Great at the budget.
Blind to the balance sheet.
Quicken Simplifi is a clean, affordable budgeting app with one of the best spending-watchlist experiences out there. But it tracks money by login, not by ownership — so once your wealth lives across many custodians and inside trusts and LLCs, it runs out of room. Formation begins where Simplifi ends.
No charge today · Cancel in two clicks · Founding price $199/yr, locked for as long as you stay
What Simplifi does well
Fast, modern budgeting: customizable spending plans, real-time watchlists, projected cash flow, and a genuinely good mobile app at one of the lowest prices in the category. For a single-household, spending-first picture, it's hard to beat for the money — and we'll say so plainly.
Feature by feature
Simplifi
by Quicken
Formation
one plan · $199/yr founding
Simplifi pricing per quicken.com as of June 2026; the headline rate reflects annual billing and will drift with promotions.
The ceiling on a budgeting app
Simplifi tells you where the money went. Not what owns it.
Simplifi is built around the monthly spending plan — and it's excellent at that. What it can't do is tell you that the rental LLC sits inside the trust, reconcile a sale at one broker against a buy at another, model an ISO exercise against AMT, or trace a number to its source. Those aren't missing features; they're a different product. That product is Formation.
Common questions
Is Formation a good Simplifi alternative?
Formation is built for households whose finances have outgrown a single-login tool: money spread across many custodians, more than one legal entity (trusts, LLCs, S-Corps), equity compensation, K-1s, and multi-state tax — unified in one view, organized by the entity that owns each account, with every number traced back to its source. The feature-by-feature table above lays out where Formation differs from Simplifi so you can judge the fit for your own situation.
How much does Formation cost compared to Simplifi?
Formation is one plan with full access — $29.99/month or $349/year list, and founding members lock $17.99/month or $199/year for as long as they stay subscribed. Every subscription starts with a 7-day free trial; there is no free tier and no percentage-of-assets (AUM) fee. The pricing row in the comparison table above shows how that lines up against Simplifi.
Can Formation handle trusts, LLCs, equity compensation, and K-1s?
Yes. Formation models every account by the legal entity that owns it (personal, joint, trust, LLC, S-Corp), tracks RSUs, ISOs, NSOs, and ESPP with alternative-minimum-tax awareness, ingests Schedule K-1s from PDF, and runs cross-custodian, wash-sale-aware tax-loss harvesting across all your brokers at once. AURA, Formation's education-only AI, explains and analyzes these numbers but never gives personalized advice, places trades, or moves money.
Keep budgeting. Add the balance sheet.
Bring every custodian and entity into one cited view — the structural layer a budgeting app was never built to hold.
No charge today · Cancel in two clicks · Founding price $199/yr, locked for as long as you stay
Full pricing details