22 ms·

Actual is going open-source

811 points by pbowyer 4y ago

Robin_Message 4y ago
If it's running locally (or in a cloud the user choses to trust), it doesn't need to be a CRDT any more to get the same security properties, which would ironically mean it is now easier to develop. (Granted CRDTs might enable other features although OT is generally considered simpler)
mizzao 4y ago
I've been using Mint for several years and it's been slowly getting more and more useless since the Intuit acquisition. As a technical user, does Actual let me do similar things myself, and now with the ability to contribute to code? Or is this completely different?
slightknack 4y ago
I love Actual, one of the best local-first apps I've used. I'm excited that it's been open sourced, but I also understand that this release is a bit bittersweet. Awesome work James, best of luck in your future endeavors :)
PStamatiou 4y ago
Would be curious if you'd be open to talking about some of the history in terms of user growth, revenue and costs. Just curious about how these types of projects go.
- yurishimo 4y ago
  If the final user numbers are accurate, revenue was a bit over $3k a month. Not even enough to really pay the founder if living in the US. Assuming $200/mo for servers, backups, and help desk software, that doesn't leave much after taxes for take home pay. As someone who just discovered this software, I am now really curious to give it a try!
  - jlongster 4y ago
    Yep that's right. I launched around 3 years ago, and it was brutally slow. I think it took a year to hit 100 subscribers. Another year to hit 300. This past fall, YNAB increased their prices which gave me decent jump from around 500 to 800 subscribers which is where I'm at today. I did everything wrong when it comes to marketing and getting subscribers. I focused on the tech and never invested in content, building hype, etc. Well, I take that back -- sometimes I did, but only 10% instead of 70% like I should have been doing.
    - codegeek 4y ago
      As a bootstrapped solo founder myself (even though I have somehow built a small team after 7 years), I totally get what you are saying. Be proud of what you did and most don't even get to do what you did. It is so hard to do things alone and especially when you realize it is mostly about Marketing and Sales (and not the product only).
    - candiddevmike 4y ago
      I'm a firm believer that the only way to stand out in the B2C world is to have a VC backed marketing budget. You can't bootstrap a positive CAC in a reasonable timeframe without going bankrupt as a solo founder.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - difflens 4y ago
      Can I just say that I appreciate the transparency about your numbers here! As a bootstrapped SAAS builder here, this gives me perspective
    - xbryanx 4y ago
      This is awesome feedback and I appreciate your honesty. I will help so many remember what matters in their next ventures.
corderop 4y ago
Sometimes I feel that society forces us to be economically successful in all aspects of life. I'm in the first steps of my career, and even though I just want to learn new things and do exciting projects, the first thought that come to my mind when I have an idea to develop is: "How could this be profitable?" > One thing I'm really excited about open-source is I no longer have to deal with any of the business or deployment stuff. I can focus on being a project manager. I think that having this feeling it's the best achievement you can get from this.
cpitman 4y ago
I wish people wouldn't use "we open sourced it" as a synonym for "this product is dead". Especially for a SaaS company, there is a totally valid business strategy in open sourcing your codebase but continuing to provide a paid SaaS offering for users that are not interested in self-hosting. It causes confusion every time a company open sources their software. Always have to wonder, "Is it dead and they are yeeting it over the fence?"
- indigochill 4y ago
  I don't necessarily interpret it as a synonym, more that these are two events that naturally coincide. IMO it's better to decide to open source a product when it dies than to annihilate it. If nothing else, people may be able to learn something from the source.
  - cpitman 4y ago
    I agree, better to open source a product then to just let it die off. I just wish companies were honest in their headline ("this product didn't work out, here's the source") instead of trying to spin it.
- bdcravens 4y ago
  Any examples of companies that opened previously closed source that continued to offer that product?
  - cpitman 4y ago
    I work for Red Hat, we do it all the time. We often acquire closed source companies and then release the software as open-source, while continuing to offer it. I believe the most recent example was Stackrox, open sourced March 31st. The "productized" version is Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security. https://www.stackrox.io/blog/open-source-stackrox-is-now-available/ https://www.stackrox.io/blog/open-source-stackrox-is-now-ava...
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    The web framework Remix was closed source and available only to license purchasers for about a year, until they announced their seed funding in October of last year: https://remix.run/blog/seed-funding-for-remix#open-source https://remix.run/blog/seed-funding-for-remix#open-source
spyremeown 4y ago
Not gonna lie, this is kinda awesome. Thanks a lot, will take a look at the code later.
ubiquitous-dev 4y ago
Hey James, we’re really sorry to hear about you closing down the business from a revenue standpoint! It sounds like it was the right choice for you though. Thanks for the contribution back to the community, as well as for prettier! We are building a platform to support local-first application development, and have appreciated your various articles / interviews / blog posts about the topic! Best of luck in the future, and thanks again.
- xanaxagoras 4y ago
  What is your platform?
mgkimsal 4y ago
> In June, all existing subscriptions will be cancelled. Specific dates coming soon. On one hand, good for being this transparent about it. I'm sure none of these decisions are easy. On the other hand... June is... 6 weeks away? I don't know the size or tech skills of the userbase - perhaps this is a decent time frame? It seems overly aggressive going in to 'shut off' mode so quickly. But... dragging it out longer may not help that many more people. Probably no simple decisions that don't inconvenience people in the short term, regardless of which way you go.
- jlongster 4y ago
  If the community want to wait, I'm happy to push back the date. I actually thought it felt less greedy to not wait too long, because doing it in the far future just means people are paying for unsupported software. Happy to keep it running though for as long as people want.
  - jtbayly 4y ago
    I'm not using your software, but as somebody who has had to switch personal finance apps multiple times, I'd personally want to be able to use it through the end of the year. It's easier to just start a new program at a new year.
poleguy 4y ago
I still use YNAB4 regularly. I have a paid copy from before they moved to an online model. I'm running it on ubuntu in wine. It still works fine. I had never heard of Actual till today. It looks like it would cover my use case. I'm not sure why I would have switched, though, as YNAB4 still works for me and has no recurring charge and is fully local.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Semaphor 4y ago
  Yeah, YNAB Classic is amazing. I remember Sync kinda sucking, but I simply disabled that, as I never used it from different places anyway.
sirtimbly 4y ago
Sad that this app didn't achieve the scale of subscriptions it deserved. A good reminder that awesome tech isn't usually enough. Do you regret not taking capital to fund marketing and support full time? Or put another way, any other ideas of where you could have spent someone else's money to give you a boost into higher subscription numbers?
- jlongster 4y ago
  Yes I totally regret it. There are ethical VCs that would be willing to invest a small amount and I should have done that. Bootstrapping isn't all it's cracked up to be; there are a lot better and smarter ways to kickstart a project.
  - adrianmsmith 4y ago
    Could you still pursue that route? Presumably it's never too late, especially as you've got a product already, and have demonstrated traction.
    - jlongster 4y ago
      I've thought about it! I'm a little burned out though on the business stuff. I'd like for this just to be a cool product now.
  - tomatowurst 4y ago
    but if you can't generate enough revenues to justify valuations you wouldn't go anywhere either. i guess it is better to find that out after raising millions and paying yourself a fat salary
    - sirtimbly 4y ago
      It's in an established and competitive market. There's money flowing into companies doing this same thing. An investor throwing (some) capital at marketing and growth for this totally functional (and beautiful) product could have made sense.
encoderer 4y ago
I did the SaaS-side-business thing for about 6 years. Early on I decided the SaaS was going to be my next career move and I would stay at my employer until I could quit employment altogether. A new job means you have to earn your place on a new team and how could I do that successfully with one eye on my SaaS at all times? When James joined stripe I was surprised both that stripe was agreeable to side projects and that James was courageous enough to try to do both. Open sourcing here just looks like more courage. Good luck James and congrats on what you’ve built here!
- brushfoot 4y ago
  As someone else with a SaaS side business of around the same age, it gets painful around then: You have to make tough decisions and the early fun is gone. Plus keeping up with new and existing customers can make it feel like you're not really steering the ship anymore but being tossed around by the storm. I understand James's desire to step back, though MIT is an interesting choice since now anyone can do anything with it, including selling it. What did you end up doing with your SaaS business?
  - encoderer 4y ago
    Went full time in 2020! Immediately took an 80% pay cut, but I spend 0 hours in bullshit meetings and no longer have to play the corporate employment game.
    - brushfoot 4y ago
      Was hoping for that answer. Good for you! I've been weighing when to take the plunge myself. I can't support my family with what mine is making on the side right now (10% of my day job salary), though I know if I were full time on it I'd be seeing more return. Just feels like a high dive into a small pool and I'm trying to suss out the right moment. Any tips/lessons learned?
      - encoderer 4y ago
        Double down on anything that has worked to attract new customers. Ask yourself if there was a gun to your head and you HAD to 10x in a year what would you do. Get to a point where it covers your lifestyle and make the leap.
Ozzie_osman 4y ago
Sad to see this. We were big fans of Actual. We're working on a product in this space. While there is a ton of demand for products like this (the incumbents, like Mint, aren't really evolving or providing the privacy people want), it's not easy to grow. We ended up raising venture capital to bridge the gap, but once we did, things started to come together. In fact, we ended up having a few people who were trying to build an app solo join the team (because they're so passionate about the space, and had build great products, but couldn't get a lot of traction).
adrianmsmith 4y ago
The blog post says 810 paid subscribers, and the price was $4/month so that's $3.2k/month. I mean that's not bad, that sounds like they'd nearly made it. Maybe they'd need 2-3x that to live off (depending where they live). But if they got that far I sort of feel they might have been able to make it. Then they wouldn't need any other job, they could just live off the product. And then any additional revenue growth would be profit. I mean they were a lot closer to it being able to sustain them than a business with e.g. $0/month revenue, or e.g. 3 users at $10/month (I've worked for a few such projects without product/market..)
- weaksauce 4y ago
  they mentioned that they need to hire 2 people. so that's a pretty low gross for that. and the expense of running the servers and all that is not included there so net was probably wildly insufficient for that kind of newhire. I'd think spending some money on marketing would have been more prudent.
- twobitshifter 4y ago
  There’s a chance they just needed to raise the price. I wonder how people land on something like $4. At that price your demand for something like this is not price sensitive. $5 and you have 20% growth, $8 and you’ve doubled. To the users it’s just a few bucks.
  - caseyross 4y ago
    Moreover, everything on the website implies that Actual was a high-end, exactingly designed product for discerning, well-off people. But it was priced like general-audience commodity SaaS. My guess is that most subscribers would have been more than willing to pay, say, 20 dollars a month instead of 4, particularly for something that has "saving you lots of money" as a core value proposition.
    - all2 4y ago
      It's open source... We could try. :D
codegeek 4y ago
"I completely underestimated how much work it takes to build a business. There's so much overhead. I'm always figuring out why a build failed, taxes, how to triage issues, responding to support, designing UIs, responding to Apple's complaints, and more. There's so much that goes on behind the scenes. There's no way a single person can possible do this alone, especially as a side project." This is the part that resonates a lot with me even though I have been able to build a small business that is reasonably successful with a small team but it takes a toll. It is a frikin slog and there are days when you feel like jumping off a cliff. Also the cost of doing something so small can add up when you can have a cushy tech job making 200K relatively easy. To do your own thing requires a very different mindset and incredibly hard. There is a HUGE difference between building a quick side project for fun VS turning it into a real business (no matter how small). I have full sympathy for the owner and totally understand where they are coming from. No judgement and I wish them all the best.
- nnoitra 4y ago
  so make 200K relatively easy?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- johnwheeler 4y ago
  Well, it's the type of business. Personal finance is super-hard to break into. It requires trust and budget. Trust requires users and word of mouth so its chicken and egg. you're not going to compete as a one man show with intuit on budgets or trust. i get the vision - build something so good and usable, and they will come. The good thing about Quickbooks though is that it's trustworthy in the social proof sense. That trumps a lot of ease of use (though it is also easy to use)
- mellosouls 4y ago
  you can have a cushy tech job making 200K relatively easy Some of these claims seem to come from people living on a different planet to me. Yes you can make that, but only if you are in a tiny (and normally very privileged) set. The way it's breezily posted on this forum at times shows perhaps just a leeetle disconnect with the mainstream tech world
finchisko 4y ago
I feel your frustration about business not going as envisioned. My current failure rate is two failed attempts to build profitable busines. Actually the second project is similar to yours. Invoice app for small entrepreneurs. Till today I'm the only user of the app. To reduce costs, I made it run completely without server support, all data is stored in local storage and hosted on netlify for free (no own domain). https://moja--fakturazdarma.netlify.app/ https://moja--fakturazdarma.netlify.app/. It was nice challenge for me to make it work completely without any backend (generation of pdfs using pdfmake, generating qrcodes and lzma compression ...) I still use it for main own invoicing and use to in my resume as work reference, but with zero money income.
- tinytuna 4y ago
  I’d suggest first having an English version of the site and maybe paying for a domain (looks more professional and trustworthy) and you could post it in Product Hunt to have more people discovering it.
  - finchisko 4y ago
    Thanks. Sure, I had own domain for a year, made promotion on Facebook. This product was not developed with other countries in mind. Idea was to do pilot in my own country and then scale up. Every country has different invoicing rules, so it cannot be just translated to English and put on US market. But since it didn't attract any single customer, I just gave up as my previous experience was that adding features when there is no traction for MVP just prolong your suffering.
muhehe 4y ago
I've never heard of this, but it looks nice. Anyone can compare with firefly-iii?
- slwoslownsn 4y ago
  It’s far less flexible of a system than firefly-iii. That said it actually (lol) functions well with any amount of historical data. Firefly-iii slows to a crawl with just a few years of data. Actual handles nearly a decade worth of data (imported from YNAB4) with ease.
  - muhehe 4y ago
    Interesting. I never managed to get too much of data into firefly, because of API rate limiting (and was too lazy to modify the code) :)
- sirtimbly 4y ago
  I've used both. firefly-iii is a fairly good, easy to maintain and host, web app. It's not as good design or UX as Actual - especially since firefly-iii has no mobile experience to speak of. Acutal had great mobile apps. firefly's budgeting interface is a bit of a UX mess.
brap 4y ago
I’ve used YNAB before and really liked it, this seems conceptually similar. Did anyone use both and would like to share their experience? My main problem with YNAB was that entering transactions manually all the time was time consuming, and I wasn’t able to stay consistent for more than a few months at a time (in my country there was no way to import automatically).
- l8nite 4y ago
  I left YNAB when they pulled the bait & switch on pricing with their oldest customers last year. I’ve been looking for something to replace it for awhile now, so I’m going to try this out.
  - xbryanx 4y ago
    Check out Lunch Money[1] - Which feels more polished and supported to me. 1 - https://lunchmoney.app/ https://lunchmoney.app/
- kashura 4y ago
  YNAB drastically changed their pricing (double for "grandfathered" customers), but even more importantly American Express import has been broken for about 6 months now. That was the final straw.
  - bestcoder69 4y ago
    We upgraded to SaaS YNAB and suffered through it for years, before dropping it in our house for the same reason. Syncing was broken for a really really long time. We finally reported it, and it was working the next time we checked. So, their monitoring (if it exists) is not doing its job whatsoever, and they’re relying on customer reports to find out about months-long outages. Not to mention the smaller sync outages that would happen constantly. We tried to understand the way they want us to deal with credit cards about a dozen times. Never had any interest in learning it and still don’t (because I don’t treat a CC transaction any different from a cash transaction w/r/t budgeting), but the new YNAB forced it on us. Nothing I’m saying is new. It’s just wild to me how bad their Second System tanked their software & reputation.
Barrin92 4y ago
>responding to Apple's complaints I really wish people would utilize the web more rather than heading for the app ecosystems. From the article it's not clear if this is possible due to some particular tech choices they have made but in general it can reduce overhead quite a lot. If you have a few hundred subscribers and you can do with one engineer less that can make a huge financial difference.
ICodeSometimes 4y ago
Interesting. I wonder why James didn't attempt to sell it at the very least? 36K ARR means you could have rather quickly found a buyer for 60k+ and gotten rid of the thing for a small but not in-significant payday. Also i wonder if the users are truly happy with being told they have to migrate to their own server as i'd assume they're the type who'd rather pay $4 a month instead of having to deal with the hassle. In any case, it's quite a courageous move and seems very well-intentioned.
- nnoitra 4y ago
  36K is peanuts. That's 3K a month.
  - tomatowurst 4y ago
    i guess you make millions a month, i will still take 3k a month MRR.
    - Trasmatta 4y ago
      3k MRR, but with a huge amount of extra stress on top of your full time job. It's not necessarily worth it, and the type of thing that leads to massive burnout.
- jonas21 4y ago
  You have no control over what the buyer would do with it. They might decide to slurp up all of the user financial data flowing through the server, for example. Or they might leak the data due to incompetence. Even in the best of circumstances, the buyer would probably have a plan for increasing revenue, which might mean raising prices, introducing ads, or any number of things that James might not like. Finally, it sounds like he wants to continue working on the product, just at his own pace, and without the stress of running a business. This would not be an option if he sold.
bern4444 4y ago
There are a lot of tools like Actual (YNAB, Monarch, Mint, Aspire google sheet etc). All are focused on budgets and mostly managing cash accounts. I've always wanted an equivalent but for investments. I know you can sync investment accounts to some of these, but that only reports the balance generally. I'd love to have the equivalent for investment accounts that answer these questions: What is my sector exposure? How much, across multiple accounts and brokerages, of Apple (or any stock/etf/mutual fund) do I own as a total percentage? How much money are in retirement accounts vs non retirement accounts? What is my IRR (rate of return) in aggregate and per account? And of course things like projections, safe withdrawal rates, analysis in the form of charts and graphs like what Actual and the rest offer. etc
- adamarice 4y ago
  I’ve been working on building this since January. We should have the first version up in a few weeks. Here’s the landing page: https://www.haystack.finance https://www.haystack.finance
  - bern4444 4y ago
    I don't know if this is a business you're trying to build or a project you're working on but I'd be interested in helping if you need. I was working on something like this as a side project but my motivation for it fluctuates.
    - adamarice 4y ago
      Awesome, yeah send me an email at adam.arthur.rice@gmail.com. Would be great to chat.
- whoopdeepoo 4y ago
  Personal capital? Sigfig?
  - bern4444 4y ago
    I've heard of personal capital - though I've read lots of reviews that say they always try and upsell you to their paid management platforms. Will take a look at sigfig!
650 4y ago
An excel spreadsheet to track reoccuring expenses and income with additions made for upcoming expenses, etc. hyperpersonalized for you has been the best for me, have tried a few budget apps. Micromanaging food expenses should be something that you decide on the spot rather than seeing 600$ on food this month oh-no. Caveat: Software Engineer salary with large discretionary income
- conductr 4y ago
  Me plus wife and a toddler and I wish I could keep under $600 a WEEK We eat out regularly and just going to a fast casual spot is like $40-50 for sandwiches
alexandargyurov 4y ago
I have to fill out every transaction manually? No Open Banking integration? :/
- xd1936 4y ago
  > You could even hook up your own bank syncing -- Plaid support a free development plan that covers an individual user. In fact, you'll see Plaid support in the syncing server because I already started building this out. Not yet, but it sounds like a top priority.
- skrobul 4y ago
  There are few importers available which have been opensourced (look at the Actual's github org), I have only tried one during migration from greedy YNAB. There is also an API which works quite well. I am using it to import transactions from Revolut. So no Open Banking yet, but afaik it's painful to get in the UK anyways
aeharding 4y ago
Great to see it going open source! I hope Actual can keep development going with the community support. Similarly, a local-first (PouchDB) budgeting app I built[1] went open source[2][3] a few years ago. It's worked out well, I love seeing what everyone does with it in their forks. Unlike Actual however, I maintain a paid subscription service while being open source. It's worked out quite well. Luckily it's not a huge time commitment as a side project, probably due to no native apps. I've also shifted from active development to maintenance, with sporadic updates every now and then. For example, I recently moved everything from Gitlab to Github[4] and upgraded a bunch of dependencies under the hood to get everything compiling on Apple Silicon. (For example, I now run AngularJS tests with Jest, hehe.) [1] https://financier.io/ https://financier.io/ [2] https://github.com/financier-io/ https://github.com/financier-io/ [3] https://blog.financier.io/financier-is-now-open-source-bdfe98a5b9b6 https://blog.financier.io/financier-is-now-open-source-bdfe9... [4] https://blog.financier.io/weve-moved-to-github-4617239b9fa3 https://blog.financier.io/weve-moved-to-github-4617239b9fa3
- gtirloni 4y ago
  > Great to see it going open source It's actually shutting down.
  - jlongster 4y ago
    What's shutting down is the public syncing server. That server is literally just a message store: it takes CRDT changes and puts them in a big table. And it servers them back out. Now that the server is public, it's incredibly easy for you to run your own. It's such a simple server (no postgres etc requirement) that this model is actually way better.
    - ec109685 4y ago
      CRDT's and the like seem like the perfect thing to build an app, but you make a good point about it requiring something so custom compared to a thin client that makes web service requests for data on each screen / page view.
tegansnyder 4y ago
I'm looking for a solution in this space that lets you plot the waterfall effect. What I'd like this solution to do is the following: 1. Enter all my bills that require full payment each month 2. Enter my bills that can be variably paid (ex. credit cards, medical bills, etc) 3. Enter my monthly income 4. Enter my budgeted personal/home expenses (food, gas/transport, etc) Then the solution should be able to model a few different paths to maximizing my savings and plot out a waterfall that says if I payoff X over 6 months and pay the minimum on Y then here is what my savings would look like. I'd like to be able to see what my projected payoff dates for different bills are and what my projected savings look like if I was to follow the model.
rmesters 4y ago
Shameless plug: OP mentioned Plaid as a way to sync bank accounts, but if anyone wants to use a Plaid alternative in Europe, check out Nordigen (it's free). Full disclosure: I'm one of the founders.
- dwild 4y ago
  How can you afford to make it free?
nerdjon 4y ago
I am curious, what do people use for budgeting? Mint seems like the most feature rich, but not only do I not want to support their parent company because of their Tax lobbying... but I don't trust them from a privacy standpoint (Considering its free). YNAB and Monarch both seem like really good options. But I have not looked into them much yet. I currently use Copilot (iOS only... really just iPhone, no iPad app). I have found it really nice but the lack of a web or iPad app makes doing some tasks more of a pain. I am curious if anyone has found any that work well for couples that don't have joint finances but do obviously share some expenses. My partner and me struggle with figuring this out and inevitably loose track of certain small things. Rent and standard expenses are easy. But going out, groceries, etc. those are the complicated ones. I know there is an app you can use that you can mark transactions as shared, but I don't want to use that for privacy reasons. I would love if there was an app that had some functionality like that built in without making it so we have one account that just has all of our accounts in it.
- drc500free 4y ago
  I used to use Mint, moved to Truebill a couple years ago. It's easier to split out and budget discretionary spending and track it over the month. They also do a good job of automatically identifying bills and other repeat charges for review.
- ashirviskas 4y ago
  >But going out, groceries, etc. those are the complicated ones. Which is why I don't actually track those day-to-day. I'm using revolut and it gives me a pretty decent estimate of spent per category per month, give or take 15%. Then I use a slightly modified google sheets budgeting template (it's right there) and just put all the numbers there. Quite convenient and you can see all the data + add custom formulas if you want to.
- ChrisClark 4y ago
  Lunchmoney.app has a collaboration feature, but the description isn't clear enough to see if it's what you're looking for.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rexreed 4y ago
I still have yet to find something that works as well as Microsoft Money. I have to run it on VMWare Fusion on a Mac to make it work. Moneydance is the next closest thing. Something that has real support for investments and tax reporting. Everything else is too... simple.
klik99 4y ago
THIS is how you sunset a product, good on him for making a tough choice and doing it the right way
quadrangle 4y ago
As someone focused on sticking to FLO software, I've been using Skrooge for accounting. It's just local, but it works well. How does Actual compare?
thepra 4y ago
Yep, making clients apps is kind of hell, that's why I chose PWAs for my web app collAnon, "installable" on iPhones, Androids and Desktops
joshpadnick 4y ago
Could you share more about the challenges you hit working with CRDTs?
michaelsalim 4y ago
Awesome how James handled this! Unrelated, I'm looking for something that can help me create finance projections. Eg: How's my account going to look like in the next 3 months if I go for a holiday. Any suggestions for that?
- sbehere 4y ago
  This seems to be exactly what ProjectionLab[1] is for. I am not a user or affiliated with it.. just learned about it the other day on some HN thread and thought it looked cool. [1]: https://projectionlab.com/ https://projectionlab.com/
  - michaelsalim 4y ago
    Thanks for sharing. I did see that. Unfortunately a bit too focused on retirement for my liking. I want to see more granular time period which doesn't seem to be possible there.
panick21_ 4y ago
I work for a company that does this kind of product for banks. We spend a huge amount of time integrating our solution into traditional banks contexts. There for sure is a lot of overhead. But being inside banks also gives you better data access.
nomoreusernames 4y ago
oh, you just casually drop this. like these latest years has been heckin stupid and you just do such nice thing. heckin legend. if there is a creator ill tell them youre a good person. legend.
linda4786 4y ago
tt_dev 4y ago
The most critical feature I need for a budgeting app is account syncing. Does anyone know any service like this that allows me to automatically import transaction data from accounts? I currently use Personal Capital which works pretty well for integrations.
tomcam 4y ago
Sorry it didn’t work as planned. Thank you for taking these steps, and for dealing with a difficult situation so gracefully.
Pooge 4y ago
What is a good desktop-first budgeting application? I've been using Homebank[1] for a few years now but I'm open to suggestions. [1]: http://homebank.free.fr/ http://homebank.free.fr/
jmschlmrs 4y ago
I’m working on a similar product at https://mygraph.ca https://mygraph.ca and always looked up to James and Actual. Great product and well engineered. It was amazing to see how productive he has been the past few years working on it while also being at Stripe. Not surprised to hear it got to be a bit much.
fullstackchris 4y ago
Hi! Saw your remarks about the difficulty of maintaining mobile apps - I agree this is an extremely large overhead, Apple and Google make it an absolute pain most of the time, but if you are willing to put in initial effort to port the screens / main functionality to a mobile friendly website, you can create a hybrid app through a WebView and significantly reduce the shipping times / app store burdens (and most updates, if not all, can go through the web and thus webview, instead of having to build and ship a native app(s)!) If it helps. I don't know the technicalities of the mobile app at all, i.e. how many native functionalities the mobile app needs, if any.
b3nji 4y ago
*Actual, is actually going open-source.
HNHatesUsers 4y ago

811 points by pbowyer 4y ago

If it's running locally (or in a cloud the user choses to trust), it doesn't need to be a CRDT any more to get the same security properties, which would ironically mean it is now easier to develop. (Granted CRDTs might enable other features although OT is generally considered simpler)

mizzao 4y ago

I've been using Mint for several years and it's been slowly getting more and more useless since the Intuit acquisition. As a technical user, does Actual let me do similar things myself, and now with the ability to contribute to code? Or is this completely different?

slightknack 4y ago

I love Actual, one of the best local-first apps I've used. I'm excited that it's been open sourced, but I also understand that this release is a bit bittersweet. Awesome work James, best of luck in your future endeavors :)

PStamatiou 4y ago

Would be curious if you'd be open to talking about some of the history in terms of user growth, revenue and costs. Just curious about how these types of projects go.

yurishimo 4y ago
If the final user numbers are accurate, revenue was a bit over $3k a month. Not even enough to really pay the founder if living in the US. Assuming $200/mo for servers, backups, and help desk software, that doesn't leave much after taxes for take home pay. As someone who just discovered this software, I am now really curious to give it a try!
- jlongster 4y ago
  Yep that's right. I launched around 3 years ago, and it was brutally slow. I think it took a year to hit 100 subscribers. Another year to hit 300. This past fall, YNAB increased their prices which gave me decent jump from around 500 to 800 subscribers which is where I'm at today. I did everything wrong when it comes to marketing and getting subscribers. I focused on the tech and never invested in content, building hype, etc. Well, I take that back -- sometimes I did, but only 10% instead of 70% like I should have been doing.
  - codegeek 4y ago
    As a bootstrapped solo founder myself (even though I have somehow built a small team after 7 years), I totally get what you are saying. Be proud of what you did and most don't even get to do what you did. It is so hard to do things alone and especially when you realize it is mostly about Marketing and Sales (and not the product only).
  - candiddevmike 4y ago
    I'm a firm believer that the only way to stand out in the B2C world is to have a VC backed marketing budget. You can't bootstrap a positive CAC in a reasonable timeframe without going bankrupt as a solo founder.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - difflens 4y ago
    Can I just say that I appreciate the transparency about your numbers here! As a bootstrapped SAAS builder here, this gives me perspective
  - xbryanx 4y ago
    This is awesome feedback and I appreciate your honesty. I will help so many remember what matters in their next ventures.

corderop 4y ago

Sometimes I feel that society forces us to be economically successful in all aspects of life. I'm in the first steps of my career, and even though I just want to learn new things and do exciting projects, the first thought that come to my mind when I have an idea to develop is: "How could this be profitable?" > One thing I'm really excited about open-source is I no longer have to deal with any of the business or deployment stuff. I can focus on being a project manager. I think that having this feeling it's the best achievement you can get from this.

cpitman 4y ago

I wish people wouldn't use "we open sourced it" as a synonym for "this product is dead". Especially for a SaaS company, there is a totally valid business strategy in open sourcing your codebase but continuing to provide a paid SaaS offering for users that are not interested in self-hosting. It causes confusion every time a company open sources their software. Always have to wonder, "Is it dead and they are yeeting it over the fence?"

indigochill 4y ago
I don't necessarily interpret it as a synonym, more that these are two events that naturally coincide. IMO it's better to decide to open source a product when it dies than to annihilate it. If nothing else, people may be able to learn something from the source.
- cpitman 4y ago
  I agree, better to open source a product then to just let it die off. I just wish companies were honest in their headline ("this product didn't work out, here's the source") instead of trying to spin it.
bdcravens 4y ago
Any examples of companies that opened previously closed source that continued to offer that product?
- cpitman 4y ago
  I work for Red Hat, we do it all the time. We often acquire closed source companies and then release the software as open-source, while continuing to offer it. I believe the most recent example was Stackrox, open sourced March 31st. The "productized" version is Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security. https://www.stackrox.io/blog/open-source-stackrox-is-now-available/ https://www.stackrox.io/blog/open-source-stackrox-is-now-ava...
- tshaddox 4y ago
  The web framework Remix was closed source and available only to license purchasers for about a year, until they announced their seed funding in October of last year: https://remix.run/blog/seed-funding-for-remix#open-source https://remix.run/blog/seed-funding-for-remix#open-source

spyremeown 4y ago

Not gonna lie, this is kinda awesome. Thanks a lot, will take a look at the code later.

ubiquitous-dev 4y ago

Hey James, we’re really sorry to hear about you closing down the business from a revenue standpoint! It sounds like it was the right choice for you though. Thanks for the contribution back to the community, as well as for prettier! We are building a platform to support local-first application development, and have appreciated your various articles / interviews / blog posts about the topic! Best of luck in the future, and thanks again.

xanaxagoras 4y ago
What is your platform?

mgkimsal 4y ago

> In June, all existing subscriptions will be cancelled. Specific dates coming soon. On one hand, good for being this transparent about it. I'm sure none of these decisions are easy. On the other hand... June is... 6 weeks away? I don't know the size or tech skills of the userbase - perhaps this is a decent time frame? It seems overly aggressive going in to 'shut off' mode so quickly. But... dragging it out longer may not help that many more people. Probably no simple decisions that don't inconvenience people in the short term, regardless of which way you go.

jlongster 4y ago
If the community want to wait, I'm happy to push back the date. I actually thought it felt less greedy to not wait too long, because doing it in the far future just means people are paying for unsupported software. Happy to keep it running though for as long as people want.
- jtbayly 4y ago
  I'm not using your software, but as somebody who has had to switch personal finance apps multiple times, I'd personally want to be able to use it through the end of the year. It's easier to just start a new program at a new year.

poleguy 4y ago

I still use YNAB4 regularly. I have a paid copy from before they moved to an online model. I'm running it on ubuntu in wine. It still works fine. I had never heard of Actual till today. It looks like it would cover my use case. I'm not sure why I would have switched, though, as YNAB4 still works for me and has no recurring charge and is fully local.

deleted 4y ago
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Semaphor 4y ago
Yeah, YNAB Classic is amazing. I remember Sync kinda sucking, but I simply disabled that, as I never used it from different places anyway.

sirtimbly 4y ago

Sad that this app didn't achieve the scale of subscriptions it deserved. A good reminder that awesome tech isn't usually enough. Do you regret not taking capital to fund marketing and support full time? Or put another way, any other ideas of where you could have spent someone else's money to give you a boost into higher subscription numbers?

jlongster 4y ago
Yes I totally regret it. There are ethical VCs that would be willing to invest a small amount and I should have done that. Bootstrapping isn't all it's cracked up to be; there are a lot better and smarter ways to kickstart a project.
- adrianmsmith 4y ago
  Could you still pursue that route? Presumably it's never too late, especially as you've got a product already, and have demonstrated traction.
  - jlongster 4y ago
    I've thought about it! I'm a little burned out though on the business stuff. I'd like for this just to be a cool product now.
- tomatowurst 4y ago
  but if you can't generate enough revenues to justify valuations you wouldn't go anywhere either. i guess it is better to find that out after raising millions and paying yourself a fat salary
  - sirtimbly 4y ago
    It's in an established and competitive market. There's money flowing into companies doing this same thing. An investor throwing (some) capital at marketing and growth for this totally functional (and beautiful) product could have made sense.

encoderer 4y ago

I did the SaaS-side-business thing for about 6 years. Early on I decided the SaaS was going to be my next career move and I would stay at my employer until I could quit employment altogether. A new job means you have to earn your place on a new team and how could I do that successfully with one eye on my SaaS at all times? When James joined stripe I was surprised both that stripe was agreeable to side projects and that James was courageous enough to try to do both. Open sourcing here just looks like more courage. Good luck James and congrats on what you’ve built here!

brushfoot 4y ago
As someone else with a SaaS side business of around the same age, it gets painful around then: You have to make tough decisions and the early fun is gone. Plus keeping up with new and existing customers can make it feel like you're not really steering the ship anymore but being tossed around by the storm. I understand James's desire to step back, though MIT is an interesting choice since now anyone can do anything with it, including selling it. What did you end up doing with your SaaS business?
- encoderer 4y ago
  Went full time in 2020! Immediately took an 80% pay cut, but I spend 0 hours in bullshit meetings and no longer have to play the corporate employment game.
  - brushfoot 4y ago
    Was hoping for that answer. Good for you! I've been weighing when to take the plunge myself. I can't support my family with what mine is making on the side right now (10% of my day job salary), though I know if I were full time on it I'd be seeing more return. Just feels like a high dive into a small pool and I'm trying to suss out the right moment. Any tips/lessons learned?
    - encoderer 4y ago
      Double down on anything that has worked to attract new customers. Ask yourself if there was a gun to your head and you HAD to 10x in a year what would you do. Get to a point where it covers your lifestyle and make the leap.

Ozzie_osman 4y ago

Sad to see this. We were big fans of Actual. We're working on a product in this space. While there is a ton of demand for products like this (the incumbents, like Mint, aren't really evolving or providing the privacy people want), it's not easy to grow. We ended up raising venture capital to bridge the gap, but once we did, things started to come together. In fact, we ended up having a few people who were trying to build an app solo join the team (because they're so passionate about the space, and had build great products, but couldn't get a lot of traction).

adrianmsmith 4y ago

The blog post says 810 paid subscribers, and the price was $4/month so that's $3.2k/month. I mean that's not bad, that sounds like they'd nearly made it. Maybe they'd need 2-3x that to live off (depending where they live). But if they got that far I sort of feel they might have been able to make it. Then they wouldn't need any other job, they could just live off the product. And then any additional revenue growth would be profit. I mean they were a lot closer to it being able to sustain them than a business with e.g. $0/month revenue, or e.g. 3 users at $10/month (I've worked for a few such projects without product/market..)

weaksauce 4y ago
they mentioned that they need to hire 2 people. so that's a pretty low gross for that. and the expense of running the servers and all that is not included there so net was probably wildly insufficient for that kind of newhire. I'd think spending some money on marketing would have been more prudent.
twobitshifter 4y ago
There’s a chance they just needed to raise the price. I wonder how people land on something like $4. At that price your demand for something like this is not price sensitive. $5 and you have 20% growth, $8 and you’ve doubled. To the users it’s just a few bucks.
- caseyross 4y ago
  Moreover, everything on the website implies that Actual was a high-end, exactingly designed product for discerning, well-off people. But it was priced like general-audience commodity SaaS. My guess is that most subscribers would have been more than willing to pay, say, 20 dollars a month instead of 4, particularly for something that has "saving you lots of money" as a core value proposition.
  - all2 4y ago
    It's open source... We could try. :D

codegeek 4y ago

"I completely underestimated how much work it takes to build a business. There's so much overhead. I'm always figuring out why a build failed, taxes, how to triage issues, responding to support, designing UIs, responding to Apple's complaints, and more. There's so much that goes on behind the scenes. There's no way a single person can possible do this alone, especially as a side project." This is the part that resonates a lot with me even though I have been able to build a small business that is reasonably successful with a small team but it takes a toll. It is a frikin slog and there are days when you feel like jumping off a cliff. Also the cost of doing something so small can add up when you can have a cushy tech job making 200K relatively easy. To do your own thing requires a very different mindset and incredibly hard. There is a HUGE difference between building a quick side project for fun VS turning it into a real business (no matter how small). I have full sympathy for the owner and totally understand where they are coming from. No judgement and I wish them all the best.

nnoitra 4y ago
so make 200K relatively easy?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
johnwheeler 4y ago
Well, it's the type of business. Personal finance is super-hard to break into. It requires trust and budget. Trust requires users and word of mouth so its chicken and egg. you're not going to compete as a one man show with intuit on budgets or trust. i get the vision - build something so good and usable, and they will come. The good thing about Quickbooks though is that it's trustworthy in the social proof sense. That trumps a lot of ease of use (though it is also easy to use)
mellosouls 4y ago
you can have a cushy tech job making 200K relatively easy Some of these claims seem to come from people living on a different planet to me. Yes you can make that, but only if you are in a tiny (and normally very privileged) set. The way it's breezily posted on this forum at times shows perhaps just a leeetle disconnect with the mainstream tech world

finchisko 4y ago

I feel your frustration about business not going as envisioned. My current failure rate is two failed attempts to build profitable busines. Actually the second project is similar to yours. Invoice app for small entrepreneurs. Till today I'm the only user of the app. To reduce costs, I made it run completely without server support, all data is stored in local storage and hosted on netlify for free (no own domain). https://moja--fakturazdarma.netlify.app/ https://moja--fakturazdarma.netlify.app/. It was nice challenge for me to make it work completely without any backend (generation of pdfs using pdfmake, generating qrcodes and lzma compression ...) I still use it for main own invoicing and use to in my resume as work reference, but with zero money income.

tinytuna 4y ago
I’d suggest first having an English version of the site and maybe paying for a domain (looks more professional and trustworthy) and you could post it in Product Hunt to have more people discovering it.
- finchisko 4y ago
  Thanks. Sure, I had own domain for a year, made promotion on Facebook. This product was not developed with other countries in mind. Idea was to do pilot in my own country and then scale up. Every country has different invoicing rules, so it cannot be just translated to English and put on US market. But since it didn't attract any single customer, I just gave up as my previous experience was that adding features when there is no traction for MVP just prolong your suffering.

muhehe 4y ago

I've never heard of this, but it looks nice. Anyone can compare with firefly-iii?

slwoslownsn 4y ago
It’s far less flexible of a system than firefly-iii. That said it actually (lol) functions well with any amount of historical data. Firefly-iii slows to a crawl with just a few years of data. Actual handles nearly a decade worth of data (imported from YNAB4) with ease.
- muhehe 4y ago
  Interesting. I never managed to get too much of data into firefly, because of API rate limiting (and was too lazy to modify the code) :)
sirtimbly 4y ago
I've used both. firefly-iii is a fairly good, easy to maintain and host, web app. It's not as good design or UX as Actual - especially since firefly-iii has no mobile experience to speak of. Acutal had great mobile apps. firefly's budgeting interface is a bit of a UX mess.

brap 4y ago

I’ve used YNAB before and really liked it, this seems conceptually similar. Did anyone use both and would like to share their experience? My main problem with YNAB was that entering transactions manually all the time was time consuming, and I wasn’t able to stay consistent for more than a few months at a time (in my country there was no way to import automatically).

l8nite 4y ago
I left YNAB when they pulled the bait & switch on pricing with their oldest customers last year. I’ve been looking for something to replace it for awhile now, so I’m going to try this out.
- xbryanx 4y ago
  Check out Lunch Money[1] - Which feels more polished and supported to me. 1 - https://lunchmoney.app/ https://lunchmoney.app/
kashura 4y ago
YNAB drastically changed their pricing (double for "grandfathered" customers), but even more importantly American Express import has been broken for about 6 months now. That was the final straw.
- bestcoder69 4y ago
  We upgraded to SaaS YNAB and suffered through it for years, before dropping it in our house for the same reason. Syncing was broken for a really really long time. We finally reported it, and it was working the next time we checked. So, their monitoring (if it exists) is not doing its job whatsoever, and they’re relying on customer reports to find out about months-long outages. Not to mention the smaller sync outages that would happen constantly. We tried to understand the way they want us to deal with credit cards about a dozen times. Never had any interest in learning it and still don’t (because I don’t treat a CC transaction any different from a cash transaction w/r/t budgeting), but the new YNAB forced it on us. Nothing I’m saying is new. It’s just wild to me how bad their Second System tanked their software & reputation.

Barrin92 4y ago

>responding to Apple's complaints I really wish people would utilize the web more rather than heading for the app ecosystems. From the article it's not clear if this is possible due to some particular tech choices they have made but in general it can reduce overhead quite a lot. If you have a few hundred subscribers and you can do with one engineer less that can make a huge financial difference.

ICodeSometimes 4y ago

Interesting. I wonder why James didn't attempt to sell it at the very least? 36K ARR means you could have rather quickly found a buyer for 60k+ and gotten rid of the thing for a small but not in-significant payday. Also i wonder if the users are truly happy with being told they have to migrate to their own server as i'd assume they're the type who'd rather pay $4 a month instead of having to deal with the hassle. In any case, it's quite a courageous move and seems very well-intentioned.

nnoitra 4y ago
36K is peanuts. That's 3K a month.
- tomatowurst 4y ago
  i guess you make millions a month, i will still take 3k a month MRR.
  - Trasmatta 4y ago
    3k MRR, but with a huge amount of extra stress on top of your full time job. It's not necessarily worth it, and the type of thing that leads to massive burnout.
jonas21 4y ago
You have no control over what the buyer would do with it. They might decide to slurp up all of the user financial data flowing through the server, for example. Or they might leak the data due to incompetence. Even in the best of circumstances, the buyer would probably have a plan for increasing revenue, which might mean raising prices, introducing ads, or any number of things that James might not like. Finally, it sounds like he wants to continue working on the product, just at his own pace, and without the stress of running a business. This would not be an option if he sold.

bern4444 4y ago

There are a lot of tools like Actual (YNAB, Monarch, Mint, Aspire google sheet etc). All are focused on budgets and mostly managing cash accounts. I've always wanted an equivalent but for investments. I know you can sync investment accounts to some of these, but that only reports the balance generally. I'd love to have the equivalent for investment accounts that answer these questions: What is my sector exposure? How much, across multiple accounts and brokerages, of Apple (or any stock/etf/mutual fund) do I own as a total percentage? How much money are in retirement accounts vs non retirement accounts? What is my IRR (rate of return) in aggregate and per account? And of course things like projections, safe withdrawal rates, analysis in the form of charts and graphs like what Actual and the rest offer. etc

adamarice 4y ago
I’ve been working on building this since January. We should have the first version up in a few weeks. Here’s the landing page: https://www.haystack.finance https://www.haystack.finance
- bern4444 4y ago
  I don't know if this is a business you're trying to build or a project you're working on but I'd be interested in helping if you need. I was working on something like this as a side project but my motivation for it fluctuates.
  - adamarice 4y ago
    Awesome, yeah send me an email at adam.arthur.rice@gmail.com. Would be great to chat.
whoopdeepoo 4y ago
Personal capital? Sigfig?
- bern4444 4y ago
  I've heard of personal capital - though I've read lots of reviews that say they always try and upsell you to their paid management platforms. Will take a look at sigfig!

650 4y ago

An excel spreadsheet to track reoccuring expenses and income with additions made for upcoming expenses, etc. hyperpersonalized for you has been the best for me, have tried a few budget apps. Micromanaging food expenses should be something that you decide on the spot rather than seeing 600$ on food this month oh-no. Caveat: Software Engineer salary with large discretionary income

conductr 4y ago
Me plus wife and a toddler and I wish I could keep under $600 a WEEK We eat out regularly and just going to a fast casual spot is like $40-50 for sandwiches

alexandargyurov 4y ago

I have to fill out every transaction manually? No Open Banking integration? :/

xd1936 4y ago
> You could even hook up your own bank syncing -- Plaid support a free development plan that covers an individual user. In fact, you'll see Plaid support in the syncing server because I already started building this out. Not yet, but it sounds like a top priority.
skrobul 4y ago
There are few importers available which have been opensourced (look at the Actual's github org), I have only tried one during migration from greedy YNAB. There is also an API which works quite well. I am using it to import transactions from Revolut. So no Open Banking yet, but afaik it's painful to get in the UK anyways

aeharding 4y ago

Great to see it going open source! I hope Actual can keep development going with the community support. Similarly, a local-first (PouchDB) budgeting app I built[1] went open source[2][3] a few years ago. It's worked out well, I love seeing what everyone does with it in their forks. Unlike Actual however, I maintain a paid subscription service while being open source. It's worked out quite well. Luckily it's not a huge time commitment as a side project, probably due to no native apps. I've also shifted from active development to maintenance, with sporadic updates every now and then. For example, I recently moved everything from Gitlab to Github[4] and upgraded a bunch of dependencies under the hood to get everything compiling on Apple Silicon. (For example, I now run AngularJS tests with Jest, hehe.) [1] https://financier.io/ https://financier.io/ [2] https://github.com/financier-io/ https://github.com/financier-io/ [3] https://blog.financier.io/financier-is-now-open-source-bdfe98a5b9b6 https://blog.financier.io/financier-is-now-open-source-bdfe9... [4] https://blog.financier.io/weve-moved-to-github-4617239b9fa3 https://blog.financier.io/weve-moved-to-github-4617239b9fa3

gtirloni 4y ago
> Great to see it going open source It's actually shutting down.
- jlongster 4y ago
  What's shutting down is the public syncing server. That server is literally just a message store: it takes CRDT changes and puts them in a big table. And it servers them back out. Now that the server is public, it's incredibly easy for you to run your own. It's such a simple server (no postgres etc requirement) that this model is actually way better.
  - ec109685 4y ago
    CRDT's and the like seem like the perfect thing to build an app, but you make a good point about it requiring something so custom compared to a thin client that makes web service requests for data on each screen / page view.

tegansnyder 4y ago

I'm looking for a solution in this space that lets you plot the waterfall effect. What I'd like this solution to do is the following: 1. Enter all my bills that require full payment each month 2. Enter my bills that can be variably paid (ex. credit cards, medical bills, etc) 3. Enter my monthly income 4. Enter my budgeted personal/home expenses (food, gas/transport, etc) Then the solution should be able to model a few different paths to maximizing my savings and plot out a waterfall that says if I payoff X over 6 months and pay the minimum on Y then here is what my savings would look like. I'd like to be able to see what my projected payoff dates for different bills are and what my projected savings look like if I was to follow the model.

rmesters 4y ago

Shameless plug: OP mentioned Plaid as a way to sync bank accounts, but if anyone wants to use a Plaid alternative in Europe, check out Nordigen (it's free). Full disclosure: I'm one of the founders.

dwild 4y ago
How can you afford to make it free?

nerdjon 4y ago

I am curious, what do people use for budgeting? Mint seems like the most feature rich, but not only do I not want to support their parent company because of their Tax lobbying... but I don't trust them from a privacy standpoint (Considering its free). YNAB and Monarch both seem like really good options. But I have not looked into them much yet. I currently use Copilot (iOS only... really just iPhone, no iPad app). I have found it really nice but the lack of a web or iPad app makes doing some tasks more of a pain. I am curious if anyone has found any that work well for couples that don't have joint finances but do obviously share some expenses. My partner and me struggle with figuring this out and inevitably loose track of certain small things. Rent and standard expenses are easy. But going out, groceries, etc. those are the complicated ones. I know there is an app you can use that you can mark transactions as shared, but I don't want to use that for privacy reasons. I would love if there was an app that had some functionality like that built in without making it so we have one account that just has all of our accounts in it.

drc500free 4y ago
I used to use Mint, moved to Truebill a couple years ago. It's easier to split out and budget discretionary spending and track it over the month. They also do a good job of automatically identifying bills and other repeat charges for review.
ashirviskas 4y ago
>But going out, groceries, etc. those are the complicated ones. Which is why I don't actually track those day-to-day. I'm using revolut and it gives me a pretty decent estimate of spent per category per month, give or take 15%. Then I use a slightly modified google sheets budgeting template (it's right there) and just put all the numbers there. Quite convenient and you can see all the data + add custom formulas if you want to.
ChrisClark 4y ago
Lunchmoney.app has a collaboration feature, but the description isn't clear enough to see if it's what you're looking for.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

rexreed 4y ago

I still have yet to find something that works as well as Microsoft Money. I have to run it on VMWare Fusion on a Mac to make it work. Moneydance is the next closest thing. Something that has real support for investments and tax reporting. Everything else is too... simple.

klik99 4y ago

THIS is how you sunset a product, good on him for making a tough choice and doing it the right way

quadrangle 4y ago

As someone focused on sticking to FLO software, I've been using Skrooge for accounting. It's just local, but it works well. How does Actual compare?

thepra 4y ago

Yep, making clients apps is kind of hell, that's why I chose PWAs for my web app collAnon, "installable" on iPhones, Androids and Desktops

joshpadnick 4y ago

Could you share more about the challenges you hit working with CRDTs?

michaelsalim 4y ago

Awesome how James handled this! Unrelated, I'm looking for something that can help me create finance projections. Eg: How's my account going to look like in the next 3 months if I go for a holiday. Any suggestions for that?

sbehere 4y ago
This seems to be exactly what ProjectionLab[1] is for. I am not a user or affiliated with it.. just learned about it the other day on some HN thread and thought it looked cool. [1]: https://projectionlab.com/ https://projectionlab.com/
- michaelsalim 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing. I did see that. Unfortunately a bit too focused on retirement for my liking. I want to see more granular time period which doesn't seem to be possible there.

panick21_ 4y ago

I work for a company that does this kind of product for banks. We spend a huge amount of time integrating our solution into traditional banks contexts. There for sure is a lot of overhead. But being inside banks also gives you better data access.

nomoreusernames 4y ago

oh, you just casually drop this. like these latest years has been heckin stupid and you just do such nice thing. heckin legend. if there is a creator ill tell them youre a good person. legend.

linda4786 4y ago

tt_dev 4y ago

The most critical feature I need for a budgeting app is account syncing. Does anyone know any service like this that allows me to automatically import transaction data from accounts? I currently use Personal Capital which works pretty well for integrations.

tomcam 4y ago

Sorry it didn’t work as planned. Thank you for taking these steps, and for dealing with a difficult situation so gracefully.

Pooge 4y ago

What is a good desktop-first budgeting application? I've been using Homebank[1] for a few years now but I'm open to suggestions. [1]: http://homebank.free.fr/ http://homebank.free.fr/

jmschlmrs 4y ago

I’m working on a similar product at https://mygraph.ca https://mygraph.ca and always looked up to James and Actual. Great product and well engineered. It was amazing to see how productive he has been the past few years working on it while also being at Stripe. Not surprised to hear it got to be a bit much.

fullstackchris 4y ago

Hi! Saw your remarks about the difficulty of maintaining mobile apps - I agree this is an extremely large overhead, Apple and Google make it an absolute pain most of the time, but if you are willing to put in initial effort to port the screens / main functionality to a mobile friendly website, you can create a hybrid app through a WebView and significantly reduce the shipping times / app store burdens (and most updates, if not all, can go through the web and thus webview, instead of having to build and ship a native app(s)!) If it helps. I don't know the technicalities of the mobile app at all, i.e. how many native functionalities the mobile app needs, if any.

b3nji 4y ago

*Actual, is actually going open-source.

HNHatesUsers 4y ago