CountAbout Pricing 2026: Basic $19.99 vs Premium $54.99

CountAbout costs $19.99 a year for Basic and $54.99 a year for Premium as of August 2026. Both prices roughly doubled on April 1, 2026, up from $9.99 and $39.99. A third plan with invoicing built in runs $64.99 a year. Everything is billed annually, and every plan opens with a 45-day free trial that does not ask for a credit card.

Last updated August 22, 2026. All CountAbout figures were read from countabout.com on August 22, 2026. Competitor prices are dated where they appear.

The price change is the part almost nobody has updated. Search for CountAbout pricing and most of what comes back still quotes the old $9.99 tier, sometimes on pages carrying a 2026 date in the headline. If you are budgeting for the switch off Quicken, work from the numbers below, not from a review that has been sitting untouched since last year.

What changed on April 1, 2026

Basic doubled. Premium went up about 37 percent. In percentage terms that is a steep move, and in dollars it is $10 to $15 a year, which is why it passed with so little noise. Existing subscribers picked up the new rate at renewal rather than being rebilled mid-term.

The consequence worth thinking about is not the absolute cost, it is the position. At $39.99 Premium was dramatically cheaper than everything around it. At $54.99 it sits about $7 above Quicken Simplifi, which is $3.99 a month billed annually, or $47.88 a year. CountAbout is no longer the obvious budget pick on price alone, and the reason to choose it has shifted onto what it can do that the others cannot.

How much does CountAbout cost per month?

CountAbout does not sell a monthly plan. Premium works out to $4.58 a month and Basic to about $1.67 a month, but both are charged as a single annual payment. There is no month-to-month option to fall back on, so the smallest commitment you can make is one year, after the trial.

That matters when you compare it with Monarch at $14.99 a month or YNAB at $14.99 a month, both of which will let you pay monthly at a premium. CountAbout's annual-only billing is cheaper per month and less flexible. If you want to try paying for a couple of months before committing, CountAbout cannot do that, and the 45-day trial is the substitute.

What the extra $35 buys on Premium

One feature: automatic transaction downloads from your banks and credit cards, plus the auto-categorization rules that go with them. Basic has no bank connection at all. You enter transactions manually or import QIF, QFX and OFX files yourself.

Everything else is shared. Both tiers give you unlimited accounts and categories, split transactions, budgeting, savings projections running out 40 years, Schedule C and Schedule E tracking, and multi-user access. That is unusually generous for an entry tier. Most competitors cripple the cheap plan on features; CountAbout only removes the aggregation.

So the question is narrow. If your banks connect reliably and you want the transactions to arrive on their own, Premium is worth $35 a year. If you left Quicken partly because the bank connections kept dropping, or you would rather not hand over banking credentials, Basic at $19.99 is a legitimate way to run the product rather than a stripped demo of it. Very few finance apps support a no-aggregation workflow properly.

The add-ons, and when they change the math

Two extras sit outside the tiers. Invoicing is $10 a year and file attachments are $15 a year, and either can be bolted onto Basic or Premium.

Do the arithmetic before you buy the invoicing plan. Premium at $54.99 plus the $10 invoicing add-on is $64.99, which is exactly the price of the dedicated invoicing plan. They land in the same place, so pick whichever route is simpler at checkout. Where it does change things is on Basic: $19.99 plus $10 gets you invoicing for $29.99 a year, well under the $64.99 tier, provided you can live without automatic downloads.

The attachments add-on at $15 a year is the one people underestimate. It is what lets you staple a receipt image to a transaction. If you are tracking deductible expenses for a Schedule C, that is not a luxury, it is the evidence you need if anyone ever asks. Budget $69.99 a year for Premium plus attachments if you are self-employed and serious about the paperwork.

Who actually needs the Schedule C tracking

Contractors and freelancers, mostly. The people who get value out of Schedule C tagging are the ones with 1099 income arriving from a handful of clients rather than a single W-2, and they need every business expense separated from household spending before a preparer sees it. If your side income comes from consulting or from services you list on a public freelance profile, that separation is the difference between a clean return and an evening of guesswork in April.

Schedule E covers the other common case, rental property. A landlord with one or two units can tag income and expenses per property and produce a report at year end. Past a handful of units, or once you have a bookkeeper involved, you are outside what a personal finance app is designed to carry.

Three-year cost against the alternatives

Over three years CountAbout Premium saves about $87 against Quicken Classic Deluxe and $135 against Monarch. Basic saves considerably more, and undercuts everything on the list by a distance. Those figures assume today's prices hold, which after April is not something to bank on for any of these vendors.

The last column is the one that decides it for most people arriving from Quicken. Simplifi is $21 a year cheaper than CountAbout Premium and cannot read your Quicken data, which is a genuinely odd gap given both products come from the same company. Monarch and YNAB will take a CSV and nothing more, so your categories and payee list do not survive. If you have a decade of history you care about, the price comparison stops being the interesting one.

Does CountAbout have a free trial?

Yes, 45 days of the full Premium feature set with no credit card required. That is the longest no-card trial among the mainstream personal finance tools. YNAB offers 34 days without a card, Monarch offers 7 days but takes your card up front, and Quicken Classic and Simplifi offer no trial at all, though Simplifi has a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Use the whole window. The failure mode with aggregation-based finance apps is that everything looks fine on day one and the second sync is when a bank connection quietly stops updating. Two full statement cycles is the minimum honest test, and 45 days gives you that with room to spare.

Is CountAbout worth it in 2026?

At $19.99 for Basic, yes, comfortably, if you are willing to import files yourself. Nothing else at that price will accept a Quicken export and keep your accounts, categories and payees intact. At $54.99 for Premium it is a closer call, because Simplifi is cheaper and better looking, and the case rests almost entirely on migration.

The honest limitation is investments. CountAbout tracks investment account balances, not a full portfolio with individual holdings, cost basis, IRR and ROI. If that is why you kept paying for Quicken, no amount of budgeting polish substitutes, and Quicken Classic Premier at $95.88 is doing a job CountAbout does not attempt. The full breakdown of that trade-off, plus what the Quicken import does and does not carry across, is in our CountAbout vs Quicken comparison.

What if you need accounting rather than budgeting?

Then none of these prices are relevant, because none of these products keep a set of books. CountAbout, Simplifi, Monarch and YNAB are all personal finance tools. They have no general ledger, no accountant login, no payroll and no double-entry.

People leaving Quicken Classic Business and Personal, at $131.88 a year, run into this constantly and split in two directions. Households move to something like CountAbout. Anyone with real books moves to QuickBooks, and hits a specific obstacle on the way: QuickBooks Online will not import a Quicken file. There is no .QDF route into QBO, and Intuit's own Quicken Converter only produces a QuickBooks Desktop company file. The path that works is exporting your register to QIF and converting it to QBO, the Web Connect format QuickBooks Online reads natively. The converter at the top of this page does that, and it writes deterministic transaction IDs so a re-import will not double post. Our guide to converting Quicken to QuickBooks walks through the whole sequence, and Quicken vs QuickBooks covers which side of the line you belong on.

The one free option

Active military get the Basic plan at no cost with no expiration, and can upgrade to Premium if they want aggregation. There is no other permanently free tier, and no advertising-supported version. Outside that, the trial is the free part.