A year ago, I posted the first version. Since then, the app has matured significantly with two major updates:
1. Multi-platform Support: Now available on Mobile (iOS), Desktop (macOS, Windows, Linux), and as a Self-hosted Docker image. (Android coming soon).
2. Addons System: We added explicit support for extensions so you can hack around, vibe code your own integrations, and customize the app to fit your needs.
The core philosophy remains the same: Always private, transparent, and open source.
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.)
It uses a plugin structure so if your bank is missing you can contribute your parser.
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?
(I don't use beancount but I use GnuCash which is a very similar concept.)
Check out https://plaintextaccounting.org/
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.
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.
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.
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.
At a certain point paranoia gives way to practicality.
Sell the data to whom?
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.
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.
It might not protect any more data, but not attempting is a guarantee that it won't.
I prefer to not give to even more people.
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
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.
Here are some other ones I've tried and used in the past:
For example - I have to reclassify loads of transactions for it to track close to correctly. Say treasuries - purchase at a discount, then at maturity redeem for full amount. You can enter them as buy/sell, but then it wont properly report to cashflow, or give you a good classification as to what type of income that was.
Similar with stocks and short term/long term. It means that even though all the info is there it's not as useful as I'd like for showing total income broken out as types of income to help with tax planning etc.
I still use it so the annoyances are not too extreme, but if there were a tool that did a better job of the investment side I'd switch.
Looking at the wealthfolio features I'm not sure it handles any of that any better though, but it does seem to break out dividend/interest income.
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).
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.
Also seems like Empower (not listed) is the big one
Generous free tier and auto sync from some common german banks
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why is there not an aggregation service that literally lets me go directly to my financial institutions to pull down my data and put it into whatever I want? A Plaid, Finicity, Yodlee, MX for the user, not the mass-traffic developer?
I guess, like price engines and free hosting, the business model isn't there to support a thing that just helps folks.
It's still MX under the hood though so it's maybe not quite as satisfying of a solution? I agree I wish we had better consistent APIs between financial institutions for data access in the US.
On a side note; SimpleFIN works well with actual, and the person that runs the bridge is great.
* https://wealthfolio.app/docs/guide/goals/
Neat: RRSPs are Canadian, so not necessarily US-only.
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?
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 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.
I'm also experimenting with local llm models to parse files and statement and call the app tools to feed data.
In a year when I consolidated a bunch of accounts, I’ve found essentially no program regardless of off or online that’s able to build a global view.
It’s a pretty classic data problem—-heterogeneous data sources, entity resolution, etc. Should be amenable to a ml solution.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
How do the integrations work, is it all file (csv) based or is there direct access as well?
"Wealthfolio does not currently support integration with online brokers or aggregators. Data must be imported from CSV files or by manually entering transactions."
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.
It might also be useful to adjust for inflation going backwards, e.g. everything shows in 2025 dollars.
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?
Thank you so much for this. I’ll check out the repo later and see if I can contribute in any way.
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.
Wealthfolio looks very neat too.
lots of features, has been around for some time
A big pain I have with the US reporting is that dividend payments don’t give the quality there based on anywhere. That makes it close to impossible to calculate TTWROR or IRR. Because just because yahoo says there was a dividend does not mean there was cash flow.
Best of luck, and thank you for keeping it open source (:
In the space of local-first finance apps, I've really enjoyed Actual Budget (as have many, based on what I'm seeing in other comments). I'll check out Wealthfolio but like @dw_arthur I'm concerned about looking at investments too much / too often. I try to invest based on personal experience / value and always go long. I use off-budget accounts in Actual to track investments/illiquid value changes and update them every 6mo-1yr. I'm sure a spreadsheet would work fine for this as well. But for someone who moves investments more frequently, Wealthfolio looks awesome.
For managing my life's data, this golden combination is always going to win: app that works well | full/local control of data | sane FOSS project governance | software license mitigates enshittification (e.g. AGPLv3)
Looks really cool, great job.
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.
