Give it your week
Balances, upcoming bills, pending charges. Type them in or link a bank through Plaid. A first pass takes a few minutes either way.
Private personal finance for iPhone
Know what's safe to spend.
Catalyst Cash reads your balances, bills, and cards, then gives you straight answers: how much room you have today, which card to pull out, and the one move worth making this week. Your records stay on your phone.
The only app that knows what's safe to spend and which card to spend it on.
- Free to start
- Works without linking a bank
- No ads. No data selling.
Local-first
Your financial record lives on your iPhone, not on our servers.
Actually free
Audits, budget, bills, rewards, and Ask AI in the free tier. Pro adds depth, not survival.
Banks optional
Manual entry is first-class. Plaid sync is a convenience you can turn on, not a requirement.
Built to survive
Encrypted export, iCloud backup, and Recovery Vault carry your record across phones.
The difference
Other money apps show you what already happened. Catalyst works one step earlier, on the decision still in front of you.
By the time a chart updates, the money is already spent. The useful moment is before you tap, before the bill lands, before the week gets away from you. That is the moment Catalyst is built for.
How it works
One honest look at your week, then the app works for you.
Run the audit
Deterministic money math grades your week from 0 to 100, names what's driving pressure, and queues the moves that matter. AI explains; it never does the arithmetic.
Act on it all week
Spend checks before you buy, the right card at the register, and Ask AI for the judgment calls in between. Then next week's audit shows what changed.
Weekly audit
A grade for your money, every week.
The audit reads your whole picture and hands back a Freedom Score, a plain-English verdict, and the single next move that matters most. Not another dashboard to interpret. An answer.
- Freedom Score from 0 to 100, graded like a report card
- Findings ranked by what they actually cost you
- Every audit archived, so the trend is visible
Ask AI
Ask the question you'd ask a money-savvy friend.
"Am I safe until payday?" "Should the dentist bill come out of checking or savings?" Ask AI answers from your real numbers and shows its reasoning. Identifying details are scrubbed before anything leaves your phone.
- Grounded in your latest audit, not generic advice
- Rate a reply and ask for a tighter revision
- Chat history stays local and auto-expires
Card rewards
The right card, before you tap.
Type a store and Catalyst ranks your own cards by expected value, points math included, and tells you how far the winner leads the backup. The 2.25% beats the 2% you were about to use, and now you know it.
- Best-card pick for any merchant or category
- Verified reward rates with live rule updates
- Nearby suggestions when several stores are close
Bills & renewals
See bills coming before they land.
Recurring costs, renewal dates, and the next bill that will squeeze your checking account, all in one view. What you pay per month across subscriptions is a number you should get to see, and cancel from.
- Monthly, weekly, and annual recurring load at a glance
- Next-due warnings tied to your actual cash
- Auto-detect subscriptions you forgot to track
And the rest of the system
One app, so your money stops living in five.
Starter lines come from your real recurring bills and audit context, not a blank grid.
Every transaction with merchant logos, categories, and export when you want the data out.
Accounts, cards, holdings, and utilization in one portfolio, with FIRE math for the long game.
Encrypted export, iCloud backup, and Recovery Vault. Lose the phone, keep the plan.
Test-drive six months of a realistic financial life before you enter a single number of your own.
Safety boundaries, floors, and payoff math are computed, not hallucinated. AI only explains.
Privacy
Private by architecture, not by promise.
Most finance apps copy your financial life to their servers and monetize the view. Catalyst Cash was built the other way around.
- Your record stays on your iPhone Balances, bills, history, and settings are local-first. You choose what leaves the device, and when.
- No data selling. No ad profiles. We can't sell what we never collect. You pay with money, not with your attention.
- AI with boundaries Ask AI requests are scrubbed of identifying details and routed through our backend. No third party learns who you are.
- Plaid only when you say so Bank linking is opt-in convenience. Turn it off and every feature still works, fully manual.
Pricing
Free proves it. Pro deepens it.
The free tier runs the whole system on your real money. Pro is for heavier weeks, more banks, and longer memory. Either way you're the customer, never the product.
Free
$0forever
Enough to run the full weekly system on your real money before you commit a cent.
- 2 audits per week
- 5 AskAI chats per day
- 1 Plaid institution or fully manual use
- Recent audit history
- Budget, bills, rewards, and planning tools included
Pro
Catalyst Cash Pro
Monthly · Annual · Lifetime
Eligible fresh users can try Pro for 7 days with no card and no auto-renew. Paid plan prices and terms appear in the iOS paywall.
- 30 audits per month and 20 AskAI chats per day
- Up to 8 Plaid institutions with quiet balance + ledger upkeep
- The Catalyst AI CFO engine for planning and deeper reasoning
- Full audit archive and searchable ledger with export
- Best-card ranking with nearby merchant suggestions
Backup, export, and recovery are never paywalled. Pro buys depth, not your own data back.
Monthly and annual subscriptions auto-renew until cancelled. Lifetime is a one-time purchase. Billing is managed through your Apple account.
Questions
Fair questions, straight answers.
Is the free tier actually usable?
Yes. Free includes weekly audits, the daily brief, budget, bills, rewards ranking, Ask AI, and one linked bank (or fully manual use). It's the whole system at a sustainable pace. Pro raises the limits and adds depth like the full archive and deeper AI reasoning.
Do I have to link my bank?
No. Manual entry is a first-class path, not a fallback. Plaid linking is there when you want balances refreshed automatically, and you can disconnect it at any time without losing features.
What does the AI actually see?
Ask AI works from a scrubbed summary of your latest audit: numbers and context, minus identifying details. Requests route through our backend so no third-party AI provider learns who you are. The critical math is computed on-device before AI ever explains it.
What happens if I lose my phone?
Your record is recoverable through encrypted export files, iCloud backup on iPhone, and Recovery Vault. Recovery is free-tier functionality on purpose. Resilience is not a paid feature.
How is this different from Monarch, Copilot, or Rocket Money?
Those are cloud dashboards: they aggregate your accounts on their servers and show you what happened. Catalyst Cash is a local-first decision tool: it keeps the record on your phone and focuses on what to do next: today's spending room, this week's move, the right card at the register. See the full comparison.
Five minutes a week. Every dollar accounted for.
Download Catalyst Cash and run your first audit today. Free, private, on your iPhone.