Empower (formerly Personal Capital) built its reputation as a free financial dashboard focused on investment tracking, net worth monitoring, and retirement planning.
But if your primary goal is to manage your monthly spending and gain control of your day-to-day finances, Lunch Money offers a very different experience.
Why it’s worth considering an Empower alternative
Empower’s free Personal Dashboard is primarily designed to support its wealth management business. Users with large investment portfolios, such as $100,000 or more, may receive outreach from advisors promoting managed investment services, with fees starting at 0.89% of assets under management.
For many people, that’s perfectly fine.
But if you’re looking for a tool focused on budgeting rather than investment management, Empower can feel limiting. Its budgeting tools are relatively basic, offering spending categories and cash-flow summaries rather than a complete budgeting workflow.
Meet Lunch Money
A budgeting app built for people who want to be intentional with their money. No advisor calls or investment sales pitches. Just powerful budgeting tools, flexible workflows, native multi-currency support, and a clean interface designed to help you understand exactly where your money is going.
Empower
⚡ Budgeting comes first
Lunch Money was designed around budgeting: set category limits, track your spending in real time, and make adjustments as you go.
While Empower includes basic spending insights, budgeting is not its primary focus.
⚡ No wealth-management upsells
By paying for a Lunch Money subscription, you're supporting an independent developer, not subsidizing a sales funnel for investment advisory services.
The free dashboard is a gateway to Empower's paid advisory services, with fees starting at 0.89% of assets under management.
⚡ Native multicurrency support
Do you earn or spend in multiple currencies? Lunch Money handles multiple currencies across accounts, budgets, transactions, and reports.
Empower only supports USD. International accounts and spending are not handled natively.
⚡ A clean, modern interface
Lunch Money offers a streamlined, modern interface that helps you focus on your finances without the clutter of investment analysis tools and retirement projections.
Empower's dashboard is dense and investment-focused, which can feel overwhelming if you just want to manage a budget.
⚡ A developer-friendly API
Want to build custom automations, dashboards, or integrations? Lunch Money offers a public API that gives you full flexibility to extend the platform however you'd like.
No public developer API. You're limited to the features Empower ships.
⚡ Crypto portfolio tracking
Connect your crypto wallet to Lunch Money and track balances in real-time in your preferred currency.
Empower tracks traditional investment accounts but doesn't support tracking crypto wallets.
⚡ Attach receipts and documents
Keep supporting documents connected to your transactions by attaching receipts and files directly within Lunch Money. It's a simple feature that makes recordkeeping easier.
Empower doesn't support file attachments on transactions.
⚡ Budget the way you want
Whether you prefer zero-based budgeting, envelope budgeting, rolling budgets, or simple category spending limits, Lunch Money has the flexibility to support your preferred budgeting philosophy.
Empower offers spending categories and cash-flow views, but no real budget methodology or category limits.
⚡ Unlimited budgets per subscription
Create a budget with your partner, run a separate one for yourself, a third for your business, and a sandbox to experiment, all under one Lunch Money subscription.
Empower provides one household dashboard. No separate budget workspaces.
Join other users who migrated from Empower!
Many former Personal Capital and Empower users came to Lunch Money looking for stronger budgeting tools and greater flexibility, and they haven't looked back.
Lunch Money is the perfect replacement for Personal Capital and Mint. Once you use it you'll wonder, why can't the other apps get it right?
I love how Lunch Money allows me to see all my finances in one place, without worrying about having my data sold to the highest bidder.
Multicurrency is seamless! I have business and personal accounts on both sides of the border, and Lunch Money handled them without a sweat!
