The app you graduate to when one app stops being enough.

What it does well. YNAB will make you a better budgeter than Clarity will. Envelope discipline, the four rules, the give-every-dollar-a-job loop — that's a real behavior-change product, and it works.

Where it breaks. It breaks the day your money stops being mostly spending. RSU vests, a brokerage account, two crypto wallets, an HSA you haven't touched since 2019 — YNAB has nowhere to put them. So you open a second app to see your net worth. Then a third for crypto. Then a tax tool in April.

What changes. Clarity is the layer underneath. Banks, brokerages, retirement, crypto, on-chain wallets, manual assets — one read-only ledger, lot-level cost basis across every venue. Keep YNAB for the envelopes if you love them. Use Clarity for everything YNAB was never trying to be.

What it does well. Empower's net-worth dashboard is the reason it exists, and it's genuinely the cleanest free one. If you want an advisor on the other end of the phone — which some people do — that's a real offer.

Where it breaks. It breaks when the advisor sales calls start, which they will. And it breaks before that for anyone with cost basis that matters: Empower aggregates positions, it doesn't keep books. No lot-level FIFO. No wash-sale detection across brokerages. No Form 8949 that prints clean.

What changes. Clarity gives you the picture without the sales pipeline on the other end. You pay a flat subscription, nobody calls, and the cost-basis math actually holds up at tax time. If you eventually want an advisor, hire one — Clarity is the books they'll wish you ran.

What it does well. Mint's pitch — connect everything once, see it all forever, free — was the right pitch. The product had real reach, and the muscle memory of opening one app to see all your accounts is hard to replace.

Where it breaks. The free model is what killed it: data sale, ad units, no incentive to keep the integrations working. Every Mint successor that's free runs the same playbook eventually. And none of them ever covered crypto, cost basis, or anything past a checking-account view.

What changes. Clarity is paid by design — your subscription is the business model, not your data. Same automatic-tracking life Mint gave you, extended to brokerages, retirement, crypto, and on-chain wallets, with a 30-day money-back guarantee instead of a free tier funded by selling you out.

What it does well. CoinTracker is a real crypto-tax engine. If you only need an 8949 in April and the rest of your money lives elsewhere, it'll do the job for the venues it supports.

Where it breaks. It's a point tool you open twice a year. It doesn't know about your brokerage, your RSU vests, your wash sales between Coinbase and Schwab, or your net worth on any given Tuesday. So crypto sits in one app, the rest of your books sit in another, and the reconciliation between them is you.

What changes. Clarity treats crypto as part of one ledger, not a separate filing. Same 8949 and Schedule D outputs, plus wash-sale detection across venues your broker can't see, plus the rest of your money in the same place you check on it the other 363 days of the year.

What it does well. Your CPA is great at the thing they're paid to do: file. They know the code, they know your filing position, and they'll catch what a piece of software won't.

Where it breaks. What they don't do is the other eleven months. Between filings you have no system — receipts in email, basis in a spreadsheet, last year's decisions you can't remember, and an April that turns into a forensic exercise every time.

What changes. Clarity is the layer your CPA wishes you ran all year. Books that stay clean between filings, cost basis they can actually trust, Form 8949 and Schedule D that print without a reconstruction phase. Works alongside your CPA, not instead of them.