A spreadsheet is the honest baseline for tracking your net worth: flexible, free, private, and yours forever. Plenty of people track their whole financial life in one — and for a while, it's the right tool. This is a fair look at where it stops being enough, written by people who'll happily admit a spreadsheet is fine until it isn't.
What a spreadsheet does well
Let's be honest about the free option first:
- Total flexibility. Any asset, any layout, any formula. Nothing is off-limits.
- Real privacy. It's a file on your machine. No third party sees it.
- Free, forever. No subscription, no lock-in, no account.
- You understand it. You built every row, so you trust every number.
If you hold a couple of accounts and check in once a quarter, a spreadsheet is genuinely fine. Don't let anyone sell you out of it.
Where it quietly breaks down
The trouble isn't day one — it's month six. A spreadsheet goes stale exactly when life gets busy:
- Prices are manual. Every stock, ETF and coin has to be updated by hand. The day you stop, your "net worth" is fiction.
- Crypto is painful. Balances move on their own across exchanges and wallets. Keeping a sheet current with on-chain activity is a second job.
- Currency drift. Multi-currency holdings need fresh FX rates to net out correctly — another manual lookup.
- No history you can trust. Unless you snapshot every month religiously, you can't see how your net worth actually changed over time.
- One typo, wrong total. A mis-keyed cell or a broken formula silently skews the one number you're trying to track.
- It's never on your phone in a useful way. Checking — let alone updating — a complex sheet on mobile is miserable.
None of these is fatal alone. Together, they mean the sheet drifts out of date, and a net-worth number you don't trust is worse than none.
At a glance
| Spreadsheet | Krosos | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | €6/mo · €60/yr |
| Privacy | Your file | Private instance per user |
| Live prices | Manual | Automatic |
| Crypto balances | Manual | 7 exchanges + on-chain, auto |
| EU bank & broker sync | None | Open banking, rolling out |
| History & trends | DIY snapshots | Tracked automatically |
| Effort to stay current | High | Low |
When it's worth switching
Switch when the upkeep costs you more than €60 a year is worth — usually when:
- You hold crypto across more than one exchange or wallet, and reconciling it by hand has become a chore.
- You have five or more accounts, and updating prices is an afternoon you keep postponing.
- You want trustworthy history — to see net worth over time without manual monthly snapshots.
- You've caught the sheet out of date more than once and stopped trusting the total.
If none of that is you yet, stay on the spreadsheet with a clear conscience.
What you keep, what you gain
The fear in leaving a spreadsheet is losing the privacy and control. Krosos is built so you don't have to:
- Privacy by architecture. Every customer gets their own isolated instance, not a row in a shared database — closer to "your file" than a typical cloud app.
- Read-only, always. Connections can only read balances; the app can't move your money. (See is it safe to connect exchange API keys?)
- Export and leave. One-click export of everything, any time — back to a spreadsheet if you want. No lock-in.
- What it automates: live prices, crypto balances across seven exchanges plus on-chain wallets, EU bank sync (rolling out), and your whole net worth — stocks, crypto, cash, funds and property, minus the mortgage and loans against them — in one always-current number.
The honest bottom line
A spreadsheet is the right first tool, and a fine last one if you like the upkeep. Krosos is for the point where the manual work outweighs the €60 — the private, EU-built way to keep the whole picture current without the afternoon of data entry, on your own instance, with one-click export if you ever want to go back.
See how your data is protected, compare all the EU trackers, or try the live demo.