These are the two paid heavyweights of the kids-card market, and the choice between them is genuinely close — same age range, similar price, deposits at the same partner bank. What splits them is philosophy: control tooling versus financial education. The official records let us compare that split without leaning on either company’s marketing.
Greenlight vs Acorns Early: the same bank, two philosophies
The quietest fact in this comparison is structural: Greenlight and Acorns Early both hold deposits at Community Federal Savings Bank (FDIC certificate 57129). The safety question — the one parents worry about most — is a tie by construction. What differs is the product philosophy on top.
Greenlight is controls-first: category spending limits, real-time alerts, instant lock, chore and allowance automation, with education as a layer. Acorns Early is education-first: age-tiered money lessons and savings goals are the spine of the app, and its investing match (1% on up to $7,000 per year into a custodial UGMA/UTMA account) extends the lesson into actual compounding.
The filings tell the pricing history
Both fee schedules are public records. Greenlight’s product page at the CFPB lists five agreements since 2018; the goHenry program behind Acorns Early lists eight since 2017. Our fiches extract the change events from those successive filings — worth a look before committing, since a program’s filing cadence shows how often its pricing actually moves.
Family-size math
One kid: Acorns Early at $5/month undercuts Greenlight by a dollar. Two to four kids: still $10 at Acorns Early versus $5.99 flat at Greenlight — Greenlight flips to cheaper from the second kid onward. Five kids: only Greenlight covers them on one plan, per the official plans pages snapshotted in our records.
The investing difference is bigger than it looks
Both products let kids touch investing, but the mechanics differ in kind. Greenlight offers investing with parent approval from its Max plan up — a feature inside the subscription. Acorns Early’s Early Invest is a custodial UGMA/UTMA account with a 1% match on up to $7,000 invested per year, per the official page snapshot in our records: an actual account that belongs to the child, usable for anything that benefits them, not education only. For a family that will actually fund it, that match is real money the comparison tables above can’t capture — and for a family that won’t, it is irrelevant. Decide which family you are before weighing it.
Verify both in ten minutes
Every claim above traces to a public record: the CFPB Prepaid Agreements Database holds both fee schedules (five Greenlight filings since 2018, eight goHenry filings since 2017 — linked in the sources below), and FDIC BankFind certificate 57129 confirms the shared partner bank is active. Our fiches for Greenlight and Acorns Early extract all of it, date it, and flag every change the day a new filing lands.