Selfinance vs your spreadsheet: keep the control, lose the maintenance
The spreadsheet is free, endlessly flexible — and you are its unpaid maintainer. Selfinance keeps the manual control you trust and automates everything you currently paste in by hand.
| Selfinance | Your spreadsheet | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | $6–9 / month | Free — plus your Sunday evenings |
| Market prices | Automatic — crypto every 15 min; stocks, commodities & FX daily | Pasted by hand, or fragile GOOGLEFINANCE formulas |
| Multi-currency | Auto-converted to your base currency | FX-rate columns you maintain |
| Charts & history | Built in, for every asset | You build them, you fix them |
| Budget ↔ net worth ↔ debt | One linked system | Separate tabs that drift apart |
| AI | Ask Claude or ChatGPT; log expenses from chat | Copy-paste ranges into a prompt |
| Error risk | Validated forms | One broken formula → silently wrong numbers |
| Custom models | A fixed, proven schema | Anything you can imagine |
Updated August 2026
The one case where the spreadsheet is the better pick
You need a truly custom model — a rental cash-flow sheet, an options ladder — that no app's schema should constrain. Keep that one tab. Many users do exactly that, and move the day-to-day tracking here.
Selfinance is built for you if…
- You track manually on purpose — you just don't want to maintain prices, FX rates, and charts by hand.
- Your net-worth tab has broken at least once and you noticed weeks later.
- You want the Sunday ritual to take five minutes, not an hour.
Frequently asked questions
Quick answers to the questions people ask most before getting started.
Why use Selfinance instead of a spreadsheet?
Same control, none of the maintenance. You still enter your own data — but market prices, FX conversion, charts, and history update themselves instead of living in formulas you maintain. A broken cell can silently corrupt a spreadsheet's net worth; validated forms can't.
How long does moving from a spreadsheet take?
Usually a few minutes to one sitting: recreate your accounts, assets, and liabilities once in the dashboard. From then on Selfinance keeps everything updated automatically instead of by hand.
Can I import my spreadsheet into Selfinance?
There's no CSV import today — you add your accounts and holdings once through the dashboard forms (most people finish in one sitting). After that one-time setup, nothing needs pasting again.
Should I keep my spreadsheet for anything?
Keep it for genuinely custom models — a rental-property cash-flow analysis, an options ladder. Move the day-to-day tracking of net worth, budget, and holdings to Selfinance, and let the special-purpose tab do only what it's uniquely good at.
The math your spreadsheet was doing
Free, no-signup calculators — no formulas to maintain.