Frequently Asked Questions

AmberLark is a calm household budgeting app that connects to your bank accounts via Plaid, automatically syncs transactions, and uses AI to help categorize spending against the budgets you set. It supports traditional budgets, pool budgets for irregular expenses, and multi-user organizations for shared household budgeting.

AmberLark is built for couples, families, and shared households who want clear visibility into everyday money without relying on spreadsheets or rigid finance tools. It is especially helpful when more than one person needs to stay aligned on spending and irregular expenses.

AmberLark focuses on calm household clarity. Compared with spreadsheets, it syncs bank data automatically and reduces manual work. Compared with rigid budgeting tools, it supports pool budgets and a gentler household-first experience. Compared with dashboard-style finance apps, it emphasizes budgeting, shared visibility, and AI categorization that learns how your household actually works.

Yes. AmberLark supports multi-user organizations. You can create an organization and invite your partner or household members. Everyone shares the same budgets, categories, and transaction views. AI-learned categorization patterns are shared across the organization, so everyone benefits from each person's input. Owner and Member roles control access levels.

When you categorize a transaction (assigning it to a category or budget), AmberLark's AI records the merchant name and Plaid category alongside your choice. Over time, the AI uses these learned patterns to automatically categorize new transactions from the same merchants. It learns at the budget level, not just category level, making it more precise. Every auto-applied change has a full audit trail and can be undone with one click.

A traditional budget creates recurring allocations tied to specific dates (e.g., $500 per month for groceries). A pool budget allocates a lump sum over a flexible date range (e.g., $2,000 for Q1 travel). Pool budgets are ideal for irregular expenses like vacations, annual insurance premiums, or quarterly subscriptions.

Yes. AmberLark supports transaction splits, allowing you to divide a single transaction across multiple categories or budgets. For example, a $200 Costco purchase can be split into $150 for groceries and $50 for household supplies.

AmberLark offers Budget vs. Actual reports (showing variance between planned and actual spending), Profit and Loss reports (income vs. expenses by category), a searchable Transaction Explorer, and Duplicate Transaction Detection. All reports are available on every plan.

AmberLark supports transaction import and export. If you need your transaction data outside the app, you can export it from the transaction tools for your own records or analysis.

AmberLark is a web app. It does not currently have a native iOS or Android app, but it is designed to work in a mobile-responsive browser.

AmberLark uses Plaid, an industry-standard service used by thousands of financial apps, to connect to over 11,000 financial institutions. Plaid handles the connection directly with your bank. AmberLark never sees or stores your bank login credentials. Our access is read-only — we can see transactions and balances but can never move money.

Yes. AmberLark uses read-only access via Plaid's Transactions product. We explicitly do not use Plaid's Auth product, which means AmberLark can never initiate payments, transfers, or any money movement. Your bank credentials are managed by Plaid and never stored by AmberLark. Two-factor authentication is available for all accounts.

No. AmberLark uses read-only Plaid access and does not use Plaid's Auth product. That means AmberLark cannot initiate transfers, payments, or any other kind of money movement.

AmberLark supports institutions available through Plaid's coverage in the United States and Canada. Availability depends on the institutions Plaid supports in those regions.

AmberLark includes connection health monitoring. If a linked institution needs to be reconnected or refreshed, the product will show that status so you can restore syncing.

AmberLark uses connection-based pricing. All features are included on every plan — the only difference is the number of bank connections allowed. You can sign up for free and choose a plan when you are ready to connect your banks. Plans can be upgraded or downgraded at any time. See current pricing.

A bank connection is a linked institution via Plaid. If you connect to Chase and it pulls in your checking, savings, and credit card, that counts as one connection. Each separate institution (Chase, Bank of America, etc.) is one connection, regardless of how many accounts that institution has.

Yes. You can cancel your subscription at any time through the Stripe customer portal, accessible from your AmberLark billing page. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period.