Piere Review: AI-Powered Budgeting

What Is Piere?

Piere is a budgeting and financial management app that uses AI to make creating and tracking your budget easier. It has both free and paid plans, but unlike many other budgeting apps, the free tier offers plenty of functionality, including multiple account connections and transaction and budget management. The app was launched by Yuval Shuminer in 2022, and when Mint announced it was closing, its popularity skyrocketed.

What Does It Offer?

Although Piere has an ambitious product roadmap, its primary features are an AI-driven budget, net worth tracker, and spending tracker. Here’s what you need to know about these features.

Two-Click Budget

Making a budget can be challenging, but Piere promises to make it simple by analyzing your financial history and recommending a budget based on your historical spending. Within two clicks, it provides a “tuned” monthly budget which you can use to track your income and expenses.

The two-click budget may work for some people since it uses 90 days of history to recommend your plan. But Piere’s budget has a major problem. It doesn’t require your budget to be balanced. My 90-day transaction window coincided with paying for summer child care and a major home upgrade.

We saved in advance for these expenses. However, the initial budget recommended by Piere showed a $4100 budget deficit every month. I was also shocked to see that Piere’s budget overlooked my mortgage payment.

However, manually adjusting the budget is simple, and tracking your expenses relative to your budget is truly painless.

Automated Categorization of Transactions

Piere automatically categorizes transactions based on the primary vendor. This is important because the budget it recommends is based on your transaction history. While I wasn’t impressed with the initial categorization of transactions (transfers were characterized as car payments, for example), I was impressed by how well Piere “learned” the new rules.

As soon as I identified savings transfers, charitable giving, and gym memberships, Piere applied the rule to all related transactions.

Categorizing Venmo Transactions

As a heavy Venmo user, I appreciate that Piere “looks inside” your Venmo account, and treats those transactions as meaningful transactions. It even treats reimbursements as reductions in spending instead of as “other” income. I primarily use Venmo to pay for a handful of services, so I couldn’t test the reimbursement feature. However, plenty of Piere’s online reviews give accolades to this feature.

Shared Transaction, Smart Reimbursement, Pooling Money and More

Piere is doubling down on “shared” finances that don’t include a significant other. Piere is positioning itself as a replacement for Venmo by allowing friends to share transactions and reconcile transactions within the app. It’s also created a financial Pool that’s perfect for a trip or an office PowerBall Pool.

Net Worth Tracking

Piere isn’t merely a spending tracker. It looks at your whole financial picture. Piere allows you to connect to traditional brokerages like Fidelity, Charles Schwab, Betterment, Wealthfront, and Vanguard, and even some crypto exchanges such as Coinbase. These connections are used to track your net worth over time. It’s worth noting that historic net worth tracking will be a premium feature, and users will have to upgrade to Piere Plus to use this feature.

Are There Any Fees?

Piere currently offers a free plan, called Piere Purple. There is also a Piere Premium plan, which costs $10/month ($119.99 paid annually). Here's a table that breaks down what you get with each plan:  

With Piere Premium, you also get a money-back guarantee and access to Moves, a new AI-powered tool that automatically moves money for you to help you meet your goals faster.

How Does Piere Compare?

Overall, Piere offers a robust, easy-to-use, easy-to-customize, and intelligent financial management platform. Piere’s free budgeting tool is better than most premium budgeting tools (although YNAB or Tiller may be better for those with complex budgeting needs).

Piere’s net worth tracking tool offers insights that rival the insights from Empower. Piere’s free option may truly be the best alternative to Mint.

How Do I Open A Piere Account?

To get the app, visit the App Store and download Piere or you can use Piere from the Google Play Store. You’ll need an email address and password to get started. Once you’ve completed a profile, you can connect your accounts to Piere. Piere uses a third-party service that only reads information from your accounts. Once that’s done, you can start reviewing your budget and net worth and categorizing transactions.

Is It Safe And Secure?

Piere uses a third-party service to encrypt information and keep it secure. The app also allows users to set up multi-factor authentication to ensure that information is kept safe and secure. Piere makes a big deal about being SOC 2 compliant. This simply means that it follows best practices for ensuring that banks and other financial institutions can connect to the app. Overall, Piere has excellent safeguards in place to minimize the risks associated with identity theft.

How Do I Contact Piere?

Piere’s headquarters is located at 910 17th St SE, Fort Lauderdale, Florida 33316. You can get in touch with the team by emailing [email protected]. If you download Piere, you can contact the development team by hitting the Gear Icon in the upper right corner and then using the “Contact The Team” section. The site doesn’t currently show any phone numbers, and it doesn’t currently have a chat option for users.

Is It Worth It?

Right now, Piere is an excellent app, and its product roadmap is promising. Personally, I’m eager to see how the AI-driven insights perform when they are released. The concept of “roll-over” budgeting is also very exciting. Because Piere is currently free, it is well worth downloading. The budgeting feature is excellent, and I’m impressed by the spending tracker.

Even if you don't want to pay for Piere Premium's added features, the free version is still worth using for most people. It’s an easy-to-use app that lets you budget, manage your spending, and track your finances.

Check out Piere here >>