Last Updated on 29 August 2025 by Dan Wilderness
Hello everyone! Today I’m continuing my series of looking at some of the best UK personal finance apps out there. Today I’m looking at the Snoop App, which advertises itself as a general money management app which helps nudge you into making choices that can help you save.
The Snoop App has a really fun presentation style and great marketing – they have a cute robot who in their present marketing campaign is “Robot Hood, swinging into action whenever your finances need attention!”
However the proof is in the test if the Snoop App can actually save you money as it claims – so on that basis, onward with our review!
How long has the Snoop App been running?
The Snoop App is actually one of the newer money management apps out there, being launched in April 2020. The launch was that rare case of actually being slightly earlier than anticipated, but with many people suddenly finding their finances in potential uncertainty in a very strange year, the founder thought the Snoop App could help and launched it earlier than planned.
On the subject of the founder, the brain behind Snoop is Jayne-Anne Gadhia, who prior to running Snoop was the CEO of Virgin Money UK, and alongside her business accomplishments has done a lot of fantastic work to promote women in banking.
How does the Snoop App Work?
Snoop is a little different from some of the other money management apps out there, as is less focused on being a budgeting app and more all around money management. This usually takes place in the form of nudges (or “snoops”) as the app calls them where you’ll be nudged into action letting you know you could potentially save money on a bill (I.E, if you pay a mobile phone bill, a “snoop” might alert you to a stronger and cheaper deal).
To make this happen, the Snoop App uses the “Open Banking” infrastructure which is provides limited read-only access to your bank account and to your credit card accounts. You can select what accounts you want to give access to, however you obviously need to integrate every account you spend or are paid into for a complete view of your finances.
Your first thought might well be “is that safe to do?” – I’ll cover open banking in more detail after the review below.
As with other apps, integrating those accounts is a relatively seamless process. If you already have say, the American Express app on your phone, the Snoop App and the American Express App work together very effectively to make adding each account very easy.
What the Snoop App does well
Presentation and ease of use
Overall the App is well presented – any connected accounts on the main page are right at the top, meaning you can immediately see where your overall financial position stands at present.
This is supplemented by graphs and useful buckets of information showing your total spend, any renewal type activity coming up and upcoming bills you may need to manage. It’s well presented and allows you to home in on a scenario very clearly.
Personalised Snoops
The part of the Snoop App that shows you your personalised “snoops” is the strongest bit of the app. It feels like it’s been developed in a similar way to Pinterest (which is a bold choice) but the Snoop app pulls this off well. What that means is that each tile is a separate piece of potentially useful information, and effective use of relevant company logos helps bring this to life. If you’re particularly interested in what a Snoop offers, you can pin them down and favourite them for later.
I’ve enclosed some examples of Snoops and what they look like below:
I also liked that you could provide feedback on if a Snoop was useful or not after reading it, which (theoretically) would cause you to see more updates of a similar nature in future. I haven’t used the app long enough to be able to see if this really does happen over time or not, but the theory at least is good.
The value of the “snoops” themselves is something I’m including in both the pros-and-negatives of the app. On the pro side the best Snoops really do add some value, and are effective because the the Snoop App‘s ability to recognise potential payments and make appropriate recommendations effectively.
For example one of my “snoops” was the Snoop App recognising that I had just paid an energy bill which had increased month-on-month significantly – so it was suggesting I run a quick check through the app to see if I could switch to a cheaper provider.
Budgeting Tools
Snoop’s free budgeting tools have continued to evolve and are excellent for an app you don’t have to pay for.
You can connect all of your accounts to the app and get a very quick summary of your net worth and spending divided by category. I found it’s become increasingly accurate in assigned spending by default to the correct category, although in practice you’re always going to have to reassign some items that aren’t obvious.
There’s then a couple of extra tools which then add real value.
First is the ability to use the app to set a budget. Here there was a choice where you could:
- Get Snoop to do most of the work for you by analysing some of your past spending and suggesting a budget based on spending for each category which you can tweak.
- Starting from zero and assigning a desired spend to each category.
It’ll then work with any credit card or spending accounts you have tracked in order to monitor the ongoing picture.
The next feature I’d highlight is a monthly “spending summary” has also been added which provides more granular detail on your spending over the month, an example below:
Entertaining style
Finally I will just mention that whoever is doing the content writing for Snoop is doing a great job – reading the articles and “snoops” was generally upbeat, occasionally fun and most importantly clear.
What the Snoop App could improve
Spending Pressure
As mentioned above, when the “Snoops” are valuable they’re really handy. Where I felt a bit mixed as a money blogger is that quite a lot of the recommendations were essentially nudges into spending more money, rather than helping save.
A good example of this was that the app had noted that I spent some money at the always excellent Hotel Chocolat recently. As a result one of my “snoops” was alerting me to the fact they had a sale on. Now this is sensible marketing, and a good way for the Snoop App to keep things free and make money – but despite being a discount I’m not sure it doesn’t tap into the psychology of buying things you don’t need to be a little uncomfortable seeing that in a money management app.
Snoop Plus Locked Flexibility
This is another point of commercial reality.
The budgeting tools let you see your overall spending from bank accounts in one place, but are fairly limited on certain aspects of flexibility that would be useful – you can’t monitor your cash flow against a payday for example or create a bill cycle without upgrading.
Equally any customer categories you want to assign are limited without Snoop Plus, but fully customisable if you add it on.
Is the Snoop App free?
The Snoop App is completely free to use, however do note that this is partially as your data will be used on an fully-anonymised basis to understand spending and market trends. (Essentially, you are providing free market research information in exchange for the free services of the Snoop app).
There is a premium option called Snoop Plus available on a 7-day trial and then a £4.99 per month ongoing cost – I have written a separate section on if this is worth it further down the review.
Overall review of the Snoop App.
The Snoop App does have some value and is worth installing, as at it’s best it’s very effective at detecting and clearly messaging where you may be overpaying on household bills and nudging you to make changes which can be effective.
Like many similar apps, the commercial reality of needing to make a profit slightly holds the app back, as there are an equal number of prods into spending more money. To my mind this is good marketing, but I will note you will face some notifications which may be at odds with minimising your spending. If you’re more relaxed about this and keen on the idea of some deal hunting appeals, then it’s a slightly different story.
What I have seen is the Snoop App continue to evolve in the time I’ve been monitoring it and updated this review – some fairly basic budgeting tools as an add on to the core idea have become more and more advanced, and I’ve kept adding onto the score as we go.
With this now in place, I think it’s one of the strongest budgeting apps in the UK, especially for free. YNAB’s budgeting app offers more flexibility if looking to budget seriously, but at a steep price.
Where can I download the Snoop App?
You can download the Snoop App right here!
(Note: We may receive a small commission for referring you using our link, but it won’t affect the service you receive and per our editorial policy, we always write honestly about what we review, no matter if we get paid or not).
Is Snoop Plus worth it?
Generally speaking no – it adds some useful tricks if you’re using the app for budgeting such as the ability to specify a payday, create spending alerts or put custom categories in place which are all good and the implementation of them is well designed.
Personally we’d just try and work around this rather than spending the £5 a month as many bank apps will now let you do this for free, but it may be worth considering if you really like the Snoop interface.
Is the Snoop App safe?
As I mentioned above, the Snoop App uses the Open Banking initiative to read our bank account data, so I wanted to include a piece on the safety of open banking.
Open Banking is now a well established part of new rules brought in by legislation under the Payment Services Directive to allow organisations to access and make better use of financial data. The access you grant to apps like the Snoop App is very highly regulated to keep it secure, however nothing can ever be said to be 100% risk free.
All you provide to the Snoop App is read only data – I.E it’s the equivalent of letting the app take a peek at your statement for a short period of time which you must re-permit each 90 days – you don’t give any access to the actual management or the direct login of your bank account.
On on that, just remember you should NEVER give any app or any person any of your account’s direct login details.
Therefore the potential direct harm or someone to make malicious transactions/steal your money is limited, however in a more general sense you should think carefully about who you provide read access to beyond the Snoop App. Given the wrong person read-only access could provide a fraudster or hacking with data on your spending that could help them commit identity fraud.
Any questions?
Have you tried the Snoop App? I’d love to hear your experiences or if you have any further questions! Just let us know in the comments below.
And if you’re looking for an alternative for our budgeting, why not check out our review of the Emma App or look at our reviews of the best personal finance apps in the UK?
And that’s it!
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