Pluto Budgeting vs Zero Budget

Most budget apps tell you where your money went. Pluto tells you what you can safely spend today, and makes sure the big stuff is covered before you do. Budgeting by paycheck, not by month. Your bills don't care about calendar months. Rent is due on the 1st. Car insurance hits in March and September. Your paycheck lands every two weeks. Pluto works the way your money actually works. Tell Pluto your income schedule and your bills, and it creates a transaction for every upcoming occurrence (rent, utilities, subscriptions, insurance, all of it), organized by pay period. After setup it mostly runs itself: confirm a match and move on. You're comparing real transactions against your planned ones, not asking whether a coffee run counts as Shopping or Groceries. Safe to Spend: the number you actually need. Your bank balance doesn't know your rent is due in four days, or that your car registration lands next month. Safe to Spend does. It takes your current balance, your upcoming scheduled transactions, and what you've set aside for savings, then gives you one number per account, updated constantly. Never get blindsided by a big bill again. With Scheduled Savings, you tell Pluto about an irregular expense (car insurance, property taxes, holiday spending, an annual subscription) and it sets aside a little from each paycheck so the money is ready when the bill arrives. $600 car insurance due in six months? Pluto spreads it across your paychecks, roughly $46 at a time. By the time the bill hits, it's already funded. No scrambling, no overdraft. It works for anything outside a monthly rhythm: HOA dues, a family vacation, back-to-school shopping, a birthday you know is coming. Set it up once and stop thinking about it. Transactions that match themselves. When a bank transaction comes in, Pluto checks your planned transactions and suggests the match. You confirm or adjust, with no manual categorization and no month-end reconciliation. The Pay Period Forecast shows what's coming, so nothing lands as a surprise. A free tier you can actually run on. The free tier includes full scheduling, Scheduled Savings, and manual transaction entry. Premium adds automatic bank sync so transactions import themselves, plus priority support. Premium also connects Apple Card, Apple Cash, and Apple Savings. Pluto is $9.99 a month or $99 a year. No ads. No selling your data. Pluto exists because the alternatives were too simple to be useful, too complex to stick with, or too expensive to justify. What you get: • Safe to Spend, calculated per account in real time • Schedule-based budgeting by pay period, not calendar month • Scheduled Savings for irregular and annual expenses • Smart matching between bank transactions and your scheduled bills • Pay Period Forecast to see what's coming before it arrives • Bank sync via a secure, read-only connection (Premium) • Apple Card, Apple Cash, and Apple Savings support (Premium) Your money, finally making sense. Terms of Service: https://www.plutobudgeting.com/terms

Most money apps tell you what you already spent. Zero asks a better question: what is this money actually for? At the start of the month you give every dollar a job. Rent, groceries, the insurance bill that lands in March. When all of it has a place, you are at zero, and there is nothing left to wonder about. Sinking funds are the part people stay for. Car repairs, insurance, the holidays, a laptop that will eventually die. Put a little aside each month and the balance carries forward instead of resetting on the first, so the big bills stop ambushing you. Debt lives in the same place as everything else. Enter the balance, the rate and the minimum payment, and you get a payoff date that moves as you pay it down. Connect a bank and let transactions arrive on their own, or type them in yourself. Neither one is a lesser version of the app. Either way, rules learn the merchants you see every week and file them for you. Budget on your own, or invite one other person and you will both be looking at the same numbers at the same time. Most arguments about money start with two people holding different information. At the end of the month the reports are blunt about it: what came in, what went out, where it went, and a six month trend so you can tell whether things are genuinely getting better. Zero is free for 30 days. No card, no reminders to upgrade while you are still deciding. After that there are two plans. Basic includes everything you have read about here. Premium adds one thing: an automatic connection to your bank. Prices are shown in the app in your local currency before you buy anything. Payment is charged to your Apple Account at confirmation of purchase. Subscriptions renew automatically unless auto-renew is turned off at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. You can manage subscriptions and turn off auto-renew in your Apple Account settings. Privacy Policy: https://zerobudget.ca/privacy Terms of Use: https://zerobudget.ca/terms