Rocket Money vs BudgetVault (2026): Free vs Premium, Is It Safe, and How to Cancel Subscriptions Without Linking Your Bank

Rocket Money is best known for one job: it finds the subscriptions you forgot about and, on a paid plan, cancels them for you. It also negotiates bills, tracks spending and shows your credit score, and it has a free tier.

It is also changing. On November 2, 2026, bill negotiation becomes exclusive to the $15-a-month Premium+ plan. Below: what the free plan covers, what Premium and Premium+ cost as of October 2026, what Rocket Money's security and privacy pages actually say, and how to run the same subscription audit yourself without linking a bank, which is how BudgetVault, our free app, works. Everything here was checked against Rocket Money's own pricing and help pages on October 2, 2026.

Rocket Money vs BudgetVault at a glance

Rocket Money free vs Premium vs Premium+

Rocket Money's own pricing breakdown lists three tiers.

Free

The free plan runs on the mobile app. You can link accounts, see your subscriptions and upcoming bills in one place, track spending by category with a small number of category budgets, check your credit score and set balance alerts. It does not include the cancellation service, manual transactions, CSV export, net worth, partner sharing or use on a computer: the Rocket Money website is now Premium-only, and free members can only manage settings there.

Premium: $7 to $14 a month, your choice

Premium uses a "pay what you think is fair" model. Rocket Money says the price typically falls between $7 and $14 a month and can vary over time and by platform. New members get a 7-day free trial, then pay monthly at the price they picked, or $84 to $168 over a year. Premium adds subscription cancellation, unlimited budgets, manual transactions, transaction rules and splits, net worth, automated savings goals, a full credit report from Experian, partner sharing, web access and CSV export.

Premium+: $15 a month

Premium+ is a fixed $15 a month plus tax, or $180 a year before tax. It includes everything in Premium, plus Rowan, an AI assistant you text about spending, budgets and subscriptions; bill negotiation with no success fee, one negotiation at a time; and access to apply for Rocket Money's high-yield savings account.

What changes for bill negotiation on November 2, 2026

Until November 1, 2026, any member can submit a bill for negotiation. If Rocket Money lowers it, you pay 35% to 60% of the first year's savings, picking the percentage within that range; if it fails, you pay nothing. From November 2, new negotiations require Premium+, and automatic renegotiations end. Negotiations already in progress finish under the old terms. Rocket Money's help center says most negotiated discounts last 12 months.

What Rocket Money does better

• It finds subscriptions for you. Link your accounts and recurring charges are detected automatically, including ones you'd forgotten. BudgetVault only knows about the recurring transactions you enter.
• It cancels them for you on Premium. Rocket Money says most cancellations take 2 to 10 business days, some the same day. It can't cancel everything, and charges billed through Apple, Google Play, Amazon, Roku or PayPal have to be canceled on those platforms.
• It negotiates bills such as internet, cable, phone and security services. BudgetVault offers nothing like it.
• Credit score on the free plan, with a full credit report on Premium.
• Automation. Premium's savings goals move money from your checking account into a non-interest-bearing custodial account at an FDIC-insured institution, on a schedule.
• Partner sharing on Premium: two people, each with their own login, on one membership.

If you know you'd never get around to auditing subscriptions yourself, paying someone to do it can be worth the money.

Is Rocket Money safe?

Security

On the technical side, Rocket Money's security page covers what you'd want to see:

• Bank logins go through Plaid (or Akoya for Fidelity accounts), and Rocket Money says it never sees or stores your bank password.
• Data is encrypted with TLS in transit and 256-bit AES at rest, and hosted on AWS, with some on Google Cloud.
• It reports regular third-party security audits and runs a bug bounty program.
• You can unlink accounts any time, and deleting your account deletes its data.

One thing to know: to cancel some subscriptions, Rocket Money may ask for your login to that service, such as the email and password of the Amazon account being charged.

Privacy

Rocket Money belongs to the Rocket Family of Companies, alongside Rocket Mortgage, Rocket Loans and Rocket Homes, and is covered by one shared privacy policy (effective July 1, 2026). In plain terms, it says:

• The Rocket companies share your information with each other to offer you their services.
• Rocket shares information with affiliates such as Redfin, and with partners and other third parties, for their own services and marketing.
• Rocket may show you personalized offers for third-party services based on what it knows about you.
• It shares identifiers and browsing activity with advertising partners for targeted ads.
• Under California's legal definition, the policy says Rocket "sells" several categories of personal information, including identifiers, commercial information, internet activity and inferences, to affiliates and non-affiliated third parties. Under state definitions that require a payment of money from an unaffiliated company, it says it does not sell.

Rocket Money's security page adds that it does not accept payment of any kind in exchange for your personal or financial data. You can opt out of the "sale" and sharing through the Do Not Sell or Share page the policy links to.

So: technically secure, but your data sits inside a family of mortgage, lending and real-estate companies whose policy allows marketing use. Whether that matters is your call. Our roundup of which budget apps sell your data and our budget app privacy audit put it in context, and our Plaid explainer covers the bank-linking step.

How to find and cancel subscriptions yourself, without bank access

Rocket Money's core trick is reading your transactions and spotting repeats. You can do the same with your bank's own export, and nothing has to leave your device:

1. Download your recent transactions as CSV from each bank and card you use. Three months catches monthly charges; go back twelve to catch annual renewals.
2. Import them into BudgetVault with the generic bank format or the Revolut, Wise or N26 preset, or open them in a spreadsheet.
3. Sort by description and look for repeats: the same merchant at a similar amount every month or year. Watch for small charges and free trials that quietly turned paid.
4. Check app-store billing, which can appear under the platform's name rather than the app's. On iPhone: Settings, your name, Subscriptions. On Android: Google Play, your profile picture, Payments & subscriptions, Subscriptions. Anything billed through Amazon, Roku or PayPal is canceled there too.
5. Cancel at the source, save the confirmation and check your next statement. Even Rocket Money's help center notes a charge can still go through if the billing date comes first.
6. Log the keepers as recurring transactions in BudgetVault, each in a category, so they count against your monthly budget and show up in reports.
7. Negotiate the big bills yourself. Call your internet or phone provider, ask what promotions or retention offers exist, and keep everything you save.

Our guide to optimizing recurring expenses walks through the full audit, including how to judge which subscriptions are worth keeping.

Which one should you use?

Rocket Money fits if you want subscriptions found and canceled with minimal effort, you have bills worth negotiating, you want a free credit score, and you're comfortable linking a US checking account, which the app requires.

BudgetVault fits if you'd rather not link your bank at all, want manual entry and CSV export without paying, or want a budget that works offline. It also doesn't care where you bank: Rocket Money only works for US users with US banks, while BudgetVault doesn't connect to any bank. For more apps in this category, see budget apps that don't connect to your bank.

Switching from Rocket Money to BudgetVault

1. Export your history if you're on Premium: Transactions, then Export on the web, or CSV Download from the menu in the app. Rocket Money emails you a download link, and the file can only be downloaded on a computer.
2. On the free plan, export from your bank instead. CSV export is a Premium feature, so download transactions straight from your bank and card issuers.
3. Import into BudgetVault using the generic format. There's no dedicated Rocket Money preset, so check the first few rows after importing.
4. Close the old account when you're done. Cancel Premium, any open bill negotiation and any savings goal first, then delete the account under Settings, Profile. Rocket Money says deletion is permanent and doesn't touch other Rocket accounts, such as Rocket Mortgage.

Bottom line

Rocket Money is good at what it's famous for: finding forgotten subscriptions and, if you pay, canceling them and negotiating bills. The free plan is useful but limited, Premium costs $7 to $14 a month, and from November 2, 2026, bill negotiation requires the $15 Premium+ plan. It needs a linked US checking account, and its parent group's privacy policy allows sharing for marketing.

BudgetVault doesn't cancel anything for you. It gives you a free, offline budget with no account and no bank connection. An evening with your bank statements and a list of recurring transactions covers the tracking side of what Rocket Money does; the phone calls are on you.