Net Worth Tracker Without Plaid — Why Manual Entry Wins on Privacy
Published March 19, 2026
If you've ever signed up for a finance app, you've probably been asked to “link your accounts.” Behind that button is usually Plaid — a service that connects to your bank using your credentials and pulls transaction data on your behalf.
Plaid is convenient. It's also a third party that now has access to your bank login, your transaction history, your account balances, and your spending patterns. For budgeting apps that need daily transaction data, maybe that's worth the trade-off. But for net worth tracking— where you're updating numbers once a month — do you really need to give away that access?
What Plaid actually does
Plaid acts as a middleman between you and your bank. When you “link” an account in Monarch Money, Copilot, or the now-defunct Mint, Plaid stores a token that lets it pull your data on an ongoing basis. This means:
- A third party has persistent access to your financial accounts
- Your transaction data flows through Plaid's servers
- If Plaid is breached, your financial data is exposed
- You can't verify what data is being collected or how it's used (Plaid has settled lawsuits over data collection practices)
The case for manual entry
Net worth tracking is fundamentally different from expense tracking. You don't need real-time transaction feeds. You need a monthly snapshot of your balances:
- Checking & savings: log in to your bank, note the balance
- Investments: check your brokerage, note the total
- Real estate: update your estimate quarterly
- Debts: check your loan balances
Total time: 2-5 minutes per month. That's the entire cost of not sharing your bank credentials with a third party.
Trackers that don't use Plaid
| Tool | No Plaid | No server | Open source | Free |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vaulted | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Local spreadsheet | ✅ | ✅ | N/A | ✅ |
| Firefly III | ✅ | Self-host | ✅ | ✅ |
| Google Sheets | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
How Vaulted works without Plaid
Vaulted takes the manual-entry approach and wraps it in a clean UI with trend charts, asset breakdowns, monthly snapshots, and multi-currency support. Your data is stored in IndexedDB inside your browser. No server ever sees your balances.
You get the visualization and tracking benefits of a finance app without the privacy costs of Plaid. Export your data as JSON anytime. Import it on another device. That's it.
Try it
Try Vaulted at vaultedworth.com — free, open source, no sign-up required. Or check the source code.