Everything to know before making Catalyst your money system.

Catalyst Cash replaces the daily and weekly decision layer and can replace several specialist tools for many users: Today Brief, Spend Check, Protection Stack, current balances, debt pressure, renewals, budgets, rewards, audit summaries, Ask AI follow-up, and backup.

It is strongest when you want clearer next moves instead of a dashboard you have to interpret yourself. Copilot, Monarch, YNAB, Rocket Money, and rewards apps can each be strong at one lane; Catalyst is designed to be the best all-in-one iPhone system with a polished daily decision surface.

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.

Both. Today Brief is the daily layer: it shows today’s spending room, next bill pressure, pending charges, spend pace, today’s context, and a before-spend check for purchases.

The weekly audit is still the planning layer. The home dashboard is ordered so the daily decision comes first, protection comes next, and deeper portfolio or backup work waits until after the core answer.

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 reads cached sync state first, keeps Pro balances and ledger data quietly refreshed in the background, and saves heavier liability refreshes for a slower cadence.

That keeps the product more current without asking you to micromanage refreshes or forcing unnecessary paid pulls every time you open the app.

It means Catalyst still has a recent cached balance snapshot and is waiting for the next full live refresh window. The account is still usable; it is simply not forcing a fresh network pull every time you open the app.

If several linked institutions share the same stale state, the app groups that status so you can see the pattern quickly instead of reading the same warning over and over.

Free supports 1 Plaid institution. Pro supports up to 8 Plaid institutions. Manual entry remains available either way.

On Pro, Catalyst is built to keep all 8 usable without constant user input by quietly maintaining balances and ledger data behind the scenes.

Yes. The Rewards tab ranks the best card for a merchant or category, compares the winner against your backup card, and can show dollar estimates once you enter a purchase amount.

That makes it useful both for everyday category choices and for one specific purchase when you want the best answer right before you tap to pay.

Catalyst does not assume there is only one nearby merchant. If several candidates are close together, it can show a short list so you choose the exact storefront before the rewards ranking runs.

That matters because “I am near the mall” is not the same thing as “I am about to spend at this one specific merchant.”

No. Catalyst can seed starter budget lines from recurring bills and audit context so you do not have to build the first version from scratch.

It also avoids overwriting matching lines you already created, which matters if you have already started shaping the budget yourself.

Helpful and needs-work feedback is not just a dead-end thumbs vote. It stays on-device and helps Catalyst adjust future replies toward the style you prefer, such as tighter answers or clearer math.

Needs-work can also trigger an improved answer right away, without turning your private chat history into product telemetry.

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. Catalyst does not sell your personal data, Plaid-linked account data, AI prompts, chat content, audit history, or manually entered financial data.

We also do not use your financial data to build advertising profiles. Plaid is optional and has its own privacy policy when you choose bank linking.

Current production AI runs through OpenAI's API. OpenAI states API data is not used to train or improve models by default unless the customer opts in, and Catalyst does not opt in to training on your API data.

We minimize prompts before sending them, exclude private account identifiers and access details, and do not store raw financial payloads on Catalyst servers. Provider abuse-monitoring logs and Catalyst's short scrubbed reliability excerpt have their own limited retention windows, described in the Privacy Policy.

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.

For most iPhone users, encrypted iCloud backup is the easiest main recovery path. Encrypted export is the portable option when you want a file you control directly. Recovery Vault is the more advanced path for off-device encrypted recovery.

Household Cloud is for shared encrypted sync, not the default answer for personal backup.

Catalyst Cash is iPhone-first today, and iCloud backup is naturally Apple-only. The portable foundation is already in the product: encrypted export, Recovery Vault, account-backed identity sessions, and RevenueCat entitlement verification tied to a durable Catalyst actor ID.

If Mac, Android, or Windows versions launch later, the clean path is to make encrypted export, Recovery Vault, or account-backed encrypted sync the cross-platform restore lane, while RevenueCat-backed entitlement checks keep Pro access tied to the customer rather than one device or store.

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 Ask AI chats per day, up to 8 Plaid institutions, quieter balance and ledger upkeep, the full audit archive, the full searchable ledger with export, and the premium OpenAI-powered model lanes.

Available at $12.99/month, $119.99/year, or $249.99 for lifetime access.

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

Free includes 2 audits per week, 5 Ask AI chats per day, OpenAI-powered Catalyst AI Nano, 1 Plaid institution or fully manual use, the last 12 audits, and the core dashboard, budget, bills, renewals, rewards, and planning surfaces.

The free tier is designed to prove the weekly system on real data before you pay. Pro is for heavier usage, more institutions, full history, deeper model access, and quieter upkeep.

Free uses Catalyst AI Nano for fast, lightweight finance answers. Pro includes three curated OpenAI lanes: Nano for volume, CFO for default planning, and Boardroom for deeper reasoning.

Pro has a 30-chat daily cap across Ask AI. Within that, Nano and CFO each support up to 15 chats per day, while Boardroom supports up to 5 deep-reasoning chats per day. If one model bucket is exhausted and another still has room, the app is designed to make switching easy.

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.

Yes. Demo mode is designed to snapshot your real data, show sample households, then restore your real state when you exit demo mode.

It also clears on a full relaunch of the app, so the sample state does not keep masquerading as your real finances after you close and reopen the app.

Yes. A one-time payment of $249.99 gives you permanent Pro access with no subscription, no renewals, and no recurring charges.

It pays for itself in under 20 months compared with the monthly plan.

Open Settings in the app and find your unique referral code (CC-XXXXXX format). Share it with a friend. When they redeem your code, you both get one free month of Pro.

You can earn up to 12 bonus months (one full year) through referrals. The referral link format is catalystcash.app/ref/YOUR-CODE.

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.