6 ms·

Actual is going open-source (2022)

129 points by edward 3y ago

tshaddox 3y ago
Worth noting that this happened a year and a half ago: https://x.com/jlongster/status/1520063046101700610?s=46 https://x.com/jlongster/status/1520063046101700610?s=46
- DannyPage 3y ago
  The repo is pretty active too, wonder if there’s a follow up blog post about the transition. https://github.com/actualbudget/actual https://github.com/actualbudget/actual
  - jlongster 3y ago
    Hey! I'm James, the original creator. Yeah, I tried to stay involved but over time I had to accept that my life right now just doesn't allow time to be very involved. We've had some incredible maintainers step up and their doing an amazing job stewarding the project along. I'm long-overdue to check in with the maintainers and write some content about the transition. I was also intending to shutdown the hosted version late summer and hand over actualbdget.com to the open-source community. My goal is to do this by end of year. Overall, I wish my life weren't so busy in some ways, but it's busy with really good and fulfilling things. The transition was a little rough for me (hard to give control away of something I worked so hard on) but it's turned out surprisingly good
    - BrutalCoding 3y ago
      I have not tried out Actual to this day, but I can imagine how you felt. Thanks for your nice gesture to hand your project out to the open source community. I will take a look, probably spin it up and contribute back.
    - Obscurity4340 3y ago
      You're not an uncool guy, OC
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
jmathai 3y ago
Congrats. Building something others use and deciding that isn’t sustainable are both great milestones. I created a more modest finance app (forecasting [1] and budgeting [2]). The Plaid integration alone was one I quickly realized I didn’t want to support a lot of users on. I also don’t want to have a large team working on it - if it requires more than a couple people then it’s not for me. I do hope that you are able to build an active community around it. Even if not, be proud of your accomplishments. [1] https://fiers.co/features https://fiers.co/features [2] https://fiers.co/features/spend https://fiers.co/features/spend
- j45 3y ago
  Neat, forecasting (especially multiple forecasts) is a nice feature set on its own compared to budgeting alone.
  - Obscurity4340 3y ago
    Its everything. Seriously
    - jmathai 3y ago
      The forecast is what makes the budget worth following.
      - Obscurity4340 3y ago
        Its all I would ever pay attention to anyway. And it should be fast-forwardable or rewindable. You should be able to see in to the past as represented within the financial transactions data a d in to the future, same. And it should allow you to fikter your view by temporal categories like year/month/week/day I can't quite put my finger on the deeper truth I'm articulating but that not every personal finance app implements a significant and front-page forecasting function is insane to me. I dont care about budgets, I care about how much money I have in any account at any given time if I've been dilligent in populating the model and I care when it shows that my balances are red/negative cuz I can't have that in a financial and existential way. I dunno
afavour 3y ago
(this is a great example of why blog posts should always have a date: this is over a year old!) One thing that sticks out to me here is the native app side: they can’t “just live” in the way an open source webapp can. They have to be removed from the App Store. What a shame that we can’t get to the point where you can easily build an open source mobile app and deploy it on your device. Progressive Web Apps for open source victory, I guess? (obviously much easier to do on Android but still requires you to go down the “forbidden path”)
- xkekjrktllss 3y ago
  the internet is for marketing, like it or not. dates could deter sharing beyond a threshold of time and therefor limit the marketing potential.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    I get what you're saying but a date is pretty much an essential part of the context for reading most posts. So you're welcome not to put a date and I'm welcome to skip past your post.
- misairu 3y ago
  Yeah, cannot find many open source apps on the App Store in this area. There's Prudent.Me that's a desktop application but it's not available on the App Store. It can be downloaded here: https://prudent.me https://prudent.me
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
meatjuice 3y ago
You can try their demo on the web https://app.actualbudget.com/budget https://app.actualbudget.com/budget
iamwil 3y ago
What kind of CRDT is it using? It looks like a merkle tree from the filename, but I'm not familiar with the implementation (like it's not a typical LWW, Grow-only sets, RGA, etc). Anyone know what it is?
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  Based on the author's talk [0], looks like it's grow-only sets. I haven't looked at the code though so it might have changed since he gave that talk in 2019. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEcwa68f-jY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEcwa68f-jY
  - iamwil 3y ago
    Ah, ok. I guess you can implement sets with a merkle tree, so a grow-only set makes sense.
    - iamwil 3y ago
      Correction. Based on his talk, the merkle tree isn't used to implement sets, but used as a quick way for you to know what timestamps have been applied across all clients.
dugite-code 3y ago
I use actual quite extensively now it's open source. As a proprietary app it's local first focus was a selling point, as an open source project it's now a source of complexity that feels a touch annoying. After all I own and run the server, it's actually the client devices I trust slightly less (if I need to pop on at work for whatever reason)
j45 3y ago
Does anyone know if the current apps are open source too?
- jlongster 3y ago
  Native apps were open-sourced yes in the repo, but the community moved them out into their own repos and archived them. Hard to build native apps open-source with all the tooling, and the community has been working on replacing them with a webapp
  - j45 3y ago
    Thanks for the clarification. Makes sense about the webapp.
Sytten 3y ago
I find it interesting as I am trying to build a business myself that someone would stop at 3k MRR. We are currently at 1.5k MRR and I agree that bootstrap is very hard. I can't even imagine hiring right now, that means doing a lot by ourselves. I live in Canada though, I keep my personnal expenses low and I do contracts on the side. I could make a lot more as an employee, it's just not me.
- hiatus 3y ago
  As someone with a solo business of ~2.5k MRR, I'm happy to stop leave it at this point because moving beyond would require scaling up, which takes it from a solo side thing to something that other people depend on to eat.
satvikpendem 3y ago
Worth noting that the author, James Long, is the same one who made a great talk on using CRDTs called CRDTs for Mortals [0], and he uses them in Actual as well. He was a great source of inspiration when I was looking into using them for my offline-first, local-first apps [1]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEcwa68f-jY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEcwa68f-jY [1] https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/
- jlongster 3y ago
  Hey! Glad to be an inspiration :)
DarmokJalad1701 3y ago
As someone who recently migrated from YNAB4, I am incredibly thankful that this exists!

129 points by edward 3y ago

Worth noting that this happened a year and a half ago: https://x.com/jlongster/status/1520063046101700610?s=46 https://x.com/jlongster/status/1520063046101700610?s=46

DannyPage 3y ago
The repo is pretty active too, wonder if there’s a follow up blog post about the transition. https://github.com/actualbudget/actual https://github.com/actualbudget/actual
- jlongster 3y ago
  Hey! I'm James, the original creator. Yeah, I tried to stay involved but over time I had to accept that my life right now just doesn't allow time to be very involved. We've had some incredible maintainers step up and their doing an amazing job stewarding the project along. I'm long-overdue to check in with the maintainers and write some content about the transition. I was also intending to shutdown the hosted version late summer and hand over actualbdget.com to the open-source community. My goal is to do this by end of year. Overall, I wish my life weren't so busy in some ways, but it's busy with really good and fulfilling things. The transition was a little rough for me (hard to give control away of something I worked so hard on) but it's turned out surprisingly good
  - BrutalCoding 3y ago
    I have not tried out Actual to this day, but I can imagine how you felt. Thanks for your nice gesture to hand your project out to the open source community. I will take a look, probably spin it up and contribute back.
  - Obscurity4340 3y ago
    You're not an uncool guy, OC
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

jmathai 3y ago

Congrats. Building something others use and deciding that isn’t sustainable are both great milestones. I created a more modest finance app (forecasting [1] and budgeting [2]). The Plaid integration alone was one I quickly realized I didn’t want to support a lot of users on. I also don’t want to have a large team working on it - if it requires more than a couple people then it’s not for me. I do hope that you are able to build an active community around it. Even if not, be proud of your accomplishments. [1] https://fiers.co/features https://fiers.co/features [2] https://fiers.co/features/spend https://fiers.co/features/spend

j45 3y ago
Neat, forecasting (especially multiple forecasts) is a nice feature set on its own compared to budgeting alone.
- Obscurity4340 3y ago
  Its everything. Seriously
  - jmathai 3y ago
    The forecast is what makes the budget worth following.
    - Obscurity4340 3y ago
      Its all I would ever pay attention to anyway. And it should be fast-forwardable or rewindable. You should be able to see in to the past as represented within the financial transactions data a d in to the future, same. And it should allow you to fikter your view by temporal categories like year/month/week/day I can't quite put my finger on the deeper truth I'm articulating but that not every personal finance app implements a significant and front-page forecasting function is insane to me. I dont care about budgets, I care about how much money I have in any account at any given time if I've been dilligent in populating the model and I care when it shows that my balances are red/negative cuz I can't have that in a financial and existential way. I dunno

afavour 3y ago

(this is a great example of why blog posts should always have a date: this is over a year old!) One thing that sticks out to me here is the native app side: they can’t “just live” in the way an open source webapp can. They have to be removed from the App Store. What a shame that we can’t get to the point where you can easily build an open source mobile app and deploy it on your device. Progressive Web Apps for open source victory, I guess? (obviously much easier to do on Android but still requires you to go down the “forbidden path”)

xkekjrktllss 3y ago
the internet is for marketing, like it or not. dates could deter sharing beyond a threshold of time and therefor limit the marketing potential.
- ghaff 3y ago
  I get what you're saying but a date is pretty much an essential part of the context for reading most posts. So you're welcome not to put a date and I'm welcome to skip past your post.
misairu 3y ago
Yeah, cannot find many open source apps on the App Store in this area. There's Prudent.Me that's a desktop application but it's not available on the App Store. It can be downloaded here: https://prudent.me https://prudent.me

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

meatjuice 3y ago

You can try their demo on the web https://app.actualbudget.com/budget https://app.actualbudget.com/budget

iamwil 3y ago

What kind of CRDT is it using? It looks like a merkle tree from the filename, but I'm not familiar with the implementation (like it's not a typical LWW, Grow-only sets, RGA, etc). Anyone know what it is?

satvikpendem 3y ago
Based on the author's talk [0], looks like it's grow-only sets. I haven't looked at the code though so it might have changed since he gave that talk in 2019. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEcwa68f-jY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEcwa68f-jY
- iamwil 3y ago
  Ah, ok. I guess you can implement sets with a merkle tree, so a grow-only set makes sense.
  - iamwil 3y ago
    Correction. Based on his talk, the merkle tree isn't used to implement sets, but used as a quick way for you to know what timestamps have been applied across all clients.

dugite-code 3y ago

I use actual quite extensively now it's open source. As a proprietary app it's local first focus was a selling point, as an open source project it's now a source of complexity that feels a touch annoying. After all I own and run the server, it's actually the client devices I trust slightly less (if I need to pop on at work for whatever reason)

j45 3y ago

Does anyone know if the current apps are open source too?

jlongster 3y ago
Native apps were open-sourced yes in the repo, but the community moved them out into their own repos and archived them. Hard to build native apps open-source with all the tooling, and the community has been working on replacing them with a webapp
- j45 3y ago
  Thanks for the clarification. Makes sense about the webapp.

Sytten 3y ago

I find it interesting as I am trying to build a business myself that someone would stop at 3k MRR. We are currently at 1.5k MRR and I agree that bootstrap is very hard. I can't even imagine hiring right now, that means doing a lot by ourselves. I live in Canada though, I keep my personnal expenses low and I do contracts on the side. I could make a lot more as an employee, it's just not me.

hiatus 3y ago
As someone with a solo business of ~2.5k MRR, I'm happy to stop leave it at this point because moving beyond would require scaling up, which takes it from a solo side thing to something that other people depend on to eat.

satvikpendem 3y ago

Worth noting that the author, James Long, is the same one who made a great talk on using CRDTs called CRDTs for Mortals [0], and he uses them in Actual as well. He was a great source of inspiration when I was looking into using them for my offline-first, local-first apps [1]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEcwa68f-jY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEcwa68f-jY [1] https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/

jlongster 3y ago
Hey! Glad to be an inspiration :)

DarmokJalad1701 3y ago

As someone who recently migrated from YNAB4, I am incredibly thankful that this exists!