Finance and accounting decision
Tiller
A narrow replacement (feeds into Google Sheets, rule-based AutoCat, daily email) is realistic for a competent developer using existing aggregators and APIs, but reproducing Tiller’s ongoing bank-connector coverage, reliability, and support is costly and operationally heavy, so keeping the paid service is reasonable for full parity.
Visit website↗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.
What a replacement has to do
- Fetch account transactions daily, append and normalize rows into a spreadsheet, auto-categorize transactions using rules/ML, surface summary templates/dashboards and send a daily summary email.
What it still won’t have
- Tiller-managed bank connector reliability and connector maintenance
- Prebuilt, polished spreadsheet templates and one-click setup
- US-based dedicated customer success/support team
- Daily hosted feed management and guaranteed privacy controls
- Auto-updates and built-in AutoCat behavior tuned by the vendor
What remains hard
- Integration maintenance
Only Tiller connects your banks and spreadsheets with an automatic feed of your daily finances.
- Brand trust
Your Trust is Not for Sale
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 20 seats.
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 hosted service using Node.js (or Python) + Postgres + Google Sheets API + a Plaid (or similar) connector to: 1) connect a single user’s bank accounts via Plaid and fetch daily transactions; 2) normalize and dedupe transactions and store them in Postgres; 3) write transactions into a Google Sheet using the Sheets API and maintain a Foundation Template sheet; 4) implement rule-based AutoCat categorization with a small ML fallback using a hosted transformer endpoint (or simple logistic regression) and an admin UI to edit rules; 5) send a daily summary email via SendGrid. Out of scope: building your own bank aggregation network (use Plaid/Envestnet/Yodlee), multi-user billing UI, and Excel desktop automation (optional: implement Microsoft Graph later). Include error handling for failed bank fetches, retry/backoff, monitoring (Sentry), and unit/integration tests for connectors, categorization, and Sheets writes.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Evidence score67
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 · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productTiller: Your Financial Life In A Spreadsheet, Automatically
- official pricingTiller Pricing And Free Trial - Tiller
- official docsTiller Features - Tiller
- open sourcemayswind/ezbookkeeping
- open sourceandrewdwallo/erpsaas
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
