Frequently asked questions.

Spending, income, budgets, goals, accounts and net worth, and shared costs you settle up.

A fast way to log small wins — every time you put a little aside or skip a splurge — and build a saving streak. It tracks your saving habit, not a balance.

Stead's gentle gamification: calm, non-punitive ways to make the habit stick. No shame if you miss a day.

Encrypted at rest, with field-level encryption on your email and display name, never sold, and exportable any time. The full, dated detail is on the security page.

Never.

Fair — most apps lead with bank feeds, and for some people that is the right call. We start from a different bet: when you add something yourself, you notice it. For catching up in bulk there is CSV import from your bank's own export, and you never hand your bank login to anyone. If that trade-off is not for you, that is a legitimate reason to use something else.

You can, and plenty of people do it well. Stead exists for the couple where one of you loves the spreadsheet and the other never opens it. It is the shared-budget habit with a UI built for two people who do not have the same relationship with a formula bar — plus sharing controls, streaks, and a shared view neither of you has to maintain by hand.

Reasonable question, and we will not dodge it. Part of the answer is what is not here: Stead has no bank-feed integrations to secure and no banking credentials for anyone to steal, and your primary data is in Australia. Part of it is that you are never locked in — export everything you have put in, or delete the account outright, free and any time. And the rest you should not take on our word: the security page sets out exactly when your records are opened, which is only when running Stead requires it and never for marketing or sale, and what is encrypted, in plain English.

Then do not ask them to log everything on day one. Start with one shared bucket — the holiday fund, the reno, whatever you are both already talking about — and let them see it work before asking for more. Sharing in Stead is opt-in and forward-only for exactly this reason: you can bring a partner in gradually instead of flipping an all-or-nothing switch.

YNAB is a genuinely good product with a devoted following, and if zero-based budgeting with bank sync suits you, it does things Stead does not — bank feeds included. Stead is built on a different bet: that budgeting sticks when it is private and when it is a bit of fun. There is nothing to connect and nothing tracking you, and the two of you build streaks and a character that grows as you go. Less admin, more momentum.