Comment by GoatOfAplomb a day ago
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.
ActualBudget is a pretty great YNAB alternative that is free and locally hosted.
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.
I went through this rabbit hole. I liked Mint (I know it wasn't private, but I liked it), I tried Personal Capital / Empower because I had a retirement account with them, I tried Monarch. But none of them had the one killer feature I needed — my wife and I both have individual accounts and we also have a joint account for household expenses. I want to track all of those separately.
The I found Tiller[0]. I've been really happy with it so far.
It basically syncs your transactions to a Google sheet you own. It comes with some basic things like budget and auto categorization based on fuzzy string matching, but because it's Google sheets you can play with it and do whatever you want with it.
But the nice thing is that you can dictate which accounts go into which sheet. So I have two sheets — one for household accounts and one for personal. And I don't need a separate subscription, which would have been required if I used any other service I had looked at. I can't remember exactly how much the subscription was, but I don't remember it being unfair.
Hey
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.
It’s great that you have coverage across multiple countries. I’ve noticed most budget apps cannot handle multiple currencies at all, much less automated sync across multiple countries.
I'll certainly give this another look if you do. Good luck with it.
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).
Big +1 for Tiller after trying several other options including YNAB. Your data in a spreadsheet - go nuts, use our templates, make your own, etc.
Do you use it? Curious for your thoughts. Right now I have CoPilot. Apps are ok, not great.
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.
Why would someone need this? How do you use this?
I use it primarily to categorize spending to know things like “how much money did I spend on electronics doodads in the last year”.
The double-entry part is a fanciness for checking that all money in (paychecks) equals all money out (spending, taxes). You can selectively disable it by “padding” balances.
I have it on for my checking account and it catches duplicate postings for transfers between my Venmo and my checking account. I can also put the initial/final balances from the bank statements as “guards” to verify that it all adds up.
This sort of structure is really helpful for a human or language model. You can break the translation work down into subunits with fast correctness checks.
It's just a way of keeping track of your finances. If you just have a single bank account and nothing else, then it probably doesn't give you much. But if your assets and liabilities are spread across multiple bank accounts, brokerage accounts, credit cards, loans, P2P/angel investing platforms, etc, then it can be a good way to get a holistic overview of your finances in one place and can help with things like tax returns.
(I don't use beancount but I use GnuCash which is a very similar concept.)
It’s actually pretty great if you’re type a about keeping your finances in check.
Check out https://plaintextaccounting.org/
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.
I'm open to missing something here.
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.
Also, even if you trust the startup's current management and investors... a lot of those virtuous promises aren't enforceable in bankruptcy, and they may be in some legal jeopardy if they safely dispose of those "assets" before they are liquidated into the hands of someone without scruples.
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.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/14/jpmorgan-chase-fintech-fees....
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.
> it would be astonishing if they _didn't_ sell my data.
Sell the data to whom?
Financial data is the most valuable data there is. Such a naive question.
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.
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.
There is also teller.io i tried them for a side project and were pretty good, but I didn’t go to far
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.
Giving access to the same info to more people is reducing privacy.
I prefer to not give to even more people.
> I love the idea of keeping my finances private
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
Giving access to the same info to more people is reducing privacy.
I prefer to not give to even more people.
In the same way as my doctor knowns some private health info but to keep it private I would prefer to not give it to my employer.
> 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).