Finance and accounting decision
Neto
A competent developer can build a useful Neto-like personal finance app (manual logging, budgets, charts, CSV, iCloud sync) in a multi-week effort using existing open-source projects for inspiration; advanced features like receipt OCR and automatic payment capture are the main things you'd give up.
View on the App Store↗Not priced
No pricing page we fetched carried a figure, so there is nothing to compare against. The build side is still real.
$100one-off120 h to build
$0/mo3 h/mo upkeep
No published price to break even against.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Neto alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Log transactions into categories → assign to accounts → update budgets/goals → view charts/analytics → export/import CSV and sync devices
What it still won’t have
- Polished App Store presence, branding and user reviews
- Native features demonstrated in the app (Apple Pay automatic capture, receipt scanning/OCR and automatic capture of payments)
- Pro subscription UX and integrated advanced analytics behind a paywall
- Live market prices for investments as provided in the app
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
No published price
Neto does not publish a price we could read, so there is nothing to compare against. What building costs is below.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a native iOS personal-finance app in Swift and SwiftUI with Core Data for local storage and CloudKit for optional device sync. In scope: transaction/category CRUD with validation, recurring transactions, multi-currency balances with daily exchange-rate fetch (use a free rates API), budgets and savings-goals engine, time-series aggregation and charts (line/bar) for day/week/month/year, CSV import and export, settings (language, currency), Face ID lock, migrations, error handling, and unit/UI tests. Out of scope: receipt OCR, Apple Pay automatic capture, live market quotes for investments, and App Store release tasks. Provide CI to run tests and scripts to seed sample data.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Build verdict base78
- An open-source build was found+5
- 3 cited sources+3
- Evidence score86
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 3
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productNeto: Budget & Wealth - App Store
- open sourceactual (prior art)
- open sourcefirefly-iii (prior art)
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.