ChatGPT Wants Your Bank Data. DecentWealth Never Asks for It.

On May 15, OpenAI released a personal finance experience inside ChatGPT. It lets you connect your bank accounts, credit cards, and investment portfolios through Plaid, then asks GPT-5.5 to reason about your spending, your savings, and your financial future.

It's impressive technology. But it's built on a premise we fundamentally disagree with: that you need to hand over your financial data to understand your financial life.

What ChatGPT Finance actually does

ChatGPT Pro users in the U.S. (at $200/month) can now link accounts from over 12,000 financial institutions. Once connected, ChatGPT creates a dashboard of your portfolio performance, spending, subscriptions, and upcoming payments.

You can ask questions like "Am I spending more than last month?" or "Help me plan to buy a house in five years."

OpenAI also introduced "financial memories," where ChatGPT stores context you share about your goals, debts, and plans, so future conversations feel more personalized.

It's a smart product. And for some people, it will be genuinely useful.

But let's talk about what it costs. Not just the $200/month. The other cost.

The price you don't see on the invoice

To use ChatGPT Finance, you give OpenAI read access to your balances, transactions, investments, and liabilities.

They say they can't see full account numbers or make changes to your accounts. They say you can disconnect anytime and your synced data gets deleted within 30 days.

That's reasonable language from a company trying to build trust. But here's what's also true:

Your transaction history tells a story that goes way beyond your bank balance. A grocery bill, a subscription pattern, a late-night purchase, a recurring transfer to a savings account. Each one is a data point. Together, they paint a detailed portrait of how you live, what you value, and where you're vulnerable.

OpenAI now has a product that collects all of those data points and runs them through an AI model. Even with the best intentions, that's a concentration of sensitive information that didn't need to exist.

And the timing is worth noting.

This launch happened the same week a class-action lawsuit accused OpenAI of sharing user conversation data with other tech companies. Maybe that's a coincidence. But if you're the kind of person who pays attention to these things (and if you're reading this, you probably are), the optics aren't great.

Why we built DecentWealth differently

We started DecentWealth with a simple question: why does tracking your net worth require creating an account?

Think about it. You want to see your stocks, your crypto, your real estate, and your retirement accounts in one place. That's a math problem. It's addition. You don't need to give a company access to your bank to add up numbers you already know.

So we built an app that runs entirely on your device.

We said NO to:

• accounts
• servers that store your data
• analytics SDKs tracking what you tap

Your data lives on your iPhone, iPad, MacBook, and Apple Watch, and nowhere else.

• For crypto, you paste a public wallet address. That's a read-only, publicly available address that reveals your balances but gives nobody access to move your funds. Know your bags without giving up your keys.
• For stocks and ETFs, you search and add your holdings manually. For real estate, vehicles, and other assets, you enter the values yourself.

Two philosophies, one problem

Let's be fair about what's happening here.

Both DecentWealth and ChatGPT Finance are trying to solve the same problem: your financial life is scattered across too many apps, wallets, and accounts, and you can't see the full picture.

• OpenAI's answer: give us access to everything and we'll show you the picture (and give you advice while we're at it).
• DecentWealth answer: keep access to everything yourself and we'll give you the tools to build that picture on your own device.

These aren't just different features. They're different philosophies about who should hold your financial data.

The numbers behind the noise

Here's what's interesting about OpenAI's launch from a market perspective: they said over 200 million people come to ChatGPT every month with finance-related questions. Two hundred million people, every month, looking for a better way to understand their money.

The demand for tools that help people see their full financial picture is massive and growing. We've known that since day one. Now a $300 billion company is saying it too.

The question is how you want to meet that demand. With a product that requires your bank credentials and costs $200/month? Or with one that's more affordable and private?

What this means for you

If you're the kind of person who uses 2-4 wallets across different crypto exchanges, holds some stocks through Robinhood or Fidelity, maybe owns some property, and just wants to see it all in one place without another company mining your data, you're exactly who we built this for.

You don't need an AI to tell you your portfolio is too heavy in one asset class. You can see it in the allocation chart. You don't need a chatbot to calculate your net worth. You need an app that adds it up without phoning home.

DecentWealth is free to download on the App Store. No account. No bank linking. No data leaves your device.

If that sounds decent to you, we're on the same page.

📱 Download DecentWealth on the App Store