If you are done paying every month to keep your own checkbook
A checkbook app with no subscription: free to try, then $9.99 once
BalanceWright is a free download, and everything in it works from the first day. When it has proved it can balance your checkbook, it asks for $9.99, once. There is no monthly charge, no yearly charge, and no renewal that can switch your register off if you let it lapse.
The app: free to try, $9.99 once. App Store · Google Play
That is the short answer. The rest of this page is the long one: what once actually means when the store is holding the receipt, what happens to your entries if you decide never to pay, and the three things people are right to be afraid of when a price is only charged a single time.
Before the money: BalanceWright is out now, on the App Store and on Google Play. BalanceWright is a phone app for iPhone and Android. The buttons on this page go to the App Store and Google Play.
The free trial, stated plainly
The app is a free download and everything works from the first day — entries, reconciling, search, recurring bills, transfers, export and backup. It asks for the one-time $9.99 after you balance your first statement, or after 100 entries, whichever comes first.
There is no clock in it. It is not thirty days, and nothing starts counting down the moment you install it. It ends at whichever of these two you reach first, and there is no third one.
- You balance your first statement1 statement
- Tick your entries off against the paper statement, close it, and the trial is used up. A statement you closed with a balancing adjustment still counts. It was still a statement you sat down and worked through.
- Or you write 100 entries100 entries
- If you never reconcile, you get 100 entries of your own writing first. That number can be raised, never lowered. Bringing a history over from another app does not use up your free entries. One import comes in whole, past the entry limit, up to 2,000 rows — all of it or none of it, never half a file.
Nothing is held back while the trial runs. There is no greyed-out button, no feature behind a padlock, and no reminder banner counting your days down at you.
So you find out whether this app can balance your checkbook before you spend anything on it. That is why the trial ends there, and not on a timer. A month of free use proves nothing about an app that holds your financial records. One balanced statement proves the only thing you actually need to know.
What buying it once actually means
One payment. No subscription, no premium tier, and free updates. It is the same one-time purchase in the App Store and Google Play. One payment on either side, no subscription on either side, and nothing that turns into one later.
Each store has its own name for a purchase like that — the App Store calls it a non-consumable, Google Play calls it a one-time product — and the part that matters is the same in both: it cannot expire. It attaches to the store account you already use — your Apple Account on an iPhone, your Google account on an Android phone — and not to the handset, and not to a version number. On a new phone, sign in to that same account and tap Restore purchase, and the unlock comes back.
There is no BalanceWright account to create and no email address to hand over. The only sign-in anywhere near this is the store one you already have: your Apple Account, or your Google account.
Changing stores is the one case where it does not carry across
A purchase is held by the store that took it, and the two stores cannot see each other. If you buy the unlock on an iPhone and later move to an Android phone, Google Play has no record of what Apple sold you, and it would have to be bought again on that side. There is no BalanceWright account in the middle that could carry it across, because there is no BalanceWright account at all.
Inside one store it is the opposite. The same purchase follows you onto every new phone you sign into with that account, and you do not pay for any of them again. We would rather hand you that exception now than let you meet it on the day you switch.
The app does not make up a price
The app never shows a price of its own. It asks the store what this costs where you are and shows that answer. Until the store replies, the price line shows a dash and the Pay button stays switched off. A made-up number on a screen that is asking you for money is the exact thing this app is built against.
What could still go wrong later
Three fears come with a one-time price, and all three are earned. None of them is answered by us saying we would never.
That a subscription arrives later
Ads and subscriptions are not held back for later. They are ruled out in the written brief this app is built to, and the word that brief uses is ever.
We are not asking you to take that from a document you cannot read. The things this app will never do are written out in public, with the reason for each one. The five things BalanceWright will not do.
That a version two arrives you have to buy again
Because what you buy is a one-time purchase held by the store rather than a licence for one version, ordinary updates to this app cannot ask you to pay again.
What comes after that is an intention, and we would rather label it as one than dress it up as a guarantee: the work still to come is planned as updates to this app, not as a second app with its own price. The first half of that is a fact about how the purchase works. The second half is a plan, and plans are the sort of thing you should make us prove.
That ads turn up after you have paid
This one has the shortest answer. There are no ads, before you pay or after, because there is no ad code in the app at all. There is nothing in the app that could show you one, and nothing to switch on later.
If you never pay, nothing is taken away
If you decide not to pay, nothing is taken away. The register stays readable, searchable, printable and backed up. You just cannot write new entries until you unlock it.
What stops
Writing new entries. That is the whole list.
What keeps working
- Reading it
- Every entry you have written, back to the first one, with the running balance beside it, exactly as it was the day before the trial ended.
- Searching it
- Search a register by payee, memo, amount or check number, across every year you have kept, and filter by date, category or status.
- Printing and exporting it
- Any register exports to a CSV file or a printable PDF, whenever you want, and that keeps working whether or not you have paid. Both files cover the account you have open and a date range you pick — this year, last year, a quarter, a month, or dates you type in yourself. To export a different account, switch to it in the register first.
- The copies, and getting one back
- Your register lives on your own phone, and the app keeps rotating copies of it by itself. Where the copies go beyond the phone itself is the one place the two phones really differ, so here is each. On iPhone, if you are signed in to iCloud with iCloud Drive turned on, every copy is also written to the app’s own iCloud Drive folder, by itself. If you are not, the Backup screen tells you so rather than claiming a copy it did not make. On Android, the register is included in the phone’s own backup, and you can pick a folder for the app to write its copies into — one that syncs to Google Drive if you want it to. You can also save a copy anywhere you like and restore from it — your own folder, a file you emailed to yourself, or iCloud Drive on an iPhone.
That is not a policy we could quietly change. Neither the export screen nor the backup screen contains a check for whether you have paid. There is no such line in either file to fail.
Your records are yours whether or not you ever pay us anything. An app that holds your register hostage until you buy it is not selling you a tool, it is selling you back your own work.
