Requires a YNAB subscription
YNAB tells you what's left.Pacecraft tells you whether that's enough.
A category balance is a number without a deadline. Pacecraft reads it against the calendar, so you find out you're overspending on the 12th instead of the 30th.
One email when it opens up. Nothing else.
Over budget3 days over pace — on track for $710 by the 31st, $110 over budget.
Sample category. Yours are read live from YNAB.
The same category, read two ways
What a balance says
$188 left
True, and comfortable-sounding. It says nothing about the thirteen days you still have to cover, or the rate you've been spending at to get here.
What a pace says
$110 over, projected
Same category, same day. You're spending about three days faster than the month is passing, and that's still fixable — there are thirteen days left to slow down.
Not everything is a pace
A car registration isn't behind schedule
Most budgeting tools divide any budget by the days in the month and call the result a pace. For an annual bill or a repair fund, that's noise: the money was always going out in one lump, so it reads as wildly under pace all month and wildly over the day it's paid.
Pacecraft asks you to say which is which, and then respects the answer. Only categories you spend across the month are paced; the rest keep their own treatment and stay out of the pace tallies entirely.
Groceries
Over budget
3 days over pace — on track for $710 by the 31st.
Spread across the month, so it gets a pace.
Home Repair
$112 left
$288 of $400 used.
Goes out in bursts. Measured against its budget, not the month.
Car Registration
$96
Paid
$96 of $96 set aside.
A bill you either paid or didn't.
Every category starts as spread-across-the-month. You change the ones that aren't, from a single settings screen — nothing is guessed for you.
Open any category
The day it runs out, not just the fact that it will
Every category has its own page. Your spending is drawn day by day through today, then carried forward at the rate you've actually been spending at — so the projection meets the budget line on a specific date you can plan around.
Underneath it sits the day-by-day view: a strip for the whole month and a bar chart showing how many days' worth of budget each day burned, with unusually large transactions flagged so one annual bill doesn't get mistaken for a habit.
At this rate Groceries runs out around the 26th, $110 over by the 31st.
Rollups
Dining out, coffee and takeout are one food-away-from-home budget
YNAB already groups categories. Turn on Pace as one (rollup) for a group and Pacecraft paces its combined budget and spending as a single card — the number you actually manage — instead of three bars that each look fine on their own.
Every category in the group counts, whether or not you'd normally track it on its own, since money moved between them would otherwise drain the total without showing up as spending anywhere.
One switch, from Category Settings.
Over budget4 days over pace — on track for $327 by the 31st, $57 over budget.
Getting started, once you're in
- 01
Sign in with your email
We email you a link. No password to create, no card to enter.
- 02
Connect YNAB
OAuth, read-only — Pacecraft can never change your budget. Your free trial starts here.
- 03
Read your pace
From day two of the month onward, you know where you stand.
Built for how budgets actually behave
Pace where pace means something
Every category you spend across the month gets the bar above: spent against elapsed, with a projection for month end. Categories that don't work that way are deliberately left out of it rather than given a number that looks precise and isn't.
See which days ran hot
Open a category and every day of the month is laid out as a strip, with a bar chart under it showing how many days' worth of budget each day burned. Four tall bars at the start followed by short ones is a different story from eleven steady ones, and the monthly total can't tell them apart.
Outliers called out
One annual insurance bill can make a category look wildly over pace. Pacecraft flags transactions that are unusually large for the category so you can tell a real problem from a one-off.
Categories you ignore, ignored
Turn off the categories you don't actively manage and they leave the dashboard entirely — no pace, no tally, no card competing for attention with the ones you do manage.
Questions worth asking
Do I need YNAB to use this?
Yes, and there's no way around it. Pacecraft has no budgeting of its own — it reads the budget you already keep in YNAB and shows you the pace of it. You'll need an active YNAB subscription, which is separate from and not included in your Pacecraft subscription.
Can Pacecraft change my YNAB budget?
No. Pacecraft requests read-only access and has no ability to write to your YNAB account. It reads your categories and this month's transactions, and that's it.
Can I use it right now?
Not yet. Pacecraft is finished enough to describe and not open to sign-ups, so the only thing on offer today is a place on the early access list.
What happens to the address I leave?
It gets one email, the day Pacecraft opens up. No newsletter, no drip campaign, and it isn't sold or shared. Reply to that email asking to come off the list and the record is deleted.
How do I sign in?
With your email address. We send you a link, you click it, you're in — there's no password to create, forget or have stolen. Your Pacecraft account is separate from your YNAB account, which you connect afterwards, so losing access to one never locks you out of the other.
Do I need a card to start the trial?
No. When it opens, the 14-day trial starts the moment you connect YNAB — not when you sign up — so nothing is ticking while you're still getting set up. No payment details are collected until you choose to subscribe.
How fresh is the data?
Pacecraft re-syncs from YNAB every hour, and you can trigger a refresh yourself from the dashboard whenever you've just entered transactions.
I have several budgets in YNAB. Which one does it use?
You pick during setup, and you can change it later.
What happens to my data if I leave?
Disconnecting your YNAB account from Settings immediately and permanently deletes everything Pacecraft stored — tokens, cached categories, transactions and any groups you saved.
Is this an official YNAB product?
No. Pacecraft is an independent companion app built on YNAB's public API, and is not affiliated with or endorsed by YNAB.
Find out where you stand
Pacecraft isn't open to everyone yet. Leave an address and you'll get one email the day it is.
One email when Pacecraft opens up, and nothing else — no newsletter, no drip campaign. Unsubscribing is a reply.