So you’ve decided to stop paying $109 a year to budget your own money. Good news: because YNAB and Zeroed both use the same zero-based envelope method, switching is mostly a data move, not a re-learning exercise. Every skill you built in YNAB — giving dollars jobs, rolling with the punches, ageing your money — transfers directly.
Here’s the whole migration, start to finish. Most people are done inside an hour.
Before you start
- Install Zeroed on Windows or Android and start the free trial — it’s 34 days, fully unlocked, no card, no account. You can run YNAB and Zeroed side by side for the entire switch, so nothing is at risk.
- Don’t cancel YNAB yet. Do that at the end, once you’ve confirmed everything came across. (If your renewal date is close, YNAB keeps working until the paid period ends.)
Step 1: Export your data from YNAB
- Open YNAB in a browser (the export lives in the web app, not mobile).
- Click your budget name (top-left) to open the budget menu.
- Choose Export budget data.
- YNAB downloads a .zip containing two CSV files: a Register file (every transaction you’ve ever entered) and a Plan/Budget file (your monthly category allocations).
- Unzip it somewhere you can find it. The Register CSV is the one that matters.
That file is your complete financial history — payees, categories, amounts, dates, account names, memos. It’s yours, and it’s about to outlive your subscription.
Step 2: Import your history into Zeroed
- In Zeroed, create your accounts first (current/checking, savings, credit cards — same names you used in YNAB keeps things tidy).
- Go to Import and choose the Register CSV.
- Zeroed’s universal parser reads the file and shows you a preview — check that dates, amounts, and payees look right, and adjust the column mapping if your regional format needs it.
- Run the import. Duplicate detection is automatic, so if you ever import an overlapping bank statement later, you won’t get double entries.
Prefer a lighter start? Some switchers import only the last 3–6 months and let the deep history stay in the archived CSV. Both approaches work — Zeroed handles multi-year registers fine, so it’s taste, not a technical limit.
Step 3: Rebuild your category plan
The Register import brings your transactions and their category names. Now recreate your envelope structure:
- Set up your category groups and categories in Zeroed to mirror your YNAB plan (have the Plan CSV open for reference — it lists every category and what you assigned monthly).
- This is also the moment YNAB veterans rarely get: a guilt-free fresh start. Ten years of category archaeology (“Misc II (old) (don’t use)”) doesn’t have to come with you. Keep what worked, drop what didn’t.
- Enter your current account balances or reconcile against your latest bank statement, then assign your available money to categories — the familiar move: give every dollar a job.
Step 4: Set up the things YNAB did in the background
- Recurring bills: add your scheduled transactions (rent, utilities, subscriptions you actually want to keep) so upcoming bills show on the Today view.
- Statement imports going forward: instead of bank sync, you’ll import a CSV/PDF/OFX statement periodically — most banks export these from online banking in two clicks. With saved import rules, a monthly import takes a few minutes, and reconciliation catches anything a broken bank feed would have silently missed.
- Sync (optional): if you use Zeroed on phone + computer, connect your own Google Drive. Your data is encrypted before upload; no Zeroed servers are involved because none exist.
- Lock it: turn on biometric unlock.
Step 5: Run parallel for a few weeks, then cancel
Keep YNAB read-only while you live in Zeroed for a pay cycle or two. When your numbers reconcile and the habit has moved, cancel the YNAB subscription and enjoy the strangest part of switching: that’s the last budgeting bill you’ll ever budget for. Zeroed is a one-time purchase — $19.99 founder price until 14 February 2027, then $39.99 — and version 1.x is yours forever.
What’s different day-to-day (honest edition)
- No automatic bank sync. You import statements instead. Some people find this a downgrade; many find the added awareness is the point of budgeting. Decide for yourself during the trial.
- No web app. Zeroed is installed software — your budget doesn’t live in a browser tab or on anyone’s server.
- No shared cloud budget. Partners share via a synced Drive folder or a shared device rather than separate logins.
Everything else — the method, the rhythm, the “every dollar has a job” discipline — is the same, minus the annual bill. For the full feature-by-feature breakdown, see Zeroed vs YNAB.
Ready? Start your 34-day free trial — no card, no account, and your YNAB data comes with you.