📊 Feature Alternative

Budget Categories
Alternative to Moneyhub

By Caolan Preston, CF30 Updated August 2026 5 min read

Moneyhub’s budget categories let you set spending limits and track where your money went each month. With the app closing, earmarkIQ offers a more advanced replacement — AI-powered auto-categorisation across 12 spending categories, plus salary allocation that splits your pay into bills, savings, investing, and guilt-free discretionary spending on payday.

Download Free on the App Store →
Quick Answer

Moneyhub's consumer app — including its budget categories — closes on 14 August 2026. earmarkIQ replaces it with AI transaction classification across 12 spending categories plus payday salary-allocation planning, and it's free to download on the App Store now. See our full Moneyhub alternative guide for the complete migration walkthrough, and our Open Banking comparison for how bank connections work.

⚠️ Moneyhub Shutdown Notice

Moneyhub closes its consumer app on 14 August 2026 — the deadline is days away. All budget categories, spending limits, and historical spending data will become unavailable. Export your data and migrate before the deadline.

Financial adviser with clients who relied on Moneyhub data? See earmarkIQ for advisers — client-consented expenditure data for planning firms, with pilot access coming.

What Moneyhub Offered

Moneyhub categorised your transactions into spending groups like groceries, transport, entertainment, and bills. You could set budget limits for each category and track your progress through the month. It was a solid, manual budgeting system — but it required you to set everything up yourself and often mis-categorised transactions.

earmarkIQ’s AI Budget Categories

earmarkIQ takes a fundamentally different approach. Instead of just categorising what you’ve already spent, it starts by allocating what you should spend when your salary arrives. The AI analyses your transaction history and automatically creates a spending plan:

12 AI-powered categories — Transactions are automatically sorted into Housing, Bills, Subscriptions, Groceries, Eating Out, Transport, Shopping, Entertainment, Health, Education, Finances, and General.
Salary allocation — On payday, earmarkIQ plans the split of your income: Bills (10%), Savings (1%), Invest (0%), Discretionary (89%) — personalised to your actual spending patterns.
Free-to-spend figure — After all commitments, you see exactly how much guilt-free money you have left (£2.6k on a £2,942 salary).

✦ AI Financial Profile

earmarkIQ goes beyond categories to build your Money Personality. It analyses spending rhythms, payday spikes (+21% average), and patterns to identify your type — like “The Feast or Famine Spender” — and provides personalised recommendations to improve your financial health.

Feature Comparison

Feature Moneyhub earmarkIQ
Automatic transaction categorisation
Custom budget limits per category
Monthly spending vs budget tracking
Number of categories8–1012
AI-powered auto-categorisation✗ (rule-based)
Salary allocation on payday
Free-to-spend calculation
Payday spike detection✓ (+21% avg)
Money personality analysis
Spending by day-of-week insights
AI spending recommendations
Weekly AI briefing
Available after Aug 2026✗ Shutting down

Migration Guide: 3 Simple Steps

Note your current Moneyhub budget limits

Before 14 August 2026, write down or screenshot your budget categories and monthly limits from Moneyhub. You can use these as a reference when setting up earmarkIQ.

Connect your bank and let AI analyse your spending

Sign up for earmarkIQ and connect your bank accounts via FCA-regulated Open Banking (see how earmarkIQ's bank connections compare to Moneyhub's). The AI immediately analyses your transaction history and auto-categorises every transaction into 12 categories.

Review your AI salary allocation

earmarkIQ creates a personalised salary allocation based on your actual spending. Adjust the splits if needed, or let the AI optimise it for you. Your free-to-spend figure updates in real time.


About earmarkIQ

earmarkIQ is a UK personal finance app, available now on iOS. It is acting as an agent of Finexer Ltd (FRN 925695), which is authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority as an Authorised Payment Institution, and is ICO registered (CSN2001882). earmarkIQ provides Open Banking account aggregation across 50+ UK banks, AI-powered salary allocation, and 12-category spending analysis. Website: earmarkiq.app

Budgeting that starts on payday

earmarkIQ doesn’t just track where your money went — it tells you where it should go before you spend it. AI salary allocation, 12 categories, real-time tracking.

Download Free on the App Store

Free to download on the App Store.