Comparison

BankBridge vs Tiller

5 min read
BankBridge is a $5/mo-per-bank MCP server giving Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and 26 other agents read-only access to your bank data via 12 live-fetch tools. Tiller Money is $79/yr (about $6.58/mo flat) and pushes your transactions into a Google Sheet or Excel workbook you fully own. Tiller is for spreadsheet people. BankBridge is for chat people. They can coexist.

The short version

Tiller Money is $79/yr. It connects to your banks and pushes your transactions into a Google Sheet (or Excel workbook) you own. The sheet has templates: a transaction register, a monthly budget, a category tracker, a yearly dashboard. You customize the sheet however you want, because it's your sheet.

BankBridge is $5/mo per connected bank. It's a hosted MCP server that gives the AI agent you already use (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, Codex, and 25 others) read-only access to your bank accounts. There's no sheet. The interface is your chat.

Both products solve the "I don't want to be locked into a finance app's UI" problem. They just route around the lock-in in different directions.

What Tiller is great at

Genuine credit where it's due. Tiller has a devoted base for good reasons:

  • You own the sheet. It lives in your Google Drive (or local Excel file). If Tiller closes tomorrow, the sheet keeps existing.
  • Template library. Monthly budget, debt snowball, savings tracker, yearly dashboard, business tracker. All free, community-extended.
  • Deep customization. It's a spreadsheet. You can write any formula, any pivot, any chart. If you think in cells, this is heaven.
  • AutoCat rules. Smart categorization that you train: a Tiller-specific scripting feature that categorizes transactions by merchant rules.
  • One flat price. $79/yr covers everything, any number of banks, any number of sheets.

If your idea of a good finance product is "give me the data in a spreadsheet and get out of my way," Tiller is exactly that. We're not trying to beat it on its own terms.

What BankBridge is, exactly

A hosted Model Context Protocol server. Connect your bank once at bankbridge.money. Paste an API key into your agent. From then on, the agent can call 12 read-only tools whenever it needs bank data:

  • List accounts and balances
  • List or search transactions with filters
  • Summarize spending by category, merchant, or month
  • Detect recurring charges
  • Cashflow summaries (income vs expenses)
  • Investment holdings and investment transactions

Live-fetch on every call. Nothing about transactions or balances cached on our servers. Access tokens stored AES-256-GCM encrypted. Read-only by design: we can't move money even if we wanted to.

Both are "bring your own interface"

The most interesting thing about these two products is how similar their philosophy is. Both refuse to be a destination app. Both let you keep using a tool you already love.

  • Tiller says: your interface is Google Sheets. We push the data there. You make the dashboard.
  • BankBridge says: your interface is your AI agent. We expose the data via MCP. You ask the questions.

Both bypass the "open the finance app, learn the finance app, use the finance app's specific reports" workflow. The difference is just whether you think in cells or in sentences.

They can coexist

Plenty of overlap potential. Tiller writes your data to the sheet on a daily schedule, where your monthly budget and year-over-year pivots live. BankBridge lets your agent answer ad-hoc questions in chat: "Did my Atmos bill go up this month?", "What's my YTD freelance income?", "Find any subscription that's grown more than 10% in the last six months."

The sheet is your structured monthly cadence. The agent is your every-other-day "I want to know one specific thing" surface. They don't compete on those.

Pricing math

Tiller: $79/yr, billed yearly. That's about $6.58/mo flat, any number of banks.

BankBridge: $5/mo per connected bank. One bank is $5/mo. Two banks is $10/mo. Five banks is $25/mo.

Crossover is around one bank. With one bank, BankBridge is $60/yr versus Tiller's $79. Two banks, Tiller wins on price. Five banks, Tiller wins by a lot. Different products though; we're comparing apples to spreadsheets.

If you have to pick one

Pick Tiller if: you love spreadsheets, you want the data dropped into a sheet you own, you have multiple banks, you like building your own dashboards.

Pick BankBridge if: you already live in Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, or Gemini; you'd rather ask questions in chat than build formulas; you want a read-only bridge for the one or two banks that actually matter.

Or run both. Tiller for the monthly review, BankBridge for the daily questions. Questions: hello@greatwork.company.

FAQ

Can BankBridge populate a Google Sheet too?

Indirectly. Ask your agent 'export every transaction this month as CSV' and paste the result into Sheets. It's a few extra seconds but it works. Tiller does that part natively on a schedule.

I'm a spreadsheet nerd. Should I even read this?

Probably keep Tiller. If your monthly rhythm is opening the sheet and looking at your dashboard, that's exactly what Tiller is built for. BankBridge adds a different shape of interaction (chat) on top, not a replacement for the sheet.

Tiller is one price for everything. BankBridge is per bank. Why?

Each bank connection has real cost on our side (the upstream aggregator charges us per connected account). Pricing per bank keeps the model honest. One bank: $5/mo. Two banks: $10/mo. If you have 5+ banks, Tiller's $79/yr flat is cheaper, fair.

Does my data leave my sheet?

Tiller writes to a sheet you own. BankBridge live-fetches per call and caches nothing. Neither product is hoarding your transactions. The trust model is different (Google Sheets vs our hosted server), but both are honest about it.