Quick Summary
Tiller costs $79 a year for automated bank sync into Google Sheets. Here's a one-time alternative for $39 that owns the spreadsheet without the bank aggregator.
Quick answer. Tiller is the leading bank-sync to Google Sheets product at $79 a year. The trade-offs are recurring cost, US/Canada bank coverage only, and a Plaid-based aggregator that holds your bank credentials. Our Financial Planning Spreadsheet is $39 once. You log transactions manually (15 minutes a week) and the file works in any country with no aggregator. Over 10 years that’s $39 vs $790.
Tiller is a good product, and the automatic transaction sync into a Google Sheet genuinely solves the manual-entry friction that derails most spreadsheet-based budgeting efforts before they produce any real behavior change. If automatic sync is the feature you can’t live without, pay for it without guilt, because the value it delivers is real for the right user.
This post is for everyone else, the people who’ve tried bank-sync tools and found that the automation created a new problem (too many miscategorizations to review, or too many accounts to keep straight) without solving the underlying one (actually engaging with the numbers).
What Tiller actually does
Tiller is two things bundled together:
- Plaid-based bank sync. Connects to your US or Canadian bank, pulls daily transactions into a Google Sheet you own.
- Foundation Template (and a library of others). A pre-built Google Sheets workbook with a dashboard, categorization rules, and reports.
You can buy each separately in spirit. The aggregator is the thing you’re really paying for; the templates are the marketing wrapper.
The price is $79 a year after a 30-day free trial. There’s also a higher Tiller Pro tier at $129 a year with extras like multi-currency and advanced reporting.
What you give up to get the sync
Three things, in order of how much they tend to bother people.
Recurring cost. $79 a year forever. Over 10 years that’s $790. Over 30 years (a typical adult planning horizon) it’s $2,370 in 2026 dollars, more after inflation adjustments.
Bank credentials in a third party’s hands. Plaid stores your bank login. Plaid is a major fintech and has reasonable security, but it’s another holder of high-value credentials. Some people are fine with this; some aren’t.
US/Canada bank coverage. If you bank outside the US or Canada, Tiller is mostly off the table. Coverage in other countries is limited or nonexistent.
If none of those bother you, Tiller is a good product. The rest of this post covers what you do if any of them do.
The 10-year cost comparison
Headline math.
| Option | Year 1 | Year 5 | Year 10 | Year 30 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tiller ($79/yr) | $79 | $395 | $790 | $2,370 |
| Tiller Pro ($129/yr) | $129 | $645 | $1,290 | $3,870 |
| FinancialAha Financial Planning ($39 once) | $39 | $39 | $39 | $39 |
The spreadsheet is one-time. If we ship a major update or a new template version, customers get it via email at no additional charge. The file works in your Google Drive forever; we don’t run anything on your behalf that could be turned off.
You’re paying for two different things: Tiller is buying you automation; we’re selling you a tool. Both are legitimate products, with different costs and different ownership models.
What our spreadsheet actually does
The Financial Planning Spreadsheet covers what Tiller’s Foundation Template does, with manual entry instead of bank sync.
Transactions sheet. Date, payee, category, amount, account, notes. You enter rows manually or paste from a bank CSV export.
Dashboard. Income vs expenses by month, savings rate, top categories, trend lines. Same chart types as Tiller’s dashboard.
Categories. Pre-populated dropdown with about 30 common categories. Add your own as needed.
Account balances. Manual entry of cash, investment, retirement, real estate, vehicle, and liability balances. The Net Worth section calculates totals automatically.
Goals. Savings goals with target date and auto-calculated monthly amount required.
Annual projections. Year-end projection of income, expenses, and net worth based on year-to-date data plus monthly run rate.
FIRE/retirement section. Years to financial independence at current savings rate, projected retirement balance.
The biggest difference from Tiller: no daily auto-sync. You log transactions once a week (15 minutes for most people) or paste a CSV monthly.
What manual entry actually feels like
Honest assessment based on running both side by side.
Time per week: 12 to 18 minutes for someone with 30 to 50 transactions, mostly cards. Less if you have a single account; more if you split across many.
Mistakes: A handful per month, mostly category misassignments. Same as Tiller, where the auto-categorizer is good but not perfect.
What’s harder than Tiller: Catching a missed week. If you skip two weeks, the backlog feels like work. Tiller handles this for you.
What’s easier than Tiller: Reconciling. When the dashboard number is off, you can trace it to a specific manually entered row. With auto-sync, you sometimes spend 10 minutes figuring out why the categorizer assigned an Amazon charge to “shopping” instead of “groceries.”
The honest summary: manual entry takes more time per week but takes less time per month overall, because the recovery cost of categorization errors is lower.
When to pay for Tiller anyway
Three situations where the sync is worth $79 a year.
You have a high transaction volume across many accounts. A household with 5 cards, 3 bank accounts, and a brokerage with regular automated investments might process 200 transactions a month. Manual entry at that volume is real work; Tiller’s automation is genuine value.
You’ve tried manual entry and stopped. Some people just won’t log transactions consistently. If past attempts have stalled, paying for the automation is the right call. Half the value of any budget tool is using it; if Tiller gets you to use one, $79 is cheap.
You’re a US/Canada single-bank user with high category-discipline. If your bank is one of Plaid’s well-supported ones and you’re patient about training the categorizer, Tiller’s first-party experience is the smoothest in the category.
When the spreadsheet wins
Five situations where a one-time template is the better fit.
You bank outside the US or Canada. Tiller’s coverage is geographic; the spreadsheet has no geographic constraint.
You’re uncomfortable handing your bank credentials to an aggregator. This is a personal-risk-tolerance decision. Some people are fine with Plaid; some won’t do it. Both positions are defensible.
You’ve stalled on past Tiller subscriptions because you weren’t checking it weekly anyway. If you weren’t logging in regularly, you weren’t getting value from the sync. Manual is fine.
You want connected templates beyond just budgeting. Our Financial Planning template integrates with Net Worth Tracker, Annual Tax Planner, and Retirement Projections. Tiller has its own ecosystem, but pricing is per-tier.
You want the lowest possible recurring cost. $39 once is cheaper than $79 a year by about year 6 month 1. After that the spreadsheet keeps winning.
A migration path from Tiller
If you’ve been on Tiller and want to try a one-time template without losing your data, here’s the path.
- In Tiller, go to your Transactions sheet. Use Tiller’s “Export” or simply Copy All / Paste Special as Values into a new sheet.
- Save the data as a CSV.
- Open the Financial Planning Spreadsheet and go to the Transactions sheet.
- Paste your CSV data into rows. The columns line up cleanly: Date, Description, Category, Amount, Account.
- Reconcile this month’s total against your bank balances. If they match, the migration is complete.
- Cancel Tiller before the next billing date.
- The next month, log transactions manually using a weekly habit (Sunday evening tends to work for most people).
Most people who do this exercise find the transition painless. The friction comes from the new habit, not from the tool change.
What I’d add for someone who values automation
Three workflows that get most of the way to Tiller’s automation without Tiller.
Weekly bank CSV download. Most banks let you export a date-range CSV in 30 seconds. A weekly Friday-evening export, paste into the template, takes 5 minutes. You get auto-import without an aggregator.
Categorization rules in the template. Use a small lookup table that maps common payees to categories (“Whole Foods” -> “Groceries”). Once built, copying transactions into the template auto-categorizes most of them via INDEX/MATCH or VLOOKUP.
Read-only API for those who want it. Some banks (Capital One, American Express, Schwab) offer downloadable QFX/OFX or read-only APIs. A short Apps Script can pull and append. This is for spreadsheet-comfortable users; not necessary for most.
These aren’t required. The base template works fine without them. They’re optional ways to reduce the manual-entry burden if it’s the only thing keeping you on Tiller.
Get the template
- Financial Planning Spreadsheet — 40-year life projection with net worth, cash flow, and FIRE in one file.
- Monthly Budget Template — Planned-vs-actual monthly budget with a dashboard and category targets.
- Personal Finance Bundle — Financial Planning plus Net Worth plus Annual Tax Planner, at a bundled price.
- Personal Finance Bundle — Financial Planning plus Net Worth plus Annual Tax Planner, at a bundled price.