ClearCheckbook officially turns 20 years old on May 20th, 2026! It’s incredible to think back on the last 20 years and see how ClearCheckbook started and what it’s developed into. We’re also launching a special anniversary premium promotion, so be sure to read through the post to find out more.

From a Project in College to the "Aha" Moment:

Back in 2005, I was nearing graduation from college and was starting to face the reality of my finances. While they were fairly basic back then with just a checking account, savings account and one credit card, I was having trouble finding a tool to help me track my spending. In those days, there really weren’t any online tools for managing your finances and all of the downloadable software was geared more towards people with much more complex finances.

Since I was going to school for graphic design with a focus in interactive multimedia, plus a minor in computer programming, I decided to build myself a financial management tool that worked the way I wanted it to. One that wasn’t overly complex and could run as a website.

For about a year, the yet-unnamed financial tool was running on my laptop purely for my own personal use. I had built some basic reporting tools as well as the ability to reconcile my transactions (a feature I originally called "Jive"). It worked well for my needs and helped me get a better understanding of where my money was going.

After graduating, I continued working for my university while applying for jobs. At some point, I looked at my spending reports and saw several months in a row where my expenses outweighed my income. I knew this wasn’t sustainable and sent some screenshots of these reports to some friends on an internet forum.

To my surprise, they weren’t asking me about my financial situation; instead, they were asking what tool I used to generate the reports and how I was tracking my info. This was the proverbial “aha” moment. After a week of updating the site to allow people to create accounts, coming up with a name, and finding a hosting provider, ClearCheckbook officially launched on May 20, 2006.

Powered by You:

ClearCheckbook quickly gained traction with people who were looking for a security and privacy-focused financial management tool. As more people joined, the feedback and suggestions started flooding in.

I was able to quickly integrate many of these suggestions into tools everyone uses daily, such as reminders, the credit card tool, and importing/exporting transactions. We even had cool features like “CheckBot,” which let you add transactions via SMS, a Mac OSX dashboard gadget, and an iGoogle widget. Back before Apple revolutionized mobile apps, these were easy ways to add transactions and see your balances without having to open the main site.

ClearCheckbook continued to grow, and as we grew, so did our hosting needs. We moved from a small shared hosting plan to larger private plans, to a dedicated private server, and finally to a cloud hosting provider. Each progression in our hosting services led to a faster and more robust site, which in turn led to more customer satisfaction and word-of-mouth growth.

Some of our customers from those early days are still with us and we’re forever grateful for your support.

Going All In:

For the first few years after launch, I juggled a full-time job during the day while working on ClearCheckbook in the mornings and evenings. In early 2009, shortly after the release of ClearCheckbook Premium, I started thinking about what it would mean to do this full time.

The company I was working for was starting to show signs of cracking due to the 2008 financial crisis. To prepare for the worst, I started waking up at 3 AM, working on ClearCheckbook for three hours, going to my day job, coming home, going to bed, and doing it all over again. I did this for several months, knowing that if I could push out enough updates, I could potentially take ClearCheckbook on as my sole income.

And that’s exactly what happened. By late 2009, the company I was working for filed for bankruptcy, leaving me at a crossroads: find a new job, or jump into ClearCheckbook full time. At the time, ClearCheckbook’s revenue was only a few hundred dollars a month, but I had faith in the site. I had a little nest egg saved up from pinching pennies over the previous six months and figured it could last me a year without any real income if I was extremely frugal.

Without a day job taking up my time, I poured all of my attention into ClearCheckbook. The amount of work I put into the site was significantly more than it had ever been, allowing me to launch many new features like the Dashboard, and most notably, the PalmOS app and a mobile-optimized website for the early versions of the iPhone and Android.

Two Decades in Data:

Fast forward through several new versions, full app rewrites, and a massive amount of new tools, and you arrive at today. ClearCheckbook now has around half a million customers managing over 210 million transactions. The website sees about 2.5 million pageviews each month, while the iOS and Android apps have tens of thousands of installs.

To say "Thank You" for 20 amazing years, we’re offering a special 20% off promotion if you upgrade to a monthly ClearCheckbook Premium membership during the month of May. This means you get access to all 70+ Premium features, tools, and settings for just $4 per month. The best part? This discounted rate is locked in for as long as your membership remains active.

To claim this promotion, just log into your account and check out the banner at the top of the page. If you don’t already have a Premium membership, you’ll see a button to learn more and upgrade.

The Future of Your Finances:

Our goal has always been “Money management made easy.” As we continue to develop new features and gradually freshen up the user interface, your feedback will remain our guiding light. We are deeply committed to making sure that any visual improvements to the site and apps will feel natural, intuitive, and maintain the seamless flow you already know and love.

Having just talked about your feedback helping to direct the future of ClearCheckbook… if you have some new features or tweaks you’d like to see in the site or apps, please reach out and let us know! We’d also love to hear how ClearCheckbook has helped you in your financial journey! Leave us a comment below or send us an email to share your story.

Thank you for an incredible 20 years. Here’s to many more in the exciting journey that is ClearCheckbook.

Brandon OBrien
Founder, ClearCheckbook

ClearCheckbook was one of the thousands of sites that were disrupted today due to an outage with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

We're seeing successful connections to ClearCheckbook and traffic resuming to normal, so we're hopeful things are resolved. We're sorry about any inconvenience this caused.

You can learn more about the AWS outage here: https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/amazon-tech-outage-10-20-25-intl

With Intuit shutting down Mint, we've had a lot of people find ClearCheckbook to replace their financial management software. We know it's always difficult transitioning from a software you're familiar and comfortable with to a new one, but we hope this blog post makes that transition to ClearCheckbook easier.

First off, welcome to ClearCheckbook! We've been helping people manage their finances since 2006 and have grown tremendously over the years, due in large part to feedback and suggestions from our customers. ClearCheckbook is free to sign up and use, but we do have a Premium Membership option that gives you access to over 70 features, tools and settings that aren't available with the free membership. Here are some common questions and answers from Mint customers:

Can I import my Mint data into ClearCheckbook?
Yes! You can import QIF, OFX and QFX files into ClearCheckbook with the free membership (premium members can import CSV files too). We have a tool for importing transactions and you can learn more about how to use the Import Transactions tool in our Importing Transactions knowledge base article.

Can I connect my bank accounts to ClearCheckbook and have my transactions automatically download?
Yes! We offer bank connections via Plaid. These connections allow for your transactions to download automatically from your bank and credit card accounts into ClearCheckbook. You can learn more about connecting your accounts and syncing transactions in our Sync with Banks knowledge base article.

Does ClearCheckbook have any budgeting features?
Yes! We have two different budgeting tools available. One is a standard budgeting tool where you enter the budgeted amount and we track the amount spent via your transactions. The second is an envelope budgeting system where the funding and amount spent values are both taken from your transactions. You can learn more about the standard budgeting tool in our Budgets knowledge base article and you can find out more about the envelope budgets in our Envelope Budgets knowledge base article.

Does ClearCheckbook have a Net Worth tool?
Yes! We will calculate your net worth and track it over time based on your account balances, debts, investments and other assets. We have both a Dashboard gadget as well as a graphical report that shows your net worth over time. You can learn more about the Net Worth reports in our Net Worth Reports knowledge base article.

We also have an extensive knowledge base that covers just about every tool, feature and setting on ClearCheckbook. We encourage you to check it out if you have any questions as you get set up and start using ClearCheckbook. Some helpful knowledge base articles to help you get started are:

• Getting Started - This article walks through how our various accounts, categories, budgets, recurring transactions, etc all work together. This will help you familiarize yourself with how ClearCheckbook works compared to Mint.
• Adding Transactions - You can manually add transactions, import them, have them automatically synced from your bank or schedule recurring transactions. This article explains all these options.
• Transaction Register - Our transaction register is where you can see all of your transactions in one place. You can perform reconciliations, view specific types of transactions or transactions for specific accounts.
• Reconciliation Methods - We have two ways of reconciling your transactions and accounts. Which one you decide on will depend on what you're used to doing and what makes the most sense to you.

If you have any other questions as you get set up, please don't hesitate to reach out! You can contact us through our Contact Form at any time. The Contact Us link is also available at the bottom of every page.

Today we're announcing a new Sync Membership that allows you to connect up to 5 financial institutions to ClearCheckbook.

This membership is for people who want to connect their bank to ClearCheckbook but don't want or need all of the additional features that come with ClearCheckbook Premium. The Sync Membership costs $2.49 per month and gives you the ability to connect up to 5 financial institutions.

You can upgrade to the Sync Membership by clicking on Settings at the top right side of the page and then click on the Manage Your Sync Membership link under the Syncing Transactions section. More information about the upgrade process can be found here: Our Manage Your Sync Membership Knowledge Base article.

Here are some FAQs about the Sync Membership and Bank Connecting

What counts as a connection? A connection is counted for different financial institutions. For example, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Capital One are three different connections. We do not count multiple connections to the same institution toward your total. If you have 3 different accounts with Wells Fargo, that still only counts as one connection.

Is my bank supported? You can check to see if your financial institution is supported here: Our Supported Banks Knowledge Base article.

Can I have more than 10 connections? If you have a ClearCheckbook Premium membership and also purchase a Sync Membership, you will be able to connect up to 10 financial institutions.

I want to learn more about how to connect my bank to ClearCheckbook We have a full support page that covers how to connect your bank to ClearCheckbook here: Our Connecting to your Bank Knowledge Base article.

Why do we charge for these connections? The service that provides your transactions charges ClearCheckbook a flat fee per institution connection per month. Unlike other financial services that offer these connections for free, we do not sell your data, show ads or receive income from any source other than our ClearCheckbook Premium upgrades. We are offering this Sync Membership and our Premium Membership in order to cover the connection fees.

2020 was a huge year of updates for ClearCheckbook with the launch of Version 5 of the website and Version 4 of both the iOS and Android apps.

The launch of ClearCheckbook V5

ClearCheckbook version 5 had been in the works for a while and we finally made V5 live in August. Version 5 included over 100 new features, options and settings. You can look back at our blog post announcing V5 as well as the release notes for a full list of all the work that went into the update and what new features were included.

Major updates to improve the speed and performance of the website

After launching V5, we focused a lot of extra attention on tweaking our server and database setups to make the site much more efficient. If you're curious about some of the updates we made, you can check out our blog post on the subject.

New iOS and Android apps

We launched new versions of the iOS and Android apps in late June. These new versions were a complete rewrite that makes it easier for us to streamline updates to the apps. There were some hiccups at the launch of the new apps, but we worked around the clock to get those fixed. The apps are stable now and any bugs that have popped up have been resolved quickly.

To followup the V4 release of the apps, we recently updated the apps to 4.1 which included a lot of new features and settings that had been suggested to us. The 4.1 update really focused on making the app much more streamlined with the website by taking a lot of the settings (such as date format and custom transaction fields) and putting them in their own Settings menu. If you update the settings via the app, they will also update the website and vice versa.

Connecting to banks is finally coming!

We're super excited to announce that the most requested feature we've received since launching ClearCheckbook in 2006 is finally being introduced. Soon you'll be able to connect ClearCheckbook with your financial institutions so your transactions are automatically synced from your bank and into ClearCheckbook throughout the day. We're putting the finishing touches on the code and then need to do some extensive testing, but so far everything looks like it's working very well!

ClearCheckbook has prided itself on putting privacy and security first and this isn't going to change. The bank connection feature is 100% optional but will help open ClearCheckbook to people who don't want to manually enter or import all of their transactions. Making ClearCheckbook more accessible and giving more people the ability to manage their finances has always been one of our main goals. Offering this feature falls right in line with that.

Happy New Year

While 2020 has definitely been a year none of us expected or planned for, we're very hopeful for a bright and exciting 2021. This is also going to be a big year for ClearCheckbook as the site will turn 15 years old in May.

Thanks to everyone who has been using ClearCheckbook to manage your finances. Whether you've been using the site for free or you're a paying member, we really appreciate you choosing ClearCheckbook and we hope to continue making the site and apps better so managing your finances becomes easier and easier.

-Brandon