a real free plan, not a trial. The free tier gives you the core dashboard with up to 25 transactions a month, 5 bills, 5 goals and current-month statement export, with no credit card required. That is enough to test whether manual entry fits your habits, though 25 transactions a month is low enough that most active users will outgrow it quickly.

Aurum Pro is $9/mo billed monthly, or roughly $79/year billed annually, which works out to about a 27% saving. Pro removes every cap (unlimited transactions, bills and goals) and adds net worth tracking, the debt tools, want-vs-need classification, savings-rate insights, financial runway forecasting, 30-day projections, unlimited statement history, prior-month PDF downloads and priority support. For most people who choose Aurum, Pro is the real product and the free tier is the on-ramp.

On price, Aurum is the clear value pick. Monarch Money runs $99.99/year, YNAB is $109/year, and Copilot Money is $95/year. Aurum Pro at about $79/year, or $9/mo with no commitment, undercuts all of them. The catch is what you trade for the saving: those competitors auto-sync your accounts, while Aurum makes you type. If your time is worth more than the price gap, that math can flip, but for privacy-focused users who would enter data manually anyway, Aurum is cheaper and keeps their data off the aggregators. The monthly option also matters: at $9/mo with no annual lock-in, you can try Pro for a month and walk away if manual entry does not stick, something the year-billed aggregators make harder.

Who is Aurum Best For?

Use Aurum if you already track your finances manually and want one clean dashboard instead of a spreadsheet, a debt calculator and a separate net worth tracker. Use it if you specifically do not want to hand your bank logins to an aggregator, a stance plenty of privacy-conscious people hold. And use it if you want serious debt and forecasting tools without paying $100 a year for them. Freelancers watching their runway month to month are a natural fit.

Skip Aurum if you want automatic transaction syncing and hate manual data entry, because that is the whole model and it will not change. Skip it if you need a mature, feature-complete app today, since several headline features are still on the roadmap and the user base is small. And skip it if you manage joint finances now, because household sharing is listed as coming soon rather than shipped. For autopilot budgeting, the aggregators remain the better call.

Best Aurum Alternatives

Monarch Money

Monarch is the polished aggregator and the closest mainstream alternative. It auto-syncs bank accounts, supports joint households today, and has a mature, well-designed interface. It costs $99.99/year for the Core plan, or $14.99/mo. You pay more than Aurum and you give up the no-bank-link privacy, but you get automation and a feature set that is years ahead. Pick Monarch if convenience beats privacy for you.

YNAB

YNAB (You Need A Budget) is the gold standard for zero-based budgeting, where every dollar gets a job. It is $109/year and has a devoted following, strong educational content and proven results for people trying to break the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle. It connects to banks but also supports manual entry. It is pricier and more opinionated than Aurum, but if you want a budgeting method, not just a dashboard, YNAB delivers it.

Copilot Money

Copilot is the design-led, iPhone-first option at $95/year. It leans on automatic categorization and a slick interface, and it is a favorite among Apple users who want their money to look as good as it tracks. Like the others, it auto-syncs accounts, so it is the opposite of Aurum on privacy. Choose Copilot if you live in the Apple ecosystem and value polish and automation over manual control. It is currently iPhone and Mac only, so Android and web users are out of luck, which is the one place Aurum’s browser-based approach quietly wins.

Final Verdict: Is Aurum Worth It?

Aurum earns a 7.6. It knows exactly who it is for and serves them well: privacy-minded manual trackers who want one tidy dashboard for spending, debt, net worth and bills, at a price that undercuts every aggregator. The debt payoff engine and runway forecasting are genuinely useful, and a real free-forever tier lets you test the fit risk-free. At $9/mo, Pro is some of the best value in personal finance.

It is held back, fairly, by its youth and its model. Manual entry demands discipline, the free plan’s 25-transaction cap pushes you to Pro fast, and several flagship features are still coming soon with a user base in the low hundreds. If you want automation, look at Monarch or Copilot. But if you would rather type your own numbers than surrender your bank logins, Aurum is the cheapest, cleanest way to do it, and well worth a try.