Freenance vs Tiller Money 2026 — Google Sheets vs Native App (PL/EU)

Quick Answer

Tiller Money is a unique product in the personal finance space: it is not really an app but a Google Sheets (and Excel) automation service. Tiller pulls daily transactions from your US banks into a customizable spreadsheet, and you do the actual budgeting using Tiller's templates or your own. It costs $79/year and has a devoted community of spreadsheet power-users. Freenance is a native cross-platform app for Polish and EU users, with Polish bank imports, PSD2, IKE/IKZE, multi-currency PLN/EUR/USD, and a built-in dashboard. For US spreadsheet enthusiasts who love customizing every cell, Tiller is excellent. For Polish or EU users who want a working financial dashboard out of the box, Tiller is functionally unavailable (no EU bank feeds) — and Freenance is the practical choice. This is a comparison of two genuinely different philosophies: Tiller is "your spreadsheet, our data pipeline." Freenance is "our app, your finances, ready to use."

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What Is Tiller Money?

Tiller was founded in 2014 in Seattle by Peter Polson. Its core idea: take the flexibility and power of spreadsheets, and automate the boring data-entry part. Every day, Tiller's pipeline pulls your bank transactions and appends them to a Google Sheet (or Excel file) you control. From there, you build your own budget — using Tiller's pre-made templates (Foundation Template, Debt Payoff, Net Worth, Savings Budget) or rolling your own.

Core Tiller features:

• Daily transaction feeds from US banks (via Plaid + Yodlee)
• Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel templates
• Foundation Template — categorized transactions + monthly budget
• Debt Payoff template, Net Worth template, Savings Budget template
• Custom rules engine (AutoCat)
• Manual transaction entry
• Pivot tables, charts, and formulas you build yourself
• Active community of template creators and power-users
• One Google account / Microsoft account per subscription

Pricing: $79/year (~$6.58/month). 30-day free trial. No monthly billing option.

Why Tiller Doesn't Work for EU/PL Users

1. US Bank Feeds Only

Tiller's daily feeds run on Plaid and Yodlee, configured for US institutions. mBank, ING Bank Śląski, PKO BP, Santander Polska, Revolut EU, N26 — none of them feed into your Tiller spreadsheet.

2. No PSD2 / EU Open Banking

Tiller is not registered as an AISP in the EU and does not consume EU Open Banking APIs. There is no path to legally read European bank data with Tiller as of 2026.

3. USD-First Templates

The Foundation Template and most community templates assume USD. You can edit cells to PLN, but most formulas, conditional formatting, and category benchmarks are written for US dollar amounts.

4. No EU Tax Wrappers

IKE, IKZE, PEA, ISA, TBSZ, ASK, ISK — none of these are modeled in any standard Tiller template. You would have to build the tax tracking yourself in additional sheets.

5. No EU Broker Sync

US brokerage feeds are available (Schwab, Fidelity, Vanguard). XTB, DEGIRO, BOSSA, Trading 212 EU — not supported.

6. Setup Effort

Tiller is a spreadsheet system, not a turnkey app. Even for US users, a meaningful setup takes 2-5 hours: connecting accounts, configuring categories, customizing the Foundation Template, building AutoCat rules.

Freenance — Native App for the EU/PL Market

Freenance and Tiller represent two different philosophies of personal finance tooling:

• Tiller: maximum flexibility, your spreadsheet, your formulas, manual customization
• Freenance: opinionated app, dashboard ready in minutes, Polish/EU defaults built in

Side-by-side philosophy:

See your full PL/EU financial picture without building a spreadsheet →

Detailed Feature Comparison

Pricing Honesty

• Tiller Money: $79/year (~$6.58/month). No monthly option. Annual cost ≈ 300-360 PLN depending on FX.
• Freenance: 19 PLN/month or ~199 PLN/year (~16.50 PLN/month effective). Annual cost ≈ €46 / $50.

In raw price terms Freenance is roughly 30-45% cheaper than Tiller annually. For a PLN-paying user, Tiller's USD billing also adds 2-3% FX spread on every renewal.

However, the more important honest point: Tiller is not really available to EU/PL users in any meaningful sense. You would pay $79 for a system that cannot read your bank, in a currency that does not match your finances. The pricing comparison is largely academic for non-US users.

Where Tiller Is Genuinely Better

1. Unlimited Customization

Tiller's killer feature is that it is a spreadsheet. If you can write a formula or pivot a table, you can build any view you want — Sankey diagrams, custom Monte Carlo simulations, scenario analysis with sliders, whatever. Freenance is opinionated; Tiller is infinitely malleable.

2. Community Templates

The Tiller community has built hundreds of specialized templates: FIRE calculators, real-estate cash flow trackers, freelance income/expense schedulers, debt avalanche/snowball comparisons. None of these are in Freenance natively.

3. Excel Power-Users

For someone who already lives in Excel for work, Tiller fits naturally. You do not need to learn a new app — you just open the spreadsheet you already know.

4. Data Ownership and Portability

With Tiller your data lives in your Google account or your Excel file. Cancel Tiller, you keep the spreadsheet. With Freenance your data lives in Freenance's cloud (with export options), which is convenient but less "yours" in the pure file-ownership sense.

5. Granular Formula Control

Custom category aggregations, what-if formulas, complex tax projections — anything you can express in a spreadsheet, you can build in Tiller. Freenance's reporting is rich but bounded by what the product team has built.

Where Freenance Is Stronger

1. It Works for EU/PL Users

The first-order difference. Freenance reads Polish and EU bank accounts; Tiller does not.

2. Ready in Minutes, Not Hours

Connect a bank or import a CSV, and within 5-15 minutes you have a working dashboard. Tiller's full setup runs 2-5 hours even for users who already know spreadsheets.

3. Mobile-First Daily Use

Freenance's iOS and Android apps are designed for the moment-of-truth — quick balance check, category drill-down, recurring subscription review. Doing the same in a Google Sheets app on mobile is painful at best.

4. Pre-Built EU/PL Defaults

PLN currency, Polish merchants in the categorization model, IKE/IKZE accounts, XTB/DEGIRO broker sync — all included by default. In Tiller you would need to build them all yourself, on top of paying for a US-only data pipeline.

5. AI Categorization

Freenance auto-categorizes Polish and EU merchants using a trained model. Tiller relies on rule-based AutoCat, which works but requires manual rule creation.

6. Financial Freedom Runway

Freenance's signature feature — a single dashboard number showing months of financial freedom — is pre-built. In Tiller you would build it as a custom cell formula.

7. Polish-Language UI

Native Polish. Tiller templates are English-only.

8. Lower Total Cost of Ownership

Freenance is cheaper in raw pricing and dramatically cheaper in time-cost. If your hour is worth more than $20-30, Tiller's setup cost alone exceeds Freenance's annual subscription.

Connect your Polish bank to Freenance — dashboard in 5 minutes →

Setup Time and Learning Curve — Side by Side

This is one of the most under-discussed dimensions in personal finance tooling.

For a power-user who finds spreadsheet building enjoyable, Tiller's setup is part of the appeal. For a user who just wants their finances visible, Freenance saves dozens of hours per year.

Which One Is Right for You?

Persona 1 — Brian, US data analyst who loves spreadsheets

• Already spends 4 hours/day in Google Sheets at work
• Wants total control over budget formulas
• Earns USD, banks in the US

→ Tiller Money. This is Tiller's ideal user. Freenance is more constrained than what he wants.

Persona 2 — Marta, Polish freelancer earning PLN + EUR

• Uses mBank PLN, Revolut EUR, XTB, IKZE at BOSSA
• Wants a dashboard, not a spreadsheet project
• iOS + Android household

→ Freenance. Tiller cannot read any of her accounts. Freenance is ready in 15 minutes with her full picture.

Persona 3 — Daniel, Polish CFO at a startup

• Excel power-user professionally
• Wants custom what-if scenarios for his personal FIRE plan
• Polish bank + EU brokers + some US assets

→ Probably Freenance, with a custom Sheet alongside. Tiller cannot read his Polish or EU accounts, so its main value proposition does not apply. He can still build custom Sheets using Freenance's CSV exports for scenario modeling, while using Freenance for daily tracking and the core dashboard.

When Spreadsheets Genuinely Beat Apps

It is worth being clear about the cases where the spreadsheet approach is the better tool — not just for Tiller, but for any spreadsheet-based personal finance system:

• Highly idiosyncratic situations: rental properties across multiple jurisdictions with different tax treatments, multi-entity small business cash flow consolidation, equity compensation modeling with vesting cliffs and tax brackets.
• Heavy what-if scenario work: comparing five different mortgage scenarios, building a Monte Carlo retirement simulation, modeling a career break with multiple income paths.
• Deep historical analysis: custom pivots over a decade of data, regression analysis on spending patterns, custom seasonality adjustments.
• Power-user habits: if you already spend hours per week in spreadsheets professionally, the marginal cost of building one more for personal finance is near zero.

For everything else — and that includes daily PFM use for the vast majority of households — a native app is simply less friction. The honest test is: do you actually want to open a spreadsheet every day, or do you want a dashboard?

Migration Path From Tiller to Freenance

If you have been using Tiller Money and are migrating to Freenance:

1. Open your Tiller Google Sheet, go to File → Download → Comma-separated values (CSV).
2. Open Freenance and create accounts matching your real Polish or EU bank accounts.
3. Use Freenance's CSV importer. Map merchants and categories on the first import. Subsequent imports auto-map.
4. Connect any active Polish bank via MT940/CSV import or PSD2 when available.
5. Add EU broker positions (XTB, DEGIRO, BOSSA) via broker CSV exports or direct integrations.
6. Keep your Tiller Sheet as an archive — it is yours forever and a useful historical reference.

Total migration time is typically 30 to 90 minutes for the first pass.

The Right Mental Model

A useful way to think about the choice:

• Tiller treats your finances as data that you analyze in your own workspace.
• Freenance treats your finances as a system that you operate through an app.

Both philosophies are valid. The right choice depends on whether you want to do the analysis yourself in cells you control, or have someone else build the analysis and present it to you. For US spreadsheet enthusiasts with US banks, Tiller is the right shape. For Polish and EU users who want a working dashboard ready in 15 minutes, Freenance is the right shape — and is the only one whose data pipeline actually works for European bank accounts.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Tiller Money available in Poland or anywhere in the EU?

Not in a functional sense. You can subscribe with a credit card, but Tiller's daily transaction feeds run on Plaid and Yodlee configured for US institutions only. No Polish or EU bank can be connected.

Can Freenance be used like a spreadsheet for custom analysis?

Freenance provides CSV export of all transactions, balances, and category aggregations. You can pipe that into your own Google Sheet or Excel file for custom what-if modeling, scenario planning, or one-off analyses — combining Freenance's data layer with a spreadsheet's flexibility.

How does pricing compare for a full year?

Tiller is $79/year (~300-360 PLN depending on FX). Freenance is ~199 PLN/year. Freenance is roughly 30-45% cheaper in absolute terms.

Will Freenance ever support deep spreadsheet integration like Tiller?

Freenance's product direction is opinionated app + CSV exports. There are no current plans to build a Tiller-style daily-sync-to-Google-Sheets pipeline, though the team continues to expand export and API options for power users.

Does Tiller have anything Freenance is planning to copy?

The AutoCat rules engine is well designed and worth borrowing from conceptually. Freenance's categorization is already AI-driven, but a transparent user-facing rules editor (similar to AutoCat) is on the roadmap for power users who want explicit control.

Can I switch from Tiller to Freenance?

Yes. Export your Tiller transactions as CSV (Sheets → File → Download → CSV), then import into Freenance via the standard CSV importer. Historical net worth and cash flow rebuild in minutes.

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Start your free 30-day Freenance trial → — a working financial dashboard for Polish and EU users in under 15 minutes, with PLN/EUR/USD multi-currency, IKE/IKZE, and EU broker sync built in. No spreadsheet required.

Further Reading

• Freenance vs Google Sheets for Finance Tracking
• Freenance vs Excel for Finance Tracking
• Freenance vs Spreadsheets