Monarch Money costs $14.99 per month, or $99.99 per year if you pay annually — about $8.33 a month. A second tier, Monarch Plus, costs $199.99 per year ($16.67 a month) and is sold annually only; there is no monthly Plus option. Both tiers begin with a 7-day free trial that requires a payment method up front and converts to a paid subscription unless you cancel in settings before it ends.
Those are the numbers, straight from Monarch's own pricing page as of September 30, 2026. The reason this question gets asked 1,000 times a month and still has a messy answer is that most of the pages ranking for it are either out of date, quoting a price Monarch does not charge, or stopping at the first tier and never mentioning the second one. One of the top results currently lists Monarch at $9.99 a month. Monarch has not charged $9.99 a month.
Want to see where your own money actually goes? Try Spendalyst free for 14 days →
Here is the full picture, including the discount code Monarch is running right now that none of those pages mention.
Monarch Money pricing in 2026: every tier, verified
If you are wondering how much is Monarch Money, these are the three offers listed by Monarch itself:
| Plan | What you pay | Effective monthly | Trial | What it unlocks |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Core — monthly | $14.99 billed monthly | $14.99 | 7 days, payment method required | Net worth across accounts, budgeting, custom reports, savings and debt goals |
| Core — annual | $99.99 billed once a year | $8.33 | 7 days, payment method required | Identical to Core monthly — you are only buying the discount |
| Plus — annual only | $199.99 billed once a year | $16.67 | 7 days, payment method required | Everything in Core, plus retirement forecasting, business income and expense tracking, P&L reports and tax-prep exports, advanced investment analysis, and will creation |
Three things in that table are worth sitting with.
The annual discount is large. Twelve monthly payments of $14.99 come to $179.88. The annual plan is $99.99. You save $79.89 — a 44% discount — for committing a year up front. That is one of the steeper monthly-to-annual gaps in this category, and it is the real reason most Monarch subscribers are on the annual plan.
Plus is not a small step up. It is exactly double the annual Core price. And because Plus has no monthly option, there is no cheap way to try it — Monarch's own plan data lists only three prices in total, and the only Plus one is the $199.99 annual.
The $199.99 figure gets written as "$199" constantly. It is $199.99. On a one-time annual charge the cent matters less than the fact that most pages quoting Monarch's price never reach this tier at all.
Is there a free version of Monarch Money?
No. Monarch has no free tier and no permanently free plan — only a 7-day trial, and that trial requires a payment method up front. Monarch's own disclosure text reads: "Free 7-day trial, then $99.99/year. Cancel in settings before trial ends. Payment method required."
That last sentence is the part worth reading twice. The trial is free in the sense that you are not charged during it. It is not free in the sense that you can walk away by doing nothing — if you do nothing, you are charged on day eight. You have to go into settings and cancel.
Monarch does back this up with what it calls a "no-questions-asked money-back guarantee," so a subscriber who forgets and gets charged is not necessarily stuck. But a guarantee you have to invoke is a different thing from a trial that expires harmlessly. If you want the longer version of this, we broke it down separately in Is Monarch Money Free?.
There is a 30% discount code live right now
As of September 30, 2026, Monarch's pricing page is displaying: "Get 30% OFF Core for one year with code WELCOME." That takes the first year of annual Core from $99.99 to $69.99 — about $5.83 a month.
The restrictions, in Monarch's own words from the footer of the same page: the offer is "for new users only and cannot be combined with other offers," it is "valid for annual Core plan only," and "the code may expire or be deactivated at any time."
So: it will not help you if you already subscribe, it will not help you on the monthly plan, it will not help you on Plus, and it renews at full price in year two. It is still a real $30, and not one page currently ranking for "how much does Monarch Money cost" tells you it exists. Promo codes do get deactivated — check the pricing page before you count on it.
What's the difference between Core and Plus, and do you need Plus?
Core covers day-to-day money; Plus covers long-horizon planning and self-employment. Monarch's own framing is that Plus is "built for members managing more than just day-to-day finances" — forecasting, "multiple income sources like a small business," and deeper investment analysis.
Concretely, Core gives you net worth across your connected accounts, budgeting, custom reports, and savings and debt goals. Plus adds retirement forecasting, business income and expense tracking, P&L reports with tax-prep exports, advanced investment analysis, and will creation.
Most people do not need Plus. If you are asking what Monarch costs because you want to know where your money went last month, Core is the product and $99.99 is your number. Plus earns its $199.99 in two specific situations: you are self-employed or run a side business and want the P&L and tax exports in the same place as your personal spending, or you are close enough to retirement that a forecasting tool changes decisions. Outside those, you are paying double for features you will open twice.
Is Monarch Money worth the cost?
It is worth $99.99 a year if you will actually log in and use the reports — and it is one of the worst-value purchases in personal finance if you won't. That is not a dodge; it is the only honest answer to a subscription question, and it is the thing the price comparison cannot tell you.
Monarch is a genuinely good product at the thing it does: pulling many accounts into one place, showing net worth and investments separately from cash, and giving you flexible, well-built reports. People who like it really like it. The reviews on Monarch's own site are not fabricated.
But Monarch is a dashboard. It rewards attention. Its value comes from you opening it, categorising transactions, adjusting budgets, and reading the reports. If you have already bought a budgeting app, used it enthusiastically for three weeks, and then quietly stopped opening it — and a lot of people reading this have — then the honest read is that $99.99 buys you the same outcome as the last one. The constraint was never the software.
We go deeper on that tradeoff in Is Monarch Money Worth It?, and if the answer is "probably not for me," the alternatives are laid out in the best Monarch Money alternatives for 2026.
What are the drawbacks of Monarch Money?
The three real ones are cost relative to the category, the amount of hands-on maintenance it expects, and a trial that charges you if you forget. None of them are secrets, and none of them are dealbreakers for the right user.
On cost: $99.99 a year is at the upper end of consumer money apps, and $199.99 for Plus is above almost everything else aimed at individuals. You are paying for breadth.
On maintenance: Monarch gives you a lot of surface area — categories, rules, budgets, goals, reports. That flexibility is the product, and it is also the work. Bank connections also break occasionally, as they do in every app in this category, and reconnecting them is on you.
On the trial: seven days is short for a tool you are meant to evaluate across a full billing cycle, and with a card on file the default outcome of indecision is a charge. Separately, if security rather than price is your actual worry, that is a different question and we answered it in Is Monarch Money Safe?.
How Monarch's price compares if you want something lighter
For contrast on cost and commitment, Spendalyst is $10.99 a month or $89.99 a year — about $7.50 a month, which saves $41.89 against twelve monthly payments. The trial is 14 days with no credit card required, and at the end of it the account pauses until you choose a plan rather than charging you.
That is a $10-a-year difference against annual Core, which is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that these are different kinds of product. Spendalyst connects your accounts read-only through Plaid, watches recurring charges, and sends one coach card each Monday with specific dollar figures — plus spending reports with a six-month trend and CSV and JSON export. There is nothing to download from an app store; it runs in the browser and installs as a web app. There is also manual entry and CSV import if you would rather not connect a bank at all.
What it does not do is the thing Monarch is best at. If you want investment analysis, net worth across a dozen institutions, retirement forecasting, business P&L, or a will, buy Monarch — Spendalyst does none of that, and no amount of price difference changes it. If what you actually want is to stop wondering where the money went without maintaining a system, the lighter tool is the better buy. If you are comparing Monarch against a third option, Copilot vs Monarch covers that pairing.
One more cost note for couples: shared household use is a common reason people compare these tools, and the per-person math differs by app. We worked through it in the best budgeting app for couples.
The short version
Monarch Money costs $14.99/month or $99.99/year for Core, and $199.99/year for Plus, which is annual-only. There is no free tier. The 7-day trial takes a payment method and charges you unless you cancel. A 30% code (WELCOME) is live for new annual Core subscribers as of this writing, bringing year one to $69.99. Annual saves $79.89 over paying monthly — the single biggest lever on what you actually pay.