Pocketbook vs Redbark

For years, Pocketbook was the budgeting app in Australia. It was free, it connected to your bank, it automatically categorised your spending, and at its peak it had around 800,000 users.¹ Then its owner, Zip, shut it down on 5 August 2022 to refocus on its core buy-now-pay-later business.² If you are here, you have probably been looking for a proper replacement ever since.

Redbark is built for that gap, with one important upgrade.

How Pocketbook connected to your bank

Pocketbook connected through Yodlee using screen scraping. You handed over your internet-banking login, and it logged in as you to read your transactions. At the time that was the only option. It is also the practice the Australian Government has since called "fundamentally unsafe" and is moving to phase out in favour of Open Banking.³

How Redbark connects

Redbark uses Open Banking (the Consumer Data Right) via Fiskil, an accredited data recipient.⁴ You log in at your own bank, approve a specific, time-limited consent, and your banking password never leaves your bank. It is the regulated system built to replace the screen scraping Pocketbook relied on.

Your data, in your tools

Pocketbook kept your data inside its own app, in its categories, on its dashboard. Redbark takes your Australian bank transactions and syncs them into the tools you choose: YNAB, Google Sheets, Actual Budget, or your own systems via webhooks and an API. It stores none of your transactions. Every sync fetches them live and writes them to your destination.

If you loved how automatic and hands-off Pocketbook felt but want to own where your data lives, that is the trade Redbark makes.

Pocketbook vs Redbark: at a glance

What you give up, and what you gain

Pocketbook was free and Redbark is a paid subscription. That is the honest trade. In return you get a tool that is still running, connects over the safer Open Banking path, syncs in real time, and puts your data in tools you control.

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