Lunch Money vs Tiller: a rules-driven app or a bank-fed spreadsheet

Two different ideas of a budgeting tool

Tiller's homepage says it feeds your daily spending, income, debt and balances into private spreadsheet templates owned by you, and its help center covers both Google Sheets and an Excel add-in. You get templates for budgets, expenses, debt, net worth and savings, and everything else is a spreadsheet you can change.

Lunch Money is a hosted app. Its help center describes syncing through Plaid, a rules engine, recurring items, a budget page and a net worth tracker. You configure it rather than build it. The question is whether you want to own the machinery or just the results.

Side by side

As listed on official pages on 30 October 2026, USD.

Bank feeds and multi-currency

Lunch Money's automatic imports page lists Plaid coverage in the USA, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Ireland, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Italy, Norway, Austria, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, for some or most institutions in each. It also names community plugins for bunq and Monzo and paid bridges, with those accounts treated as manually managed and updated via the API.

Tiller says it uses Plaid and Yodlee and, as of January 2026, as many as 21,000-plus sources work with it according to Yodlee. But its help center says Tiller is built for US customers, designed for US dollars and dates, will not escalate issues for unreliable international banks, and cannot connect EU or UK banks because of Open Banking regulations.

For anyone outside the US or holding several currencies, this is close to decisive: Lunch Money's multicurrency page lists over 160 currencies and fetches exchange rates daily, converting to a primary currency you can change at any time.

Rules versus spreadsheet formulas

Lunch Money rules match on payee name, category, notes, amount range, day range and account, and can set a payee name, notes, category or tags, link a recurring item, split a transaction, mark it reviewed or send an email. Create and Apply runs a new rule retroactively, and you can opt in to rerunning a rule when transactions are updated.

Tiller's AutoCat sheet treats each row as a rule. Columns ending in Contains, Min, Max, Polarity or Regex are filters, and any other column is an override, so you can set Category, Tags or custom columns. Rules run top to bottom. Auto Run on Fill only processes newly added transactions; Run Rules on All overwrites matches across everything. In Excel, AutoCat supports only rules-based categorization, while Google Sheets adds Description Match and AI Suggest.

Beyond categorization, Tiller's advantage is that anything you can write as a formula is yours: custom reports, sinking-fund trackers, a debt payoff model. Lunch Money's advantage is that features such as recurring-item detection and the net worth snapshot already exist and do not break when someone edits a cell.

Worked example: one month's categorization

An invented household has 120 card and bank transactions in a month. Fifteen merchants (groceries, fuel, streaming, utilities, a coffee shop) account for 80 of them; the remaining 40 are one-offs.

In Lunch Money, the household writes 15 payee rules once, each setting a clean payee name and category, and uses Create and Apply to fix past months. Next month, synced transactions from those 15 merchants arrive already categorized, and the 40 one-offs get handled in one sitting. A rule that splits the monthly warehouse-club run between Groceries and Household saves a manual split every month.

In Tiller with Google Sheets, the household adds 15 AutoCat rows with Description Contains criteria and a Category override, puts specific rules above general ones, and turns on Auto Run on Fill. Data arrives about once a day; the 40 one-offs are left for Description Match, AI Suggest or manual entry. In Excel, the same 15 rules work, but the household clicks Fill after each refresh and categorizes the 40 one-offs by hand.

Either way the steady-state effort is similar. The difference is what happens when something unusual comes up: in Lunch Money you look for a setting; in Tiller you write a formula.

Who fits each, and who should skip

Choose Tiller if you already keep a spreadsheet budget, live in the US with US-dollar accounts, and value owning every row and formula. Skip it if you dislike maintaining spreadsheets or bank in the UK or EU.

Choose Lunch Money if you want automation without spreadsheet upkeep, hold several currencies, or want an API to pipe data elsewhere. Skip it if your goal is a spreadsheet-native workflow, because exporting a CSV or calling an API is an extra step compared with data already sitting in a sheet.

• Check your bank in each vendor's connection search before paying.
• Run both trials on the same month of data if you are undecided.
• Lunch Money's CSV export only includes the filtered view, so clear filters before exporting.