Honest comparison
Piggey vs Spreadsheets
The DIY classic: infinitely flexible, completely private, and abandoned by week six.
TL;DR
The spreadsheet is undefeated in theory: free, private, infinitely customizable. In practice it's a part-time job — download CSVs, paste, fix the formulas you broke, hand-categorize 312 rows, vow to do better next month. Piggey keeps everything good about the spreadsheet (your data, no bank login, full control) and automates the part that kills it: the labor.
At a glance
| Piggey | Spreadsheets | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, or $16/mo Pro — first month free | Free* (*your Sunday afternoons) |
| Free plan | Yes — a real one, forever | All of it, forever, including the suffering |
| Bank login | Never. Import a CSV — your credentials stay at your bank | Never (you are the integration) |
| Budgeting required | None required | If you build it |
| AI categorization | Automatic — AI tags your whole history at once | You, squinting at "POS PURCHASE #4417" |
| Subscription detection | Yes (Pro) — flags the charges worth cancelling | Ctrl+F and vibes |
| AI assistant | Penny — ask anything about your money in plain English | The formula bar |
| Setup time | ~5 minutes | 3 hours, plus a lifetime of maintenance |
| Platforms | Any browser | Wherever Excel haunts you |
| Privacy | No bank credentials, no data selling | Perfect — the one thing it nails |
The real differences
The spreadsheet lifecycle
Week 1: beautiful template, color-coded categories, a pivot table you're proud of. Week 3: you're 40 transactions behind. Week 6: the file is a guilt object you avoid opening. The failure isn't discipline — it's that the system bills you 2+ hours a month forever, and clarity shouldn't have a labor cost. Piggey's whole premise is making the labor zero: same CSVs in, finished dashboard out.
What you keep, what you lose
Moving from a spreadsheet to Piggey, you keep: privacy (no bank login here either), your raw data (it's still your CSVs), and control (recategorize anything, build custom rules and reports). You lose: formula maintenance, manual categorization, and building every chart yourself. You gain: AI categorization, automatic subscription detection, and Penny — a finance assistant you can just ask instead of writing a VLOOKUP.
Where Spreadsheets shines
- Completely free
- Total privacy — data never leaves your machine
- Infinitely customizable
- No vendor can shut it down or raise the price
Where Spreadsheets falls short
- Every single insight is manual labor
- Categorizing transactions by hand, forever
- One broken formula silently corrupts everything
- The graveyard of abandoned tabs: "Budget2024_v3_FINAL_real"
Pick Spreadsheets if…
Spreadsheet artisans who genuinely enjoy the craft, need a custom model no app provides, or run finances complex enough to justify the build. Respect.
Pick Piggey if…
Everyone who built the spreadsheet, loved it for five weeks, and hasn't opened it since. Piggey is the same inputs (your bank's CSV exports, no bank login) with the categorization, charts, and subscription-hunting done by AI instead of by you.
Switching is easy
This one's easy — you already have the CSVs. Drop the same bank exports you've been hand-pasting into Piggey, and the AI does the categorizing you've been doing by hand. Your spreadsheet can retire with honor.
Try Piggey freeFrequently asked questions
Why use Piggey instead of a free spreadsheet?
Same privacy model (no bank login — you import your own CSVs), but the AI does the categorization, charting, and subscription-hunting you'd otherwise do by hand. The free plan exists, so the comparison isn't even free vs. paid — it's free-with-labor vs. free-without.
Can I still export my data from Piggey?
Your data stays yours — Piggey is built local-first and your transactions are always accessible. No lock-in spite walls.
I love my spreadsheet. Should I switch?
If you're actually maintaining it and enjoying it — honestly, no. Carry on. Piggey is for the rest of us who stopped updating ours in February.