Your spreadsheet knows everything.
Until it doesn't.
A spreadsheet is the most flexible financial tool there is — and the most manual. It's only as current as the last time you touched it, and it never shows its work. Formation keeps the flexibility, but the data stays live, cited, and reasoned over by AI.
No charge today · Cancel in two clicks · Founding price $199/yr, locked for as long as you stay
What a spreadsheet does well
Total control, total flexibility, zero cost — it does exactly what you tell it. For a sharp DIY-er, a good model is genuinely powerful, and plenty of complex households run on one. We're not here to mock the spreadsheet; we're here to automate the tedious 80% and keep the part you love.
Feature by feature
Spreadsheet
Excel · Sheets
Formation
one plan · $199/yr founding
“Spreadsheet” means a self-maintained Excel or Google Sheets model — the real incumbent for many complex households.
The spreadsheet question
The most honest tool you'll outgrow.
A spreadsheet is only as good as your discipline to update it — and the moment your money spans five custodians, three entities, and a pile of K-1s, maintenance becomes a second job, and one stray cell becomes a wrong decision. Formation keeps the flexibility (export anything, model anything) but the data stays live and cited, so you stop being the integration layer.
Common questions
Is Formation a good Spreadsheet 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 Spreadsheet so you can judge the fit for your own situation.
How much does Formation cost compared to Spreadsheet?
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 Spreadsheet.
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 the flexibility. Lose the manual entry.
Bring every account and entity into one live, cited view — and still export to your own model anytime.
No charge today · Cancel in two clicks · Founding price $199/yr, locked for as long as you stay
Full pricing details