Every new finance app asks the same question within the first thirty seconds: can we connect to your bank? Link your checking account, your credit card, your brokerage, your mortgage servicer. Hand over read access to every dollar that moves through your life, and we will show you something useful in return.
Most people say yes without thinking much about it. The convenience is real. But so is the risk. In 2023 alone, financial services accounted for the highest volume of reported data breaches of any industry in the United States, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center. Every connection is a surface. Every linked account is another place where something can go wrong.
Brevizo, a personal net worth tracking app, has taken a position that most fintech companies would consider heresy: it does not connect to anything. No bank feeds. No Plaid integration. No screen scraping. Users enter their own numbers, by hand, on their own schedule.
That is the whole product. A clean dashboard where you type in what you own and what you owe. The app does the math and shows you your net worth, broken down by category, tracked over time, presented visually so you can see the trajectory at a glance.
It sounds almost quaint in 2026, a year when open banking APIs are connecting more accounts than ever and the average American has linked their financial data to at least three third-party services. But the Brevizo team argues that the industry’s obsession with automated data collection has created a false choice: you either share everything or you track nothing.
“There is a real group of people who want to understand their financial position but do not want to hand over the keys to do it,” said Priya Rao, a fintech analyst who covers consumer products for Meridian Research. “Manual entry sounds like a step backward until you realize that for some users, it is actually the point.”
The privacy argument is not theoretical. Several prominent financial aggregation services have faced scrutiny over how they store and share user credentials. Screen-scraping methods, where a third party logs in as the user to pull data, remain common despite criticism from banks and security researchers. Even token-based connections have raised questions about data retention and secondary use.
Brevizo sidesteps all of this by simply not participating. There is no data pipeline to secure because there is no data pipeline. The numbers in the app are whatever the user typed. That means there is nothing to breach, nothing to scrape, and no third-party token sitting in a database somewhere.
The tradeoff is friction. Updating a Brevizo dashboard takes a few minutes of manual work. Checking a bank balance, looking up a current investment value, entering a mortgage payoff amount. It is not hard, but it is not automatic either. The app is betting that the people who care about this kind of tracking are willing to spend five minutes a month to keep the picture current.
That bet seems to resonate with a particular demographic. Privacy-conscious professionals in their late twenties to mid-forties, people who have enough financial complexity to need a tracker but enough awareness of data risks to be uncomfortable linking their accounts to yet another app.
“I had Mint for years. Then it shut down and I had to move everything to Credit Karma, which I also did not love,” said David Chen, a 34-year-old software engineer in Seattle who started using a manual net worth tracker after his third financial app changed ownership. “At some point I just wanted something where my bank login was not involved.”
The net worth focus also differentiates Brevizo from the crowded budgeting app market. Most consumer finance tools are built around spending: where did your money go this month, and how can you spend less of it. Brevizo does not track spending at all. It tracks position. Assets on one side, liabilities on the other, one number at the bottom.
The Brevizo features include visual breakdowns of asset categories like cash, investments, real estate, and vehicles, set against liabilities including mortgages, student loans, credit cards, and auto loans. A trend line shows net worth over time. The interface is minimal by design, with no alerts, no gamification, and no urgency cues.
Financial planners have mixed feelings about the manual approach. Some see it as a step backward from the real-time visibility that automated tools provide. Others argue that the act of manually entering numbers creates a kind of financial awareness that passive tracking never does.
“When you type in your student loan balance yourself, you confront that number in a way you do not when it just appears on a screen,” said Marcus Allen, a financial coach who works primarily with clients in their thirties. “There is something about the manual process that makes it stick.”
Whether that stickiness translates into a sustainable business remains an open question. The fintech industry has spent a decade training users to expect automation. Asking them to do the work themselves is a contrarian bet. But in a market where the alternative is handing over your most sensitive financial data to a company you found through an Instagram ad, contrarian might be exactly what some people are looking for.
Brevizo is not trying to replace bank-linked tools. It is trying to serve the people who opted out, and the ones who never opted in. Your numbers, entered by you, stored by you, seen by you. Nothing else required.
