I love the idea of keeping my finances private while still having a useful tracker/planner. And I love that this would give me some protection against a new version making things worse. I also love the option to write my own plugin or to hack the source code itself (even though I probably wouldn't).
But I don't think I'm willing to give up fully automated data refreshes at this point. I have too many accounts to track.
> I love the idea of keeping my finances private while still having a useful tracker/planner.
YNAB4 was a local client, but with YNAB5 they sadly (to me) went online and subscription.
I happily paid for v4 (one-time purchase), but was/am not willing to pay for v5 because (a) I don't like renting software, and (b) I have no need for syncing (which a subscription could justify to pay for ongoing server costs).
I second that. Switched from ynab4 (used some version since 2011) to Actual Budget a few month ago. Some tiny ux issues, but improvement in many more areas. Don't regret finally kicking ynab out.
Odd, earlier this week I was cleaning up some ooooold VMs/docker stuff and came across something I was using to try out actualbudget, so it's an interesting coincidence hearing it mentioned again today.
IIRC I was pretty impressed with it back then. It looks like there are more non-direct install options now. (Flatpack, appimage, etc.)
sort of different but I built https://paperright.xyz budgeting app to address some of my frustration with budgeting apps, bank connections, ease of use, privacy, etc. It doesn't connect to your bank or take any info other than your email (+stripe if you sign up for pro). I built it because i needed a budgeting app for my brain. Also research shows AI/automated financial management doesnt work you need to manually track things to really understand whats going on.
Yeah, makes sense. I’ll probably toss in an add-on or optional integration with an account aggregator later, so folks can either opt in or just stick with a local-only setup if they prefer.
Happy to help build an integration with [Lunch Flow](https://lunchflow.app), which aggregates multiple open banking providers for global coverage behind a single API.
I manage all of my finances with Beancount (https://github.com/beancount/beancount). It has a native document store and I primarily use it to archive all of my statements to share with my accountants via Fava (https://github.com/beancount/fava). It’s not pretty, but it’s all in one (local) git repo.
Language models are great at turning those statements into Beancount postings and fixing errors, but the local ones not so much yet.
>A double-entry bookkeeping computer language that lets you define financial transaction records in a text file, read them in memory, generate a variety of reports from them, and provides a web interface.
Have you considered https://tiller.com/ ? They can pull feeds in and refresh automatically but have a big privacy play so that only you get to see your finances (and display and manage it in Excel or Google Sheets).
This is one where I don't quite get the angle of hosting locally to preserve privacy.
By nature of the economic system, you must interact with 3rd parties, unless you somehow live a life where you can manage to be all crypto or (increasingly harder) cash based. At that point, there is no real benefit to privacy outside of ensuring that whatever institution(s) you work with aren't doing anything odd.
Trusting some random VC-backed SAAS not to sell my data is (to me) as mad as trusting that the tide won't come in - it would be astonishing if they _didn't_ sell my data.
My bank has both commercial & cultural reasons not to sell my ID & transaction history. They might still do it anyways, but it's at least plausible that they wouldn't, if only due to the harm to their reputation if it ends up in the papers.
I trust that the VC-Backed SaaS will be beholden to not wanting to get cut off from the bank(s), meaning not selling that data. If they sell aggregate anonymized transaction data, I'm also not sure I give a shit.
At a certain point paranoia gives way to practicality.
My threat model is one well placed technical employee who knows a buyer that will pay fuck you money. Judas can work at any organization and frequently does.
Yeah I was taken a back as well, "sell gold? To whom??" To the people buying gold, is not reasonable to have to pinpoint who exactly that might be given there is not shortage.
That is because of both of your biases (which is understandable) and me, not specifying why I am asking.
"it would be astonishing if they _didn't_ sell my data."
If the "who" was answered with "... to Kim Jong Un, glorious leader of the DPRK" you might raise a brow. That is probably not what they meant.
Maybe the author meant "... to the legal buyer of the new company, as part of the content of the company"? Maybe they meant "... to anyone willing to pay a price, legally or illegally"?
I wondered what scenario the author had in mind. It's a reasonable question. To me, the implications are quite different. You might of course disagree.
I'm a founder in this space (Fulfilled - posted above). Here's the reality:
You're right that incentives matter. But selling your data would be idiotic for us, same reason it would be for your bank in that trust is the entire business model.
If we want to monetize insights from aggregated data, we'd do it in-house and offer you better products. Example: Why sell your mortgage readiness data to some broker when we could source competitive mortgage offers and present them directly to you? Keep you in our ecosystem, add value to your experience, and build a revenue stream that doesn't destroy the core product.
The wealth space is crowded. Companies that burn user trust get exposed fast and die faster. The only sustainable path is treating your data like it belongs to you and not us. Any company here who doesn't get that is building on quicksand and I'd be very surprised to hear any of the larger players engaging in those practices but maybe I'm naive.
Either way, it's why we're a Fiduciary and that blankets the entire product suite.
"...Selling your data would be idiotic...same reason it would be for your bank [to sell your data] in that trust is the entire business model." I'm afraid that ship has sailed and taken your data with it.
I really don't think you read this article beyond the headline because that's not what it's about or implying...literally in the slightest.
That article is about JPMorgan being able to charge Plaid or other providers for the middleman access. They used to be operating almost for free, now Plaid has to pay for access the same way companies like mine pay Plaid.
So you don't think Plaid sells customer data? And by extension charging for customer data requests by Plaid and other aggregators isn't in fact charging for it?
So you didn't read the article and now you're just throwing out statements without validation? Great, if JPMorgan is selling your data then that's their decision and that's beyond the scope of this convo. We work with partners (Plaid, Snaptrade) who explicitly state that they DO NOT sell user data, and we maintain the same principles:
Here is the quote if you're too lazy to read this one too:
Does Plaid sell my financial data for advertising or marketing purposes?
No, we do not sell your financial data to third parties for marketing or advertising purposes.
Plaid only shares your data to power the services and products that you choose or to protect you and the Plaid network from fraud.
Plaid was founded on the principle that you have a right to your financial information and we are focused on providing products that allow you to safely and conveniently access your data and harness the power of Plaid’s secure financial network.
As Plaid develops more products and services, you may ask Plaid to share your information in ways that benefit you and that you control.
It's just the mindset. The "oh well 'they' already have all my data anyway" mindset leads to more and more individual steps of giving up privacy even if you could do something about it.
It might not protect any more data, but not attempting is a guarantee that it won't.
It’s more about having the optionality to not be tied to a SaaS provider and trusting them with all your financial data and bank credentials.
Having options to:
1– Install a piece of software and run it locally, no subscription, no cloud 2– Have to right to use a nicer app instead of a spreadsheet 3– not hand over your banking creds. Some banks will void your account insurance if you do 4– Reduce your exposure by not putting all your financial data on some startup’s servers.
Actual Budget uses SimpleFIN [1] in the US. The integration is pretty good. The big alternative is Plaid and I don't trust them at all. It's a shame we don't have a standard for electronic banking yet.
Well, one of the benefits is that it won't go away.
I used Mint for years, and I LOVED it. Hooked it up to all my accounts, it could track purchases and spending and kept everything up to date automatically. It would remember how I categorized things.
Of course, then Intuit decided to get rid of it and force everyone to move to Credit Karma, which doesn't do the same things AT ALL. I don't care about tracking my credit scores, and I pay off all my credit cards every month, I don't need help finding a loan for anything. The only thing it does is try to offer me loans and credit cards. It doesn't have any transaction history, so it doesn't do the one thing I care about.
The decade+ of transaction history I had in Mint was just GONE. It really sucked, and I have not found a replacement yet.
I don't mind if it is hosted, or even if I have to pay for it, but I would like to be able to keep my historical data, and for it to automatically populate from my accounts, and not go away if a company decides it can't make money from it anymore.
Did you find a suitable replacement? What do you use now? I'm interested to hear how big of an sticking point this still is with this a verbose range of options now.
different poster of course, but actualbudget (free selfhost) + simplefin (paid api for transactions) has been really good. faster and more features than the commercial options had. simplefin can also be used for your own local projects
I'd love that too, but I'm not sure it's even feasible or possible, at least in the EU country where I live. I, like most people (I think?) need to file taxes each year, and those include my new positions, or what positions have disappeared, including how much I have in savings. And, the only way for me to keep savings without losing money, is to keep it in a bank, so it's again not private.
Feels like "private finance" been dead for a long time, unless you start using cryptocurrencies specifically for privacy, like zcash, otherwise you'll be having non-private data at least somewhere.
What you describe sounds more like keeping your assets a secret... and if you feel defeated because the government can know, how do you feel about hiring an accountant? Or executing stock trades? You can't keep those activities a secret from those agents working for you. You would probably expect them to keep their privileged information about you _private_ though, right?
And I think that's what the parent post is talking about. Today's companies make you agree to 3 50-page documents which they can update at any time and your continued use after such silent updates constitutes consent.. and at some point they will sell your financial status/well-being to people for profit. So the more you feed them the more of your data that is being easily sold.
We ultimately probably can't stop that, but we can make it more difficult. Many apps like this would take your information and sell it.. having an option that lets you track your own finances without becoming a product is nice.
Right on. In this case, I used "private" to mean "the makers of this particular product don't have a ton of my financial information." I don't expect a product like this to prevent my government, or my brokerage, or my bank, or even a middleman account aggregator, from knowing about my money. But something like this can be one less thing, at least.
Also it’s more about having the optionality. There are tons of cloud-based and connected SaaS trackers out there, but very few local ones. Having options to:
– Install a piece of software and run it locally, no subscription, no cloud
– Have to right to use a nicer app instead of a spreadsheet
– not hand over your banking creds. Some banks will void your account insurance if you do
– Reduce your exposure by not putting all your financial data on some startup’s servers
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But why one or the other? Don't get me wrong, I appreciate a curated list of suggestions, but it would really be useful to have some tips or comments on the experience of each one, their shortcomings or advantages. Otherwise, it's not much better than just checking out a list of names from Google :)
I will use hledger if I'm handling someone else's money, like as a trustee. Double entry accounting is nice for being precise about things. But for my own accounts it's too much overhead to deal with reconciliation. Don't have time for that.
A lot of it is going to be needs & vibes based. Some of them have more in-depth and niche features in certain areas, like transaction splitting or categorization and others are just simple and clean UI to go for ease of use.
I use monarch and I've been happy enough with it. Would probably consider self-hosting with actual in the future, but I wanted an easy on-ramp for myself to actually get in the habit of budgeting.
We're entering the same market but with a tilt towards investment & actionable guidance. Same read-only capabilities on the account sync side (although our budgeting + spending side is still heavily in development) except we're an RIA that can provide professional advise (for free).
I still use GNUcash [1]. Only drawback is comparatively poor handling of equities, with no good way to view historic portfolio value / net worth. Great for general purpose accounting though.
It's not perfect, for example its monthly/yearly subscription detection didn't work great for me, but compared to all those apps that involve trusting a third party with your banking data it's worth a look.
beancount + the web ui for it, fava, is what I end up going back to whenever I look for the sort of tools. Downside is I'm way behind on my ledger and don't _really_ want to spend the effort inputting everything to catch up.
Which you appear to be the developer of from other comments in this thread. Not saying it's bad, but it's self-promotion rather than organic preference.
> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
You missed https://tiller.com which uses the same financial connectors as others but dumps the data into a Google/Office365 spreadsheet that you control.
I'm a huge fan of You Need A Budget, it was instrumental in giving me control over my finances. It feels like a superpower to see all my money in one place and not care which bank account the dollars actually reside. Also makes it easier to take advantage of various offers (Credit card or things like HYSA) since I know all the records will live in YNAB and I have full control there, even if the individual banks I use have terrible UIs.
Interesting that this made to HN top, last week i posted as about my open source wealth tracker http://github.com/venil7/assets with all the same features, including self hosting
and it barely got any traction
So I don't want to be rude, and am saying this purely as feedback since you asked and I detect a bit frustation - the wealthfolio site linked in the post presents a lot better than your one linked in your github.
Nominally they appear to be very similar like you say (open source, locally hosted etc), but the presentation does make a big difference for at-a-glance engagement. The wealthfolio is just... very pleasant to look at. The site largely focuses on what the value to the reader is, versus 'how do I get it running'.
Just my thoughts. I know it's incredibly frustrating when you see a copy/version of something you've made, but it gets more attention. But honestly could also just be the mood of the day. There may just be nothing to read into here.
+1, very polite way of saying it. of course there's a difference between the two posts. open source is interesting but not enough with a financial app, since it's all about trust + usefulness.
landing page needs to look good and communicate the value prop super effectively. If it doesn't look good you'll lose people's interest in about 2 seconds.
This is nice of you. I just want to say to the GP it's mostly random IMHO. Survivorship bias is hard. You hear about only what you hear about, not all the great stuff. It's a matter of big numbers, don't give up, play the long game.
> Source available for inspection and personal use only. Free to use non-commercially; commercial use reserved to the author. No warranty or liability. Contributions do not confer authorship or ownership rights.
It's marketing and empathising with your market. A github page doesn't give the impression of a polished product and doesn't inspire confidence. It looks more like a draft. When I go to your page the first thing I see is a list of code files but I don't care about that I want to know what it can do for _me_ and my finances.
Sometimes, its just luck or timing. But I usually upvote open source projects with an actual website and not just a repo. Thats me of course. Also, the UI screenshots from your github didn't look that appealing. Hope this feedback is helpful.
I am going to add it to my watch list on GitHub as it looks interesting. However, as the other post said, it needs an elevator pitch and do not be afraid to include more pictures.
I have a hard time finding the features of the program from the repository alone. For me personally, I do not have time to do a deep dive into the code (or even the api spec) of potentially interesting software to figure out what is going on. Especially in your case where it seems to use a pure functional approach in typescript, which creates additional overhead :)
Best of luck with the project.
Why does this app have a nice landing page? Who paid for that? Why? Nobody makes a landing page to wcratch their own itch. In some situations I'd rather have a readme.
I didn't see your previous post, but my feedback would be that your readme doesn't really list all the features? It has some screenshots, but maybe a short list of major features/what you can do with it would be helpful for people just driving by to look at it?
I don't think you need a fancy landing page for every oss project, but I have no way of telling what is different about your project without actually trying it out.
How does this compare to Ghostfolio? Seems like it's exactly the same space & Ghostfolio has an existing substantial user base. Why should I choose one or the other?
This looks great and it's nice to see development in this space! However, the "big box" alternatives for this which keep your accounts in sync are really cheap (I think I renewed my annual Quicken Simplify for $40) and, for the most part, "just work." So, I personally wouldn't want to switch to anything self-hosted unless it provided automated syncing. I'd actually be all over this if it did especially having a way to extend things with plugins.
Yeah, it seems at certain points I need to add automatic syncing. The app already offers a way to extend things using plugins https://wealthfolio.app/addons.
For me this is a core piece of any money app. If an app doesn’t include syncing it’s not worth it. I have too many moving pieces to deal with CSV exports.
This is the 'problem' I need solved as well. Sync across multiple Financial institutions is a nightmare. If the CSV import can be automated with some Plaid/simplefin bridge that's reliable, I think it would be a nobrainer for a large group of us to selfhost instead.
It's still limited to just one party, that's heavily regulated for compliance. Not perfect, but a step better than exposing to apps that can have bigger surface area of exposure.
this looks really polished, congrats! in your opinion, how does it compare with alternatives like actualbudget [0]? I've been using Quicken for a long time and might be in the market for a subscription-less alternative that is ideally self-hosted. Quicken has been running into lots of issues syncing some of my accounts lately (mostly duping assets).
I've used actualbudget for several years now after switching from Quicken. Actual is great for budgeting but my strategy has been to use a separate investment tracker to get a nice dashboard to look at. I haven't found one yet that handles account syncing seamless as I'd like... I've used Ghostfolio but I'm going to give this a try.
On a side note; SimpleFIN works well with actual, and the person that runs the bridge is great.
The idea of privacy and wealth tracking is problematic. Other than a subset of crypto (and only a subset), all of the things being tracked are in some company's database(s), particularly any equity positions or cash accounts. There's nothing particularly private about that, really.
I agree, generally. But there is always a bit of a nuance when it comes to personal finance. I have gone through the full cycle, I started off with logging every single transaction, then syncing everything and tracking monthly cash flow, investment dashboards and then to yearly syncs and now I barely think about it.
What happened was I slowly built an awareness of how things are going, where my spending and savings are and internalised a few things. For example, as a contractor I responsible for my taxes, so 30% of my invoice goes into a savings account as soon as I get paid. But, that wouldn’t have happened right away for me, if I have never done the monthly cash flow.
I think everyone goes through this journey. Because I often see people super into accounting for a couple of years and then completely abandon it later in life. Looking at it daily in early stages help get a feel and set expectations for the long term. Some people get sidetracked here and the phrase “Beat the market” grates on me for that reason.
I do a similar thing on the investment side. I did play with this app to see if it would give me anything that my spreadsheet doesn’t, but I’m not really seeing it
On the spending/budgeting side, I could see the use of day-to-day tracking. I import my credit card transactions into gnucash weekly - if I didn’t already have a good workflow set up I could see the use of something like this to help keep on top of things.
That's kind of just a brag about being wealthy though, isn't it? For many people who are trying to get escape velocity to being financially secure, tracking spending + investments is a necessary reality.
No one is saying it's healthy but if you have debt, can't save or don't have investments on track to meet your future needs then what's more unhealthy, monitoring or lower living standards?
> Wealthfolio does not currently support integration with online brokers or aggregators. Data must be imported from CSV files or by manually entering transactions.
This is unfortunately going to be the deal breaker for wide adoption. Self hosting is great, but manually importing data from dozens of accounts every day and entering every single transaction as you make it is simply too much of a burden.
If there was a sufficiently good import, something deeply customized for at least the top N banks, I think I’d be ok with that workflow. But even Quicken was disappointing on that front.
Quicken is getting even more and more disappointing.
Used to be, you'd use what Quicken calls "direct connect" where the client software itself connects to your bank's servers and pulls down your transactions and balances. They also had this "quicken connect" where the client software connects to Quicken servers, who, in turn, contact your bank--making Intuit an unwanted middleman. Slowly, but consistently, Quicken has been dropping "direct connect" support and coercing their users to go the middleman route.
I, too, have been looking for an alternative to Quicken, but: 1. I don't want to have to go to each bank's crappy web site and download a crappy CSV to import, and 2. I also don't want the software developer inserting itself into what should be a data transfer between me and my bank.
The Holy Grail personal finance software would 1. be free and open source, 2. download data directly from financial institutions without CSVs or a middleman and 3. store the data in an open format like sqlite that I can query and manipulate outside of the application.
My understanding is that part of the problem is that many banks do not provide that kind of "direct connect" functionality anymore. Some used to provide OFX but no longer do. Also, financial regulations aimed at "open banking" (like PSD2) bizarrely seem oriented towards enabling middlemen like Plaid. They don't require anything like "each individual customer must be allowed to access their individual data by using an API however they want"; it all has to go through a "third-party provider".
So the holy grail is really "Banks must be required to provide all customer info in a machine-readable format, via a programmable API, directly to their customers." :-)
You're correct here. The banks have limited who they are allowing into their systems more and more right now. We wanted to build direct partnerships with trading institutions to leverage their brokerages but they'd tell us to speak with their whitelisted partners like Plaid or a new (YC backed) incumbent, Snaptrade.
If you can be a little flexible on (2), then Beancount hits most of the Holy Grail points. The ledger format is literally text (it is plain-text accounting after all) but there is a query language the works really well.
I end up saving CSV's locally and importing the transactions from there (no hand entry, but I still need the intermediate download step.) I don't find it that too burdensome since I don't have a zillion different accounts.
Yea, (2) is always the tough one. Looking at my Quicken, I have 28 active accounts that I regularly (like daily) update from online, and manually finding, downloading, importing, and reconciling 28 CSVs is just not going to be acceptable.
Would it be possible to write an addon to use Perl's Finance::Quote [1] like GnuCash does? It supports scraping many financial websites, as well as paid AlphaVantage quotes.
Maybe the license structure could allow for proprietary extensions. I don't think there would be many people willing to put the work of writing many deep and good quality integrations with banks for free.
No, the ability to import is table stakes for me. I'm not manually entering transactions or trades. Simply providing an API key for me and vibe coding a client to pull is all that's needed.
Self-hosted doesn't have to mean free. I think an option to enable syncing with your own Plaid key (that you manage and pay for yourself) would be great.
Unfortunately ETRADE for example does not make exporting all transaction easy. Last time I looked at their API it involved manually authing via a http flow signing into your ETRADE account to get a temporary token that expires. Not exactly a flow that can be used for long polling account activity.
I haven't researched much on Robinhood or Coinbase but I suspect they have much better APIs. That's an idea where a plugin system would be awesome, something like Plaid but for brokerages and Crypto exchanges only.
Lets say my strategy from now is: 15% on an ex-US mid cap, 15% US Largecap, 15% ACWI growth, 15% Emerging market growth, 40% in short treasury fixed income. If I already have some ETFs already, can this be used to bucket and calculate what is the current state of the ETFs I hold against the strategy?
Can it do that for Mutual funds in like retirement accounts?
Context: I want to implement my own portfolio using some weights on a basket of ETFs. The ETFs are selected by country/geography(e.g. ex-US or US or world) and then type(small, mid, large) and then finally by income strategy(growth, value, fixed, defined outcome etc) based on expected returns.
I downloaded the iOS app. I like the simplicity. I wonder if it could even be a bit simpler.
I currently do a quarterly financial review. I document the balances from all of my accounts.
In addition to buy/sell/deposit/withdrawl, could Wealthfolio have an option to just add a balance. I suppose In the meantime, I'll make do with deposits and withdrawals.
Last, could you make it a little easier to find to donate button? Or possible at all? Now that I have the app open, I can't find where to send a one time payment.
Looks really cool, very much appreciate making it free/select price.
Just downloaded it on Windows 10, but unfortunately the modals (add account etc) aren't scrollable and cutoff the bottom of my screen, making them pretty much unusable (can't submit!)
Issue was only with add account, so continuing to try to onboard myself.
Is there more detailed documentation available? A few troubles I've run into:
- Having trouble with stock splits -- Schwab simply reports the added shares, not the split ratio, so I can't do it via csv import
- Separate but probably related, if I add some shares back in 2022 (e.g. SWPPX, a SP500 index), the "performance" shows essentially immediate -90% return. I suspect this is also related to splits; possibly Yahoo finance retroactively applies the future split quantity on historic quotes. Edit: figured this out, I'm responsible for entering any splits across the history, it seems
- How do you designate the counter-account for transfer-in / transfer-out transactions?
- Schwab does some funny business with date strings occasionally ("03/16/2022 as of 03/15/2022"); not your problem per se, but interpreting either presented date would be better than quietly defaulting to 1970
- In the activities tab, I can only reverse date order in list view, but not grid view
- As a wishlist item.. default csv import settings for major brokerages would be great, considering this is in principle how you're expecting users to repeatedly interact with the software
- Maybe I'm missing it, but is there a simple way to see the list of accounts you've created? This would seem like a very basic feature. Edit: okay, I see them in dashboard, but can't add them there. Would seem like an appropriate nav column entry.
I don't mind dumping in a few csv every month to update, but having to manually fix my csvs before upload adds a lot of effort.
My hero usecase with these tools is to auto pull investments from Fidelity 401K account + Schwab brokerage + BYOBrokerage.
Then combine them and break them down by country/geography(e.g. ex-US or US or world) and then type(small, mid, large) and then finally by income strategy(growth, value, fixed, defined outcome etc)
This is really cool and kind of what I'm looking for since trusting my account details to some app gives me heartburn. I downloaded the source and built it, but still have heartburn after seeing it download 700+ crates/packages. Who knows what is in all of that?!?
Love the idea, but really need some form of access to API's for the big brokerages and apps to be able to pull in data, doing stuff by hand ... na nice looking site/app tho
is there any way to remove entries with the CSV import function?
my bank includes transactions that are yet not final (preliminary transaction where currency conversion still isn't final). these rows change both in both the title and the amount, but i can do some guessing on how a row updates.
however: when i import my transaction a couple days later again, i need to manually keep track and remove preliminary transactions (now removed from my bank's export).
related: when i imported a CSV into YNAB, i would have to manually keep track of updated entries and remove those. with some code and state handling, i could figure out which rows no longer existed – but i couldn't remove them with the import function.
i ended up abandoning YNAB's CSV import and use their API to remove transactions... but it would have been much simpler if the CSV import could just have removed certain rows from the get-go.
(while i don't think this acts as a budget, it think others will run into similar issues as i have when it comes to importing CSV files)
I currently use Banktivity which is OK. Would love to hear from any others that have used Banktivity and migrated to something else. Ideally, there should be OFX support.
I gave the iOS app a spin.
1. It requires at least 2 characters to search for a symbol. What about Verizon (V) or AT&T (T)?
2. I entered a holding for a fund that doesn’t have public quotes by choosing not to look up the symbol and entering the price and purchase date, but then I couldn’t find a way to manually add price quotes for later dates to reflect the change in value.
You can search by company name. For manual pricing, click on an added manual holding, then there is a tab "Quotes" in the top right to view and edit the prices.
Awesome. I have been meaning to give this a try so this is a great nudge.
Given the permissions you expose, it looks like it is possible to write a plugin to get account activities from something like Plaid so I don't need to keep importing - am I understanding correctly?
Right now the app supports three market data providers: Yahoo Finance, AlphaVantage, and MarketDataApp. If your ticker is on one of those, it updates automatically. If not, you’ll have to switch it to manual tracking and update or import prices yourself.
Here's a philosophical question. Does anyone account for inflation when looking at their long term history? I've been thinking of looking at everything in 2019 dollars.
It might also be useful to adjust for inflation going backwards, e.g. everything shows in 2025 dollars.
Yeah I need to mirror a few other comments. I would definitely give this a go, but I need plugins that connect automatically to my Broker. In my case IBKR, but the top brokers you would need Schwab, Fidelity, Trading212, Hood.
Without that onboarding the tool becomes a headache and what I already have is good enough. YNAB is also a very good reference of where to go next in the budgeting sense. That has a real use case and also opportunity for solving many users needs.
Good luck I can see it's a great piece of software, but as trading is my fulltime job I have far too many trades and without an auto-importer it wont work for me.
Haha, I'm a big user and fan of Wealthsimple :)
I created the app initially to have a unique experience for all my other accounts in other banks. I took inspiration from other fintechs as well.
For now, it's CSV and manual editing using the UI. I'm looking to have direct integration with major brokers when possible to avoid third-party aggregators and managing users' data/credentials (or at least have the option to).
This would be amazing, though I realize it's not straightforward and not easy to do. I have so many accounts across different companies that this connection piece is basically a requirement for me to use your app on a regular basis. I'm sure that applies to a lot of people, and I'm sure you already know that. I appreciate the focus on building the tool first and then getting that connection stuff working later.
I just want to also commend you on the UI/UX here, it looks and feels really solid.
Really interested in how you do this. When I as looking into building my own finance-related app, you have to pay a ton to get market data (stocks, crypto, ETFs, options) and connecting bank accounts if it's not for individual use (you still have to pay for individual use, but not significantly as much).
"Wealthfolio does not currently support integration with online brokers or aggregators. Data must be imported from CSV files or by manually entering transactions."
So data has to be imported since the start then I'm assuming, like a complete ledger? Otherwise how would we know the complete list and the value of the investments over time. Won't that get out of sync with the ground truth (what's in the account) over time?
It seems promising, but usability sucks. I can't figure out how to add anything. In the holdings screen there is no add button. In the income screen there is no add button. In the performance screen there is an Add account button. But pressing it opens a search accounts panel. WTF? I was able to add benchmarks, so I can at least see a chart. The chart animations are gratuitous... all it does is make you wait a bit. I the pressed the history icon. Turns out it is the activity screen, not history. Finally I found the Add activity screen. I press Add activity... but in the dialog requires an account and I don't know how to create an account. There are no more screens. At this point I gave up.
Is SimpleFIN basically the same as something like Plaid? I thought it was maybe an open source thing, but it looks like you still need to sync your bank accounts to their system first?
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I liked the concept here, but tried it out and couldn't figure out how to add the very first thing successfully. I set up my employer's 401k as the first account, and went to add the first investment in the account, but it's a mutual fund not an ETF, which means I had to disable symbol lookup. I had a cost-basis, I had a current value, and I had a count of shares, but you only asked for an average cost-basis and count of shares. I had no way to update the current value. When starting out the first entry should have all three of these. I tried to figure out to update this, but the only value adjustment was via providing a spread (open/high), and I couldn't figure out how to use this to get it to an accurate value. Honestly, it would have been better to have cost basis tracking in a more advanced place and started with current value and count of shares, and then simply update current value on a time-basis.
I greatly look forward to the day when the Godot team focuses on UI tools and workflow, a layout and theming engine, and slim UI-focused builds. So we can avoid this total nonsense local-server React-UI insanity. This is such a stupid way to build desktop applications.
I just came here to tell you how beautiful your color scheme is. It immediately reminds me of the color of the paper of money. The layout and color scheme look professional, trustworthy, tried and true, traditional yet modern. It's gorgeous!
But I don't think I'm willing to give up fully automated data refreshes at this point. I have too many accounts to track.
YNAB4 was a local client, but with YNAB5 they sadly (to me) went online and subscription.
I happily paid for v4 (one-time purchase), but was/am not willing to pay for v5 because (a) I don't like renting software, and (b) I have no need for syncing (which a subscription could justify to pay for ongoing server costs).
IIRC I was pretty impressed with it back then. It looks like there are more non-direct install options now. (Flatpack, appimage, etc.)
https://financier.io/
Happy to help build an integration with [Lunch Flow](https://lunchflow.app), which aggregates multiple open banking providers for global coverage behind a single API.
Language models are great at turning those statements into Beancount postings and fixing errors, but the local ones not so much yet.
Why would someone need this? How do you use this?
https://copilot.money/
By nature of the economic system, you must interact with 3rd parties, unless you somehow live a life where you can manage to be all crypto or (increasingly harder) cash based. At that point, there is no real benefit to privacy outside of ensuring that whatever institution(s) you work with aren't doing anything odd.
I'm open to missing something here.
My bank has both commercial & cultural reasons not to sell my ID & transaction history. They might still do it anyways, but it's at least plausible that they wouldn't, if only due to the harm to their reputation if it ends up in the papers.
At a certain point paranoia gives way to practicality.
Sell the data to whom?
"it would be astonishing if they _didn't_ sell my data."
If the "who" was answered with "... to Kim Jong Un, glorious leader of the DPRK" you might raise a brow. That is probably not what they meant.
Maybe the author meant "... to the legal buyer of the new company, as part of the content of the company"? Maybe they meant "... to anyone willing to pay a price, legally or illegally"?
I wondered what scenario the author had in mind. It's a reasonable question. To me, the implications are quite different. You might of course disagree.
If we want to monetize insights from aggregated data, we'd do it in-house and offer you better products. Example: Why sell your mortgage readiness data to some broker when we could source competitive mortgage offers and present them directly to you? Keep you in our ecosystem, add value to your experience, and build a revenue stream that doesn't destroy the core product.
The wealth space is crowded. Companies that burn user trust get exposed fast and die faster. The only sustainable path is treating your data like it belongs to you and not us. Any company here who doesn't get that is building on quicksand and I'd be very surprised to hear any of the larger players engaging in those practices but maybe I'm naive.
Either way, it's why we're a Fiduciary and that blankets the entire product suite.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/14/jpmorgan-chase-fintech-fees....
That article is about JPMorgan being able to charge Plaid or other providers for the middleman access. They used to be operating almost for free, now Plaid has to pay for access the same way companies like mine pay Plaid.
Plaid does in fact sell your data, but they ask for permission first. So does JPMC, for that matter: https://media.chase.com/news/chase-launches-chase-media-solu...
https://plaid.com/safety/
Here is the quote if you're too lazy to read this one too:
Does Plaid sell my financial data for advertising or marketing purposes?
No, we do not sell your financial data to third parties for marketing or advertising purposes.
Plaid only shares your data to power the services and products that you choose or to protect you and the Plaid network from fraud.
Plaid was founded on the principle that you have a right to your financial information and we are focused on providing products that allow you to safely and conveniently access your data and harness the power of Plaid’s secure financial network.
As Plaid develops more products and services, you may ask Plaid to share your information in ways that benefit you and that you control.
It might not protect any more data, but not attempting is a guarantee that it won't.
1– Install a piece of software and run it locally, no subscription, no cloud 2– Have to right to use a nicer app instead of a spreadsheet 3– not hand over your banking creds. Some banks will void your account insurance if you do 4– Reduce your exposure by not putting all your financial data on some startup’s servers.
[1] -- https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/
I used Mint for years, and I LOVED it. Hooked it up to all my accounts, it could track purchases and spending and kept everything up to date automatically. It would remember how I categorized things.
Of course, then Intuit decided to get rid of it and force everyone to move to Credit Karma, which doesn't do the same things AT ALL. I don't care about tracking my credit scores, and I pay off all my credit cards every month, I don't need help finding a loan for anything. The only thing it does is try to offer me loans and credit cards. It doesn't have any transaction history, so it doesn't do the one thing I care about.
The decade+ of transaction history I had in Mint was just GONE. It really sucked, and I have not found a replacement yet.
I don't mind if it is hosted, or even if I have to pay for it, but I would like to be able to keep my historical data, and for it to automatically populate from my accounts, and not go away if a company decides it can't make money from it anymore.
I'd love that too, but I'm not sure it's even feasible or possible, at least in the EU country where I live. I, like most people (I think?) need to file taxes each year, and those include my new positions, or what positions have disappeared, including how much I have in savings. And, the only way for me to keep savings without losing money, is to keep it in a bank, so it's again not private.
Feels like "private finance" been dead for a long time, unless you start using cryptocurrencies specifically for privacy, like zcash, otherwise you'll be having non-private data at least somewhere.
And I think that's what the parent post is talking about. Today's companies make you agree to 3 50-page documents which they can update at any time and your continued use after such silent updates constitutes consent.. and at some point they will sell your financial status/well-being to people for profit. So the more you feed them the more of your data that is being easily sold.
We ultimately probably can't stop that, but we can make it more difficult. Many apps like this would take your information and sell it.. having an option that lets you track your own finances without becoming a product is nice.
– Install a piece of software and run it locally, no subscription, no cloud – Have to right to use a nicer app instead of a spreadsheet – not hand over your banking creds. Some banks will void your account insurance if you do – Reduce your exposure by not putting all your financial data on some startup’s servers
Here are some other ones I've tried and used in the past:
https://copilot.money
https://lunchmoney.app
https://ynab.com
https://beancount.io
https://hledger.org
https://www.monarch.com/
https://useorigin.com/
We're entering the same market but with a tilt towards investment & actionable guidance. Same read-only capabilities on the account sync side (although our budgeting + spending side is still heavily in development) except we're an RIA that can provide professional advise (for free).
[1] https://www.gnucash.org/
It's not perfect, for example its monthly/yearly subscription detection didn't work great for me, but compared to all those apps that involve trusting a third party with your banking data it's worth a look.
https://github.com/Rshep3087/lunchtui
Generous free tier and auto sync from some common german banks
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Also seems like Empower (not listed) is the big one
I'm a huge fan of You Need A Budget, it was instrumental in giving me control over my finances. It feels like a superpower to see all my money in one place and not care which bank account the dollars actually reside. Also makes it easier to take advantage of various offers (Credit card or things like HYSA) since I know all the records will live in YNAB and I have full control there, even if the individual banks I use have terrible UIs.
Nominally they appear to be very similar like you say (open source, locally hosted etc), but the presentation does make a big difference for at-a-glance engagement. The wealthfolio is just... very pleasant to look at. The site largely focuses on what the value to the reader is, versus 'how do I get it running'.
Just my thoughts. I know it's incredibly frustrating when you see a copy/version of something you've made, but it gets more attention. But honestly could also just be the mood of the day. There may just be nothing to read into here.
landing page needs to look good and communicate the value prop super effectively. If it doesn't look good you'll lose people's interest in about 2 seconds.
> Source available for inspection and personal use only. Free to use non-commercially; commercial use reserved to the author. No warranty or liability. Contributions do not confer authorship or ownership rights.
Not super related, but have you considered getting a proper licence? Your project is not so much 'open source' as much as it is 'source-available'. Might be a good read: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9805/can-i-li...
I have a hard time finding the features of the program from the repository alone. For me personally, I do not have time to do a deep dive into the code (or even the api spec) of potentially interesting software to figure out what is going on. Especially in your case where it seems to use a pure functional approach in typescript, which creates additional overhead :) Best of luck with the project.
Just because you don't, doesn't mean nobody else does. Lots of people have a design itch to scratch.
I don’t think you need to have a financial notification to make a nice webpage for your project that you are proud of.
I don't think you need a fancy landing page for every oss project, but I have no way of telling what is different about your project without actually trying it out.
For me this is a core piece of any money app. If an app doesn’t include syncing it’s not worth it. I have too many moving pieces to deal with CSV exports.
[0] https://actualbudget.org/
On a side note; SimpleFIN works well with actual, and the person that runs the bridge is great.
What happened was I slowly built an awareness of how things are going, where my spending and savings are and internalised a few things. For example, as a contractor I responsible for my taxes, so 30% of my invoice goes into a savings account as soon as I get paid. But, that wouldn’t have happened right away for me, if I have never done the monthly cash flow.
I think everyone goes through this journey. Because I often see people super into accounting for a couple of years and then completely abandon it later in life. Looking at it daily in early stages help get a feel and set expectations for the long term. Some people get sidetracked here and the phrase “Beat the market” grates on me for that reason.
On the spending/budgeting side, I could see the use of day-to-day tracking. I import my credit card transactions into gnucash weekly - if I didn’t already have a good workflow set up I could see the use of something like this to help keep on top of things.
No one is saying it's healthy but if you have debt, can't save or don't have investments on track to meet your future needs then what's more unhealthy, monitoring or lower living standards?
* https://wealthfolio.app/docs/guide/goals/
Neat: RRSPs are Canadian, so not necessarily US-only.
This is unfortunately going to be the deal breaker for wide adoption. Self hosting is great, but manually importing data from dozens of accounts every day and entering every single transaction as you make it is simply too much of a burden.
I'm also experimenting with local llm models to parse files and statement and call the app tools to feed data.
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awealthfolio.app+map+p...
Would be happy to contribute profiles.
Used to be, you'd use what Quicken calls "direct connect" where the client software itself connects to your bank's servers and pulls down your transactions and balances. They also had this "quicken connect" where the client software connects to Quicken servers, who, in turn, contact your bank--making Intuit an unwanted middleman. Slowly, but consistently, Quicken has been dropping "direct connect" support and coercing their users to go the middleman route.
I, too, have been looking for an alternative to Quicken, but: 1. I don't want to have to go to each bank's crappy web site and download a crappy CSV to import, and 2. I also don't want the software developer inserting itself into what should be a data transfer between me and my bank.
The Holy Grail personal finance software would 1. be free and open source, 2. download data directly from financial institutions without CSVs or a middleman and 3. store the data in an open format like sqlite that I can query and manipulate outside of the application.
So the holy grail is really "Banks must be required to provide all customer info in a machine-readable format, via a programmable API, directly to their customers." :-)
I end up saving CSV's locally and importing the transactions from there (no hand entry, but I still need the intermediate download step.) I don't find it that too burdensome since I don't have a zillion different accounts.
[This](https://reds-rants.netlify.app/personal-finance/the-five-min...) project (I am not affiliated in any way) claims to automate ledger update even further.
That said, I'll check out Beancount!
1. https://finance-quote.sourceforge.net/
I haven't researched much on Robinhood or Coinbase but I suspect they have much better APIs. That's an idea where a plugin system would be awesome, something like Plaid but for brokerages and Crypto exchanges only.
Can it do that for Mutual funds in like retirement accounts?
Context: I want to implement my own portfolio using some weights on a basket of ETFs. The ETFs are selected by country/geography(e.g. ex-US or US or world) and then type(small, mid, large) and then finally by income strategy(growth, value, fixed, defined outcome etc) based on expected returns.
Free to try. Shoot us an email if you want a demo.
I currently do a quarterly financial review. I document the balances from all of my accounts.
In addition to buy/sell/deposit/withdrawl, could Wealthfolio have an option to just add a balance. I suppose In the meantime, I'll make do with deposits and withdrawals.
Last, could you make it a little easier to find to donate button? Or possible at all? Now that I have the app open, I can't find where to send a one time payment.
Just downloaded it on Windows 10, but unfortunately the modals (add account etc) aren't scrollable and cutoff the bottom of my screen, making them pretty much unusable (can't submit!)
Is there more detailed documentation available? A few troubles I've run into:
- Having trouble with stock splits -- Schwab simply reports the added shares, not the split ratio, so I can't do it via csv import
- Separate but probably related, if I add some shares back in 2022 (e.g. SWPPX, a SP500 index), the "performance" shows essentially immediate -90% return. I suspect this is also related to splits; possibly Yahoo finance retroactively applies the future split quantity on historic quotes. Edit: figured this out, I'm responsible for entering any splits across the history, it seems
- How do you designate the counter-account for transfer-in / transfer-out transactions?
- Schwab does some funny business with date strings occasionally ("03/16/2022 as of 03/15/2022"); not your problem per se, but interpreting either presented date would be better than quietly defaulting to 1970
- In the activities tab, I can only reverse date order in list view, but not grid view
- As a wishlist item.. default csv import settings for major brokerages would be great, considering this is in principle how you're expecting users to repeatedly interact with the software
- Maybe I'm missing it, but is there a simple way to see the list of accounts you've created? This would seem like a very basic feature. Edit: okay, I see them in dashboard, but can't add them there. Would seem like an appropriate nav column entry.
I don't mind dumping in a few csv every month to update, but having to manually fix my csvs before upload adds a lot of effort.
Then combine them and break them down by country/geography(e.g. ex-US or US or world) and then type(small, mid, large) and then finally by income strategy(growth, value, fixed, defined outcome etc)
Wealthfolio looks very neat too.
my bank includes transactions that are yet not final (preliminary transaction where currency conversion still isn't final). these rows change both in both the title and the amount, but i can do some guessing on how a row updates.
however: when i import my transaction a couple days later again, i need to manually keep track and remove preliminary transactions (now removed from my bank's export).
related: when i imported a CSV into YNAB, i would have to manually keep track of updated entries and remove those. with some code and state handling, i could figure out which rows no longer existed – but i couldn't remove them with the import function.
i ended up abandoning YNAB's CSV import and use their API to remove transactions... but it would have been much simpler if the CSV import could just have removed certain rows from the get-go.
(while i don't think this acts as a budget, it think others will run into similar issues as i have when it comes to importing CSV files)
Others have mentioned in the thread that the lack of account integration might be a problem.
Plaid has been mentioned as a potential service, are there other recommendations?
If I find time I could try to write a plugin over a few weekends.
We're developer oriented, free to get started, and investment focused.
Given the permissions you expose, it looks like it is possible to write a plugin to get account activities from something like Plaid so I don't need to keep importing - am I understanding correctly?
It might also be useful to adjust for inflation going backwards, e.g. everything shows in 2025 dollars.
Without that onboarding the tool becomes a headache and what I already have is good enough. YNAB is also a very good reference of where to go next in the budgeting sense. That has a real use case and also opportunity for solving many users needs.
Good luck I can see it's a great piece of software, but as trading is my fulltime job I have far too many trades and without an auto-importer it wont work for me.
How do the integrations work, is it all file (csv) based or is there direct access as well?
I just want to also commend you on the UI/UX here, it looks and feels really solid.
"Wealthfolio does not currently support integration with online brokers or aggregators. Data must be imported from CSV files or by manually entering transactions."
Show HN: Wealthfolio: Private, open-source investment tracker - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41465735 - Sept 2024 (263 comments)
Does it do something like custom positions? Like if I wanted to wrap my polymarket positions into there, could I hack that together?
Does this support kinda-specific stuff like those german FinTs and EBICS?
As others have mentioned, adding account integrations will make this much easier to use.
I would also love to hear more of your story, and motivations around this project.
Best of luck, and thank you for keeping it open source (:
Looks really cool, great job.
I think without sync with financial institutions it's going to be hard to grow a userbase.
But this is very cool software!
P.S.: I ctrl+f "encrypt" on your home page and no hits. It's banking / budget / money software, there should be a hit.