Greenlight Alternatives: What Leaving Costs

Greenlight does not sell a card. It sells four bundles, and the question "what else is there?" cannot be answered until you know which part of the bundle you actually use.

So this page does the decomposition. Each tier is broken into the features it gates, each feature is priced against the cheapest verified alternative, and the difference is computed. All prices were checked against the companies’ own pages on 24 August 2026 (Greenlight and Acorns) or 23 August 2026 (everything else).

The most useful result is negative: two of the four tiers have no replacement in the verified set at any price, because they are not really competing with kids’ banking apps.

Nothing here is a recommendation. Every superlative below is attached to a number.

What you are actually paying for

From greenlight.com/plans, checked 24 August 2026. Note that greenlight.com/pricing returns a 404; /plans is the live path.

The annualised column is monthly × 12. Greenlight sells no annual plan and publishes no annual price — both its plans page and its fee disclosures were checked on 24 August 2026 — so those four figures are arithmetic, not quoted prices.

Two features are worth pinning down before the replacement table, because they change what "equivalent" means. The savings reward runs 2%, 3%, 5% and 6% by tier, and it is capped at a $5,000 average daily balance per family — the Greenlight and Acorns Early comparison works out the balance each tier needs before the reward covers its own fee, and this page does not repeat it. And the plan covers up to five children for one fee, so the per-child cost of every row below falls as the family grows. What flows through those cards is a separate question — the allowance calculator and the allowance-by-age guide put a figure on it.

The replacement cost, tier by tier

annual delta = Greenlight annual − replacement annual. The right-hand column is a difference in price, not a verdict, and every "cheapest alternative" cell carries the constraint that makes it cheap.

One row goes the other way, and it belongs there: replacing Max with Acorns Gold costs $12.24 a year more, not less. Acorns Gold is the parent’s full investing subscription with the kids’ product inside it — "Acorns Early is included in every Gold subscription" — so it is not a like-for-like swap in either direction.

Over the ten-year window ages 8 to 18, those annual deltas are $718.80 for the two free Core replacements, $1,317.60 for the Fidelity route out of Max, $527.60 for the Till Premium route, and $238.80 and $119.80 for the two chores swaps. The full fee comparison across thirteen providers carries the ten-year totals for every plan on the market; this page is only about the difference.

The two things nothing else replaces

Nothing in the verified set offers family location sharing, crash detection, SOS alerts, driving reports or identity-theft coverage. Not one of the providers we checked documents any of them.

That is a factual observation about feature sets, and it has one clear implication: Infinity and Family Shield are not really competing with kids’ banking apps. A parent weighing Family Shield at $239.76 a year against BusyKid at $48.00 is comparing a family-safety product with a chores app that happens to issue a card. The banking half of those tiers is the same banking half Core sells for $71.88; the other $167.88 buys something no alternative on this page provides.

Whether that is worth the money is not a question this page can answer. What it can say is that the comparison most "alternatives" lists invite you to make is not a like-for-like one.

Free alternatives, in three different senses of free

Every list treats "free" as one category. It is at least three, and the differences matter more than the price does.

Revolut’s Standard tier belongs in the second row rather than the first, on Revolut’s own wording: "Revolut is not a bank." Its free tier is real — "There are no fees for one account with the Standard plan" — but "you’ll need to upgrade if you want to include multiple kids", and its paid tiers are $9.99 and $16.99 a month (revolut.com, checked 23 August 2026).

One thing on Revolut we could not resolve and will not guess at: its pricing page shows "Linked accounts for family members aged 6-17 | 5" unchanged across all three plan tabs, while its product FAQ says only Standard is capped at one free child and larger families need to upgrade. Those two statements contradict each other. Both are quoted here; neither is picked.

The full feature comparison

Rows are the verified alternatives. "Not published" is a distinct value from "no" — it means the provider’s own pages did not state it when we checked, not that the feature is absent. About two in five cells in this grid read that way (56 of 136), and that is the honest state of this market.

Jassby is live and publishes no price we could retrieve: its pricing page carries no pricing section, /debit-cards-for-families returns a 404, and its support fee article blocks retrieval. It is listed with empty cells rather than filled in from a third-party listicle. Current is omitted entirely for the same reason — current.com/teen-banking returned a 404 on 23 August 2026.

The bank and credit-union options most lists skip

Two of the strongest free alternatives are not apps at all, and they appeared on almost none of the pages ranking for this query.

Fidelity Youth Account is the closest free analogue to Greenlight Max: "no subscription fees, no account fees, and no minimums to open", "no minimum balances to open", an optional debit card, "All ATM charges are reimbursed", and real investing in stocks, ETFs, Fidelity mutual funds and REITs, where "Fractional shares make it easy to start small" from $1 (fidelity.com, checked 23 August 2026). The structural difference matters more than the price: it is a brokerage account that "teens ages 13–17 can own independently", not a parent-controlled card. That is a different legal arrangement, not a cheaper version of the same one, and it raises tax questions a subscription does not — the custodial account tax calculator is the place to start on those. Fidelity publishes no rate with an effective date, so no yield is quoted here.

Axos First Checking has "Zero monthly fees" for ages "13 through 17 years old (18 years old in Alabama)" with an adult co-owner, and daily limits of $100 cash withdrawal and $500 at the point of sale (axosbank.com, checked 23 August 2026). Its minimum opening deposit, APY and ATM reimbursement cap are not published on that page, so they are not stated here.

Credit-union youth accounts publish real, dated APYs, which no card app does. Five examples, all fetched 23 August 2026:

These are examples of a category, not places to open an account. Every one has a membership requirement — MIDFLORIDA’s is geographic, Alliant’s requires membership for the joint owner, Navy Federal’s is service-linked. The point of the table is the range: youth accounts at real institutions publish rates from 0.05% to 4.00%, dated, disclosed and paid by a bank, against an FDIC national average of 0.38%. Check what your own local institutions publish rather than treating any of these five as the answer.

One more is worth naming, since it now carries a rate date where it didn't when this page was first drafted. Call Federal Credit Union advertises up to 6.00% APY on a youth account — but only on the first $1,000; above that the rate drops to 0.15% APY, and the credit union has since added a dividend declaration date to the page (callfederal.org, dividend declaration dated 23 June 2026, checked 27 August 2026). It carries the same kind of membership requirement as MIDFLORIDA above, and the tiered structure means the headline 6.00% only describes the first thousand dollars saved.

What "3% savings" means at each of these

Almost none of it is interest. Step advertises 3.00% and its own help centre calls it "not interest, but instead earned as cash rewards funded by Step". Till’s 2% is a "save reward", Greenlight’s 2–6% is a capped "Savings Reward", and FamZoo’s is "parent-paid interest" — the parent’s own money moving between the parent’s own sub-accounts.

Revolut is the sharpest case in the set, because both halves of it are true at once. Its marketing leads with a real bank rate — "up to 5.50% APY for balances in a High Yield account", with "Savings Account services provided by Cross River Bank, Member FDIC" — while the child’s own balance earns nothing: "Pockets are not savings accounts and do not earn interest." The 5.50% is the Metal-plan ceiling — Revolut's free Standard plan tops out at 4.00% APY on the same High Yield Savings product — and either way it accrues on the parent's account, never the child's Pocket (revolut.com/savings/hys and revolut.com/our-pricing-plans, checked 27 August 2026). Note also that Revolut’s own page still dates that figure "accurate as of 8/20/2025", which is now over a year old.

The fee comparison carries the full table of which advertised rate is which mechanism, benchmarked against the FDIC average. It is not repeated here.

What happens to the money when you leave

This is the part no page on either search result covers, and it is all from Greenlight’s own help centre, checked 23 August 2026.

Leaving costs $0 for cash and $25 per child for securities — but a Greenlight investing account can never end up in a child’s own name anywhere.

Closing the account. There is no closure fee: "There’s no fee to close your account, and there are no long-term contracts required." Only the Primary Accountholder can close it — a second parent or an Authorized Approver cannot — and access ends immediately for the whole family. Family Shield and Safe Family Device holders cannot close in the app at all and must call. There is no pause or suspend option; a break from the service means fully closing the account. Whether a mid-cycle refund is prorated is not documented anywhere on greenlight.com, so this page does not say.

Cash. It transfers out free and "typically process within 1–3 business days", but only the Primary Accountholder can move it, only to a pre-linked bank account, and "Greenlight imposes account-specific limits … We cannot disclose these limits due to Risk and Compliance reasons". If the funding source has gone inactive, unclaimed balances are escheated to the state’s unclaimed-property office.

Investments. An in-kind ACATS transfer is possible, but only into the parent’s own brokerage account, because "all investing portfolios created with Greenlight are held in the Primary Accountholder’s name" and "investment accounts cannot be transferred to another brokerage under a child’s name at this time". The fee is $25 per Invest account profile, and it appears nowhere on the published fee schedule at greenlight.com/fee-disclosures — only in the help centre. Fractional shares cannot transfer in kind and are sold first.

And the sharpest one: downgrading from Max to Core force-liquidates a child’s investments. Greenlight’s own wording is "All investments in your child’s Investing for Kids accounts will be automatically sold on your next billing date." Full closure liquidates everything. If you are moving down a tier to save $59.88 a year, that sale happens whether you intended it or not. What the resulting balance could have compounded to is arithmetic you can run in the investing for kids calculator — arithmetic only, not a reason to stay or go.

How we checked this, and when

Greenlight’s four prices and its per-tier feature gating were re-fetched from greenlight.com/plans on 24 August 2026 and were unchanged from the 23 August check. Acorns Early Lite at $8 and Acorns Gold at $12 were re-fetched the same day. Everything else came from the provider’s own site on 23 August 2026, and each figure carries its date above.

Two limits worth stating. Revolut’s and Greenlight’s help pages block automated retrieval and had to be read in a live browser session, which makes them harder to re-check than the rest. And Greenlight itself ranks for this query with its own "alternatives" page — a vendor writing the comparison against itself has an obvious reason not to compute what leaving costs, which is most of why this page exists.

These figures are re-verified monthly. If one has moved, it has moved since the date stamped beside it.