I Fired Rocket Money. Your Company Could Be Next.

Last week I fired Rocket Money. I canceled my subscription and replaced it with a budgeting system I built myself. It runs every night, does more than Rocket Money did for me and costs less. This isn't a prototype or a thought experiment.

I've written before that a lot of the companies sitting in the middle, between us and what we actually need, are going to get cut out, because AI makes it practical to build what they sell. Mostly I've said that in general terms. Rocket Money is a specific one.

The good news for a lot of companies is that this won't happen fast. A typical family isn't going to build its own budgeting system next month. But it does call for a real reckoning, and that's hard to hear. It's a bit like telling someone close to you something they don't want to know. They'll push back, maybe for a long time, and that doesn't change what's true.

Why I Built My Own

When Mint shut down, I learned that a tool I relied on could disappear, and I had to set everything up again in Rocket Money. This time I wanted to save money, keep more of our data private and stop depending on a company that could change its product or close. I also wanted things no budgeting app was going to give me.

Rocket Money only knows what the bank sends it, and bank labels are often garbled. My system checks a confusing charge against my email and texts, and I'm adding my location history so it can tell where I was when the money went out. I wrote about that location piece recently. I'd never hand all of that to one company, and no company is going to build that feature for a single customer.

What My Home Finance System Does Now

In September I wrote about using AI for the family budget. Back then the system pulled each month out of Rocket Money, checked it and updated our budget spreadsheet. It still does all of that. Now it gets our data straight from the source, and it runs a full set of dashboards.

The only thing Rocket Money had that I couldn't build was the connection to our banks. So I went to Plaid, the company that supplies those connections to apps like Rocket Money, and signed up for its free Trial plan.

• Every account, every night. Our checking, credit cards, loans and retirement accounts update overnight into one running record of every transaction back to 2018, and I can pull new ones any time.
• Better categories. Each charge gets a category from a rule. When a charge is unclear, AI checks my email, my texts and the web, and the answer becomes a new rule. A $42 charge labeled "DC Chamber" turned out to be tickets to the Hudson Valley Balloon Festival, found in an old email receipt. If I spot a wrong category, I fix it right in the transaction list, and the fix applies to every charge like it, past and future.
• Numbers I can trust. For every bank statement, the starting balance plus every transaction has to land exactly on the ending balance the bank printed. A separate checker redoes that math from scratch, and if anything fails, nothing gets published. No AI touches the numbers, and the AI never holds a bank password.
• Dashboards built for our family. Spending by category with each store's logo, every transaction searchable, each loan's balance over time, our income and how long our savings would last.

Rocket Money Premium cost me $7.59 a month, about $91 a year. I'd been paying for it mostly because the free version only pulled our transactions once a day. Plaid's Trial plan is free for up to 10 bank logins, which covers us, and everything runs on my own computer.

Nothing is really free, though. I'd bet Plaid profits from my data in anonymized form. At least right now it costs me nothing, and even if Plaid starts charging one day, it'll still cost less than Rocket Money did.

Plainly, I don't need Rocket Money anymore. What it sold me was a basic set of features on top of a bank connection. Once I could get the connection directly, I could build the rest myself.

RIP Rocket Money?

So will everyone do this eventually and put Rocket Money out of business? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on how fast the technology improves and how quickly people take it up. It also depends on whether Rocket Money can look at this squarely and make some fundamental changes. I hope it does. But in my experience, when a company sees the core of what it is under threat, it usually doesn't lean in. It deals with it when it's forced to, or when it's too late.

What Rocket Money Could Do About It

Rocket Money gets zero dollars from me now. Some of my business would beat none of it, so what would it take to win some back? A company like this still has two things one person can't match: savings that come from size, and insights that come from seeing millions of customers.

Sell the data at a fair price. I don't care much where my bank data comes from. Plaid costs me nothing right now. If Rocket Money could come close to that on the data and add real value on top, I'd pay for that value.

Sell categories my AI can use. Good category labels with a confidence score, available to my own system and my AI agents (assistants that act on my behalf), not just inside the Rocket Money app. Plenty of people won't want to keep up their own rules or review unknown stores. For them, good-enough categories beat doing it by hand.

Stand behind the numbers, and see what one person can't. I had to build my own checks so every number adds up, and it took time to learn where things go wrong. Rocket Money already knows a lot of that. It can also spot patterns across millions of anonymous customers: a phone carrier just raised its prices, or your insurance term ends in two months and the bill is likely to go up. That explains why a cost changed, or gets you ahead of it. It's a trade-off, since your data joins that anonymous pool, so it should be a choice people make.

Offer security as a feature. Keeping our data myself is good for privacy, but it means I've taken on the security risk. Some people would rather a big company hold their data than trust their own computer, and companies can still sell that peace of mind.

Break the product into pieces. Stop treating the product as one size fits all, or even tailored by customer group. Split it into small services, like the bank feed, categories, alerts and subscription tracking, that people and their AI can pick and combine. The app becomes one ready-made bundle of those pieces for the many people who don't want to put anything together.

Don't bolt on a closed AI feature. A lot of companies are adding AI features inside their apps to copy what people can already do with their own AI. That may help for a while, but those features are usually weak, and they double down on a closed system. At the very least, let people and their AI agents run the service from outside.

Move faster on features. I can add a feature or change a chart almost right away. A company serving millions has to think about scale, security, legal issues and odd cases, so it's slower, fair or not. That gap means every step of building software has to speed up, with everyone from business owners and product managers to designers, developers and testers working with AI agents on a shared system. Companies cutting their software teams to save money are digging the hole deeper. They need more speed and better quality to stay ahead of customers like me.

None of this means dropping what works today. It'll be a while before what I did is common or shows up in the quarter's numbers, so the current business can keep running with some adjustments. But the work has to start now. A shift in mindset and culture comes first, and then a lot of training and figuring things out. A company that waits too long won't be ready when the wave hits.

It's Not Just Rocket Money

This is coming for a lot of brands. Rocket Money is one example of a strong brand that delivers real value today and could see that value wear away quickly. Every business should at least take a hard look at where it stands. I picked Rocket Money because it was a real bill in my real life. I wanted to save money and get more for it, and I could. So I fired it.

P.S. The Sales Pitch

Yes, I picked on Rocket Money, and I doubt they'll call to thank me and ask for help. But if your company wants to find where it's exposed, plan what to do about it or speed up its product work with AI agents, I can help at wespomeroy.com. And if you want a system like mine, built around your own life, I build those too. Mine also tracks our savings, the financial side of my exit from Verizon and my consulting expenses, and it prepares statements for my accountant. Company or person, I'm here for it.