Clear answers before you trust a new money app.

Catalyst Cash replaces the weekly decision layer: current balances, debt pressure, renewals, audit summaries, and follow-up questions. It is strongest when you want clearer next moves instead of a dashboard you have to interpret yourself.

If your main job is envelope budgeting down to every category or preserving a permanent cloud ledger as the product's center of gravity, you may keep your old tool during transition. If your main problem is not knowing what move matters most this week, Catalyst Cash is built for that.

No. The fastest path is to get today's truth accurate: current balances, major cards, income timing, and recurring costs. That is usually enough to produce a useful audit and a credible next-action list.

Catalyst Cash is optimized around current decision quality, not making you finish a giant migration before the product can help.

Not as a direct external CSV or app-to-app migration yet. Catalyst Cash supports encrypted backup and restore of its own data, but it is not currently a universal importer for Mint, YNAB, Monarch, or Rocket Money exports.

If preserving older records matters, keep the export from your previous tool while starting the current decision workflow here. The app is built to make your next week clearer first.

Catalyst Cash still covers renewals, cash flow, debt, rewards, budgeting, FIRE math, and transaction cleanup. The difference is that those tools support one weekly operating rhythm instead of becoming separate systems you have to interpret yourself.

If you want a plain-language breakdown of where Catalyst Cash fits best, the compare page is the right follow-up.

No. Plaid is optional. Manual entry still supports the core audit, debt, budgeting, renewals, and planning workflow.

Plaid makes current balances and transactions easier to maintain, but the app is not designed around forcing you into one connection model.

This happens across the category, not just here. Financial institutions change login flows, block aggregators, require re-auth, or recover slowly after outages. Catalyst Cash keeps the local record usable, so a temporary connection issue does not make the rest of the app meaningless.

When a connection needs attention, reconnect it, keep the critical balances current, and continue running the workflow. The product is designed to degrade more gracefully than dashboard-only apps that become blank when sync has a bad day.

Because good finance UX should not waste network calls just to feel busy. Catalyst Cash uses cached sync status where it can, and only performs paid or rate-limited live refreshes when the request is actually useful and allowed by plan limits.

That keeps costs lower, avoids unnecessary provider churn, and still gives you current-enough information for the weekly decision loop.

Free supports 1 Plaid institution. Pro supports up to 6 Plaid institutions. Manual entry remains available either way.

The split is meant to keep Free genuinely useful while reserving heavier live-sync usage for the people who need broader coverage.

Your core financial record stays local-first on your device. That includes the day-to-day working data you use to run the audit and manage the app.

AI requests are scrubbed and routed through the Catalyst backend, and the operational privacy boundary is explained in more detail on the Privacy Policy and Security pages.

No. The app does not keep Plaid access tokens on-device. It keeps local connection metadata and account state needed for the user experience, while the sensitive token boundary stays off the phone.

Manual backups also exclude passcodes, device identifiers, subscription state, and similar secrets.

Catalyst Cash supports encrypted backup and restore so your finance record is portable without turning the whole product into a cloud-first database. Manual backups intentionally omit sensitive keys that should not be restored from export files.

The goal is resilience: keep the user's working record recoverable while maintaining tighter security boundaries than a typical finance dashboard clone.

Yes. The product is designed so your core working record does not depend on a server-side finance database first. Network features exist when you use them, but the app's core posture is still local-first.

That means you can use manual entry, optional Plaid, security controls, and encrypted backups without restructuring your whole financial life around a cloud dashboard.

Pro expands usage and depth: 20 audits per month, 30 AskAI chats per day, up to 6 Plaid institutions, the full audit archive, the full searchable ledger with export, and the premium AI models.

The core workflow stays the same. Pro mostly removes constraints once the weekly rhythm is already working for you.

The core math does not change. Pro changes usage limits, depth, model access, history depth, and the broader ledger workflow.

That split matters because the point of upgrading is more room and better tooling, not a paid version of basic arithmetic.

Once a week is enough for most people. Run another one after a paycheck, a large purchase, a new bill, or any meaningful change in your balances.

The app is meant to be a recurring operating rhythm, not a tool you only open when you are already stressed.

No. Catalyst Cash provides educational analysis and decision support, not licensed tax, legal, investment, or financial advice.

The app is there to help you think more clearly and act more intentionally, while the responsibility for your decisions remains yours.