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Snowball or avalanche isn’t really the hard part of paying off debt — most people pick one in about thirty seconds and move on. The actual friction is everything after that: updating balances, watching a payoff date creep closer, not losing motivation three months in. That’s the job these five tools do differently, from a spreadsheet you never pay for to an app that pulls your real balances automatically. Here’s what each one costs and who it’s actually built for, checked against the providers’ current pricing.
Quick refresher: snowball vs. avalanche
Snowball pays minimums on everything, then throws every spare dollar at your smallest balance first. When that one’s gone, the payment rolls into the next-smallest, and the visible wins keep you going. Avalanche does the same mechanics but targets your highest interest rate first, which saves more money if you actually stick with it. Every tool below supports both. What varies is price and how much of the tracking they’ll do for you.
A name you might expect to see here, and won’t
Tally shows up in a lot of older debt-payoff roundups. It shut down in August 2024 after running out of funding, so it’s left off this list entirely. If a “best of” article you’re reading elsewhere still recommends it, that’s a sign it hasn’t been updated recently.
The five options, compared
| Tool | Price | Free tier | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Undebt.it | Free | Yes — the whole tool, no paid tier at all | Full snowball/avalanche tracking without paying anything, ever |
| Debt Payoff Planner | Free (2-debt limit), or $6/mo or $25/yr Premium | Yes — capped at 2 debts | A simple mobile app with a visual payoff date |
| Toya | Free (Standard), or $8.99/mo or $75.99/yr Pro | Yes — account linking and overview only | AI-optimized payoff order using your real, live balances |
| Pay Off Debt by Jackie Beck | $4.99 one-time | No — but there’s no subscription, ever, either | Paying once instead of signing up for anything recurring |
| Vertex42 Debt Reduction Calculator | Free | Yes — the whole spreadsheet | No app, no account, no bank connection at all |
Two of these cost nothing, permanently. That’s unusual for this category, so it’s worth checking the free options before assuming you need to pay for a payoff plan at all.
Undebt.it does the whole job for free
Unlimited debts, snowball and avalanche plus a couple of hybrid strategies, payment tracking, a debt-free date projection. None of it costs anything. There’s no bank-account linking, so balances go in by hand, which means more setup work than a syncing app but also nothing to eventually upsell you on and no data-sharing agreement to read through. As a purely free option, it’s the most complete tool here.
Debt Payoff Planner keeps it simple on your phone
This one’s built for people who want an app, not a website. Enter your debts, pick a strategy, and your debt-free date sits front and center every time you open it. The free tier stops at 2 debts, which is a real limitation if you’re juggling a few cards and a loan. Premium removes that cap, drops the ads, and adds reminders and cross-device syncing for $6 a month or $25 a year. At that price it’s a low-stakes way to get an app-native version of what Undebt.it does in a browser.
Toya links your accounts and lets AI do the math
Toya connects via Plaid, pulls real balances, APRs, and spending automatically, and runs snowball and avalanche against your actual numbers instead of ones you typed in. Standard is free for account linking and a basic overview. Pro, at $8.99 a month or $75.99 a year, unlocks the AI-optimized payoff plan, which is the entire reason to pick this tool over a manual one. It’s also the most expensive subscription on this list, so it only pays off if the automation genuinely saves you time you’d otherwise spend updating a spreadsheet by hand.
Pay Off Debt by Jackie Beck: pay once, own it
Every other tool on this list is either free or a subscription. This one is neither. A single $4.99 purchase, no recurring charge, ever, supporting snowball, avalanche, or a custom order you set yourself. It skips the bank linking and the AI. For someone who specifically doesn’t want another monthly line item, even a small one, while they’re trying to pay down debt, that’s the entire pitch, and it’s a reasonable one.
Vertex42’s spreadsheet skips the app entirely
Sometimes the honest answer is that you don’t need an app. Vertex42’s free spreadsheet, built for Excel or Google Sheets, lets you enter debts and pick snowball, avalanche, or a stair-step hybrid, and it calculates the full schedule right there. No signup, no linked bank account, nothing leaving your own computer. It’s more manual than anything else on this list; you’re the one updating it each month. For someone already comfortable in a spreadsheet who doesn’t want to hand financial data to a third party, it’s a genuinely complete option for zero dollars.
Where these tools help, and where they don’t
Where they help
- Doing the payoff-order math correctly, every time a balance changes.
- Making a debt-free date visible, which motivates in a way a stack of statements doesn’t.
- Tracking extra payments accurately, so you can actually see the snowball speeding up.
Where they don’t
- None of them find extra money for you. That still comes out of your own budget.
- Funding doesn’t guarantee an app stays running. Tally is the cautionary example.
- Bank-linked tools like Toya need your login credentials shared through Plaid. If that’s a dealbreaker, the manual tools here are the honest alternative.
The short version
- Most complete free option, manual entry is fine: Undebt.it.
- A simple phone app, only a couple of debts: Debt Payoff Planner’s free tier.
- Real bank data driving the plan automatically: Toya.
- No subscription, not even a cheap one: Pay Off Debt by Jackie Beck.
- Comfortable in a spreadsheet, don’t want to link a bank account anywhere: Vertex42’s calculator.
Related read
Paying down debt is one lever. Growing what’s left once it’s gone is the other. See our comparison of the best free net-worth and investment trackers in 2026 → If a chunk of what you’re paying down is buy now, pay later balances, see our BNPL apps comparison → for how each provider’s late fees actually work.
Before you link anything to any of these
None of this is tailored financial advice; it’s a comparison of tools, not a plan for your specific debts. Neither snowball nor avalanche is objectively correct — avalanche wins on the math, but the method you’ll actually finish beats the one you give up on after a month. Free-tier limits change, so confirm current terms on the provider’s site before signing up for anything. If your situation is more complicated than what a payoff app can model, multiple accounts in collections, for instance, a nonprofit credit counselor can help in ways a comparison article isn’t built to.
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