Why Vault refuses your bank login
The leading net-worth apps are aggregators. They connect to your accounts, learn your habits, and are paid by someone other than you — through advertising, or through introductions to advisors who pay for the lead. The product is good. You are not the customer.
That model has a second cost, quieter than the first. An aggregator can only show what it can plug into. Foreign accounts, a flat with a mortgage, a stake in a private company, coins in self-custody — the assets that make a balance sheet interesting are exactly the ones the connector cannot see. So the app shows a confident total that is wrong, and the serious tracker goes back to the spreadsheet.
The spreadsheet is honest and fragile. It bends to any asset you can describe, and it breaks on currencies, on charts, on a phone, and on the day you forget which tab held the mortgage.
You own the data. You enter it. We are paid to show it to you and to no one else.
So Vault is built the other way around. No bank credentials, because none are needed — prices come from public markets, and everything else is yours to state. A subscription, so there is nothing downstream that needs your transactions. And encryption on your side of the wire, so the promise is a property of the system rather than a paragraph in a policy.
The second half is direction. Current net worth is half a question. The other half is whether you are getting closer, and how much further — which is arithmetic on assumptions you should be able to see and change. Vault puts them next to the number they produce. It does not congratulate you, does not count streaks, and does not tell you what to buy.
A quiet tool you open once a month, that tells you exactly where you stand and how far is left.