How Bilance makes money (and why it is not free)

Bilance makes money one way: subscriptions. You pay for the app, and that is the entire business. No ads, no selling your data, no commissions for pushing you towards loans, cards, or insurance. Most new users start with a full-featured trial; the exact terms are shown in the app before you pay. After the trial, Bilance is a subscription app. There is no permanent free tier, and that is deliberate.

Bilance is the budgeting app built for European banks — it connects all your accounts automatically and does the categorising for you. Doing that costs real money: bank connections, data processing, and human support create ongoing costs. Every budgeting app pays these bills somehow. Across the industry, the common models are:

• Subscriptions. Users pay directly. Simple, visible, and the model Bilance uses.
• Advertising. The app is free or cheap, and advertisers pay for your attention.
• Data monetisation. Aggregated or anonymised spending data is sold as market insight. Many users never realise they agreed to this.
• Financial cross-selling. The app recommends loans, cards, or insurance and earns a commission per signup. The app can then be free, because you are the sales channel.

These models are legal, but the funding is often buried in privacy policies or commercial terms, so do not assume it is obvious. And each one changes what the app is for.

Why the model matters more in a finance app

A budgeting app sees the most sensitive picture of your life: what you earn, where you spend it, what you owe. With that data on the table, incentives matter.

An app funded by cross-selling has a reason to conclude you need a loan. An app funded by advertising has a reason to keep you scrolling. An app funded by data has a reason to collect more than it needs. Bilance depends on subscriptions alone, so it has exactly one way to survive: be so useful that you keep choosing to pay. Your fee keeps Bilance ad-free, private, and constantly improving. It also keeps our interests aligned with yours, because we only succeed by building something genuinely useful for you.

That is the whole argument for a paid app. “Why is it not free?” is not a rude question. It is the right question, for any finance app. The price for your country is always shown in the app before you subscribe: no hidden cost behind ads or data extraction.

How the trial works, and why there is no permanent free tier

The trial gives you the complete app: bank syncing to 2,300+ European banks (see yours), automatic categorisation, planning, net worth. Everything works exactly as it would on a paid plan. You are not charged when the trial starts, and you can cancel anytime through your App Store or Google Play. Cancel in time and you pay nothing, keeping access until the trial ends.

We chose a full trial over a permanent free tier on purpose. A free tier has to be paid for somehow — usually by one of the other models above, or by limiting the free features enough to force an upgrade. We would rather show you the real app and let you decide whether it earns its price.

If the business model is the part of app-safety you were worried about, the other half of the picture is how the bank connection itself works: see is it safe to connect a budgeting app to your bank?