Rasid vs Bobby

Two apps built for two different jobs

Bobby is a ledger you maintain. You add each subscription yourself, helped by a built-in catalogue of hundreds of well-known services that fills in the price for you — Yummygum's own release notes put it as "Popular subscriptions' prices are automatically inputted." Nothing is connected and nothing is scanned. CNBC Select, which names Bobby its "Best free service", makes the same point in its cons: "Doesn't automatically pull recurring charges from your accounts."

Rasid starts from the paperwork you already receive. With read-only access to Gmail it searches billing mail — receipts, invoices and statements — and builds the list out of what it finds. You can also hand it files directly: a spreadsheet, a Google Sheet, a PDF statement or a photo of a bill.

So the honest question is not which app is better made. It is whether you want a tidy list you keep by hand, or something that goes and reads the numbers off documents that were already sent to you.

Neither app asks for your bank login

This is worth saying plainly, because a lot of this category works the other way. Bobby does not connect to accounts at all. Apple's App Privacy block for it declares Purchases, Identifiers, Usage Data and Diagnostics — and no Financial Info data type whatsoever. The US bank and card names you will find in its catalogue, such as Bank of America, American Express, Discover and Chase, are labels for entries you create, not links to anything.

Rasid does not ask either. There is no bank account linking, no card numbers, no OTP and no screen scraping. The Gmail permission is read-only and Rasid only searches billing mail with it; Rasid cannot send, delete or modify anything in your inbox, and you can revoke the access from your Google account whenever you like.

What differs is how each app fills the gap that leaves. Bobby fills it with typing. Rasid fills it by reading things that already arrived.

The part that only matters if you live here

A UAE household's fixed costs are not only streaming services. They are DEWA or SEWA or ADDC, Etisalat (e&) or du, Empower for cooling, and then a credit card statement with a date and a minimum due that quietly decides whether the month goes well. Rasid reads those: the six utilities named above, and statements from Emirates NBD, Mashreq, ADCB, FAB, ADIB, RAKBANK and HSBC UAE, pulling out the statement date, the total due and the minimum due.

In Bobby, every one of those is a row you create and update yourself each month. There is no ingestion, no OCR, no import and no provider connection of any kind — which is not a flaw, it is simply a different design.

On currency, Bobby supports more than one and offers a foreign currency breakdown, and CNBC Select notes it can track subscriptions in international currencies. Whether AED is among them we cannot confirm: Yummygum's public changelog is incomplete and has not been updated since April 2025, so we will not claim it either way. Its UAE App Store listing is priced in AED and the app itself downloads free there. Rasid works in AED and shows a charge in another currency as charged, with AED under it.

What Bobby does better

The price model, first. Bobby is a free download with one-time in-app purchases and no recurring subscription at all — the full All-in-one Pack v2 is $2.99 in the US and AED 12.99 here. CNBC Select's own roundup puts Rocket Money at $7 to $14 per month for comparison. If you want to buy a tool once and never think about it again, that is a genuine advantage, and Rasid cannot match it yet because Rasid has not published what it will cost after early access.

Then the craft and the standing. Bobby holds 4.75 out of 5 from 7,963 ratings on the US App Store, CNBC Select calls it a "simple, minimalist interface", and it has carried native iOS dark mode since version 3.0.0. It is localised into nine languages — Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. Ten years of design attention shows.

It also reaches further across Apple's hardware than Rasid does. Bobby runs on Mac (M1 or later) and on Apple Vision as well as iPhone. And for a handful of straightforward subscriptions, catalogue-assisted typing is quick — adding Netflix takes seconds, with the price filled in for you.

Price, and what "free" means in each app

Bobby's model is one-time unlocks rather than a subscription. Apple's listing shows six in-app purchases: All-in-one Pack v2 at $2.99, the older All-in-one Pack at $1.99, and Unlock Subscription Limit, Unlock Category Limit, Security Pack and Visual Pack at $0.99 each. In the UAE the same six read AED 12.99, AED 7.99, and AED 2.99 for the remaining four.

The existence of an "Unlock Subscription Limit" purchase proves the free tier is capped; the exact number is not something Apple or Yummygum publishes. App Store reviewers report the ceiling is five subscriptions, and we would rather attribute that than state it as fact. As for what the packs contain: the Security Pack is where passcode and Touch ID sit, per Apple's own listing, and the Visual Pack covers custom themes, app icons and fonts. Available write-ups place iCloud sync in the paid unlock rather than the free tier.

Rasid is free during early access, with nothing to unlock. What it costs afterwards is not published yet, and we are not going to pretend otherwise on a page about honesty.

Platforms, languages and how current each app is

Bobby's compatibility block lists iPhone and iPod touch on iOS 14.0 or later, Mac on macOS 11.0 or later with an M1 chip or better, and Apple Vision on visionOS 1.0. There is no iPad entry and no iPad screenshots, so the iPad runs the iPhone app rather than a version built for it — a current App Store review raises exactly that. There is no web app, and no Android app is currently available: a Google Play search returns no app published by Yummygum, and Bobby's own website links only to the App Store. CNBC Select lists this as a con — "Only available in the Apple Store" — and its roundup now points Android users to a different app entirely.

Bobby's nine languages do not include Arabic. Rasid has not published its language list yet.

On version history: Bobby first appeared on the App Store on 30 March 2016, and the most recent update is version 3.10.4, released 9 December 2025. Rasid is iOS first, built with React Native and Expo, with Android planned after.

Where your data goes

Rasid runs on Firebase: Auth for Google sign-in, Firestore and Cloud Functions. The AI that extracts figures from a statement and writes the insights runs as a server-side call to the Anthropic API from those Cloud Functions — the API key lives in Firebase Secret Manager and never reaches your phone. The Gmail grant is read-only, Rasid only searches billing mail with it, and you can revoke it from your Google account at any time.

Bobby's position is simpler by construction: it reads nothing, so there is little for it to send. Apple's privacy block declares only Purchases, Identifiers, Usage Data and Diagnostics, with no financial data category at all.

If your requirement is absolute — nothing, ever, is permitted to read my mailbox — then Bobby's architecture is the stricter one and that is a perfectly good reason to choose it. Rasid's answer is a narrower scope and a revoke switch, not a claim that no reading happens.

How to choose

Choose Bobby if you are on iPhone, Mac or Apple Vision, your subscriptions are few and in one currency, you would rather pay once than pay monthly, and you do not need your utility bills or card statements in the same place. It is a well-made app with a decade behind it and a price that is hard to argue with.

Choose Rasid if you are in the UAE and the list you need is DEWA, du, Empower and a card statement alongside Netflix — and you would rather not retype any of it each month. Rasid reads the billing mail with a read-only Gmail scope, takes spreadsheets, PDFs and photos of bills, keeps personal, family and business separate in Spaces, and warns you three days before a renewal, a trial converting or a due date.

Rasid is free during early access. If something here is unclear or you think we have got a fact wrong about either app, write to hello@rasid.app and we will correct it.

Related pages

• Bobby alternatives: apps like Bobby for tracking subscriptions
• Subscription and bill trackers that don't ask for your bank login
• Rasid vs Subby, and Bobby and Subby side by side
• Rasid vs Subo
• Rasid vs Orbit