The Desk
About Vault Daily: Who We Are and How We Test
We are a small independent newsroom that treats budgeting apps the way wire services treat earnings reports — with skepticism, stopwatches and real money.
New York — Vault Daily is an independent, reader-funded publication covering the software that manages household money: budgeting apps, expense trackers, savings coaches and the new wave of AI finance agents. We accept no sponsored placements, run no display advertising, and buy every product we review at retail. Every score on this site comes from a standardized four-week test run by a named reporter.
Our Mission
Vault Daily was founded in 2023 by two former wire-service reporters who kept watching friends overpay for budgeting software that a free tool could beat. The premise of this newsroom is simple: the apps that touch your bank account deserve the same scrutiny as the banks themselves. We report on features, pricing, data practices and — above all — whether a tool actually changes how its users spend and save.
Our coverage sits at the intersection of consumer technology and personal finance literacy. When we rank an app first in a list like our 2026 AI budgeting rankings, that position was earned in testing, not negotiated in a sales call. No company covered here has ever seen a review before publication.
The Reporting Desk
Dominic Reyes
Senior Personal Finance Correspondent
Twelve years covering consumer fintech, from the first neobanks to today's AI money agents. Leads our annual budgeting-app rankings and every head-to-head test.
Sarah Linden
Reviews Editor, Consumer Technology
Former product analyst turned journalist. Owns our scoring rubric, runs usability passes on every app, and edits the desk's guides and glossary.
Greta Halvorsen
Managing Editor
Edited a syndicated money column for a decade before co-founding Vault Daily. Sets editorial policy, signs off on every score, and writes our market-trend coverage.
How We Test: The Four-Week Protocol
Every app we score goes through the same protocol, designed in 2023 and refined each January. Week one is setup: we connect real checking, credit and savings accounts and time how long a new user needs to reach a working budget. Weeks two and three are daily use — our tester logs every transaction the app touches and notes each miscategorized expense, late sync or broken rule. Week four is the coaching audit, where we measure whether the app's advice produced any measurable change in our tester's cash flow.
Scores run from 0 to 5 across five weighted categories: ease of use (20%), tracking accuracy (25%), AI and automation quality (25%), financial-literacy value (15%) and price and data practices (15%). The category scores, never an editor's mood, determine the headline rating. When two apps finish within 0.2 points, we publish a dedicated head-to-head — as we did in noruvo vs fezelo this June.
Editorial Independence and Corrections
Vault Daily earns revenue from reader contributions only. Outbound links to app developers are editorial pointers, not advertisements, and carry no affiliate commission. If a developer asks us to change a score, the answer is no — and the request itself becomes reportable. Errors are corrected at the top of the affected article with a dated note, never silently.
Questions about our methods, or a tip about an app we should test next? Write to the desk at tips@vaultdaily.cfd. We read everything; we reply to most.