All 100 ideasMoney
#84 of 100 · Money
Budgeting that stays on your machine
A local or self-hosted budgeting app, like the old one-time-purchase YNAB 4, that categorises spending and forecasts balances with irregular income.
Asks per year
What the askers want
- Would pay11%
- Want it local or private67%
- Object to subscriptions22%
- Want it open source or self-hosted56%
- Want AI to do it0%
Share of the 9 asks that say so, as judged by Jev.
What exists on Show HN
Built, still asked for20 Show HN launches do this job, and 41 more do part of it. People still ask, so the launches are missed, unknown, or not what they want. Ask what they’re missing before you build.
- Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager2023 · 662 pts
- Pulse Local, a Mac budgeting app whose AI models run on your machine2026 · 122 pts
- A simple FOSS and self-hosted budgeting app2020 · 88 pts
- Mintable – Roll-your-own Mint clone for managing personal finances2019 · 87 pts
- Guitos, a free open-source budgeting app2023 · 53 pts
- Personal finance with 'hledger' in Emacs2017 · 52 pts
- Fungible – A local personal finance app in the terminal2026 · 30 pts
- Trackm, a personal finance web app2026 · 21 pts
Instead of: Mint, YNAB, Quicken, Firefly III
The idea, as matched
A private personal finance app (Mint, YNAB or Quicken replacement) for budgeting, categorising spending and forecasting balances with irregular income, preferably local or self-hosted with a one-time price, not a subscription.
Jev first matched 17 requests to this idea; a second reader kept 9 of 17.
Every ask, newest first
Each line is an AI paraphrase of what the writer wanted. The link goes to their own words on Hacker News.
Reader’s note. Several left YNAB over its subscription.
- Nov 2025Wants a local-first YNAB4-style budgeting app with one-time purchase and no subscription or sync. Read it: a comment in “Show HN: Wealthfolio 2.0- Open source investment tracker. Now Mobile and Docker”
- Aug 2024Wants budgeting software handling irregular income, planned lumpy expenses and reimbursements, not just consistent monthly cash flow. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Software for Real-World Budgeting?”
- Feb 2024Asks for an open-source alternative to YNAB with the same budgeting method. Read it: a comment in “Firefly III: A free and open source personal finance manager”
- Feb 2024Wants a self-hosted expense tracker supporting multiple users with shared accounts, categories and spending breakdowns. Read it: a comment in “Firefly III: A free and open source personal finance manager”
- Apr 2022Wants a tool for finance projections, like seeing their account three months out after a holiday. Read it: a comment in “Actual is going open-source”
- Oct 2020Wants a YNAB-like budgeting app that is not a cloud subscription with hosted data. Read it: a comment in “What if we had Local-First Software?”
- Jan 2020Wants self-hosted options, even paid, to see all finances in one place. Read it: a comment in “What happened to Mint?”
- Oct 2017Wants a forward-looking personal finance tool with envelopes and savings simulations, replacing a manual spreadsheet routine. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: How do you manage and anticipate your personnal finance?”
- May 2017Wants a finance tool tracking income and expenses by category and date, with tax-owed reports. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: What do you use for managing personal finance/money?”
Building this?
Read ten of the asks above first, because they say what the existing launches miss. If you ship it, post it as a Show HN so the next run of this list finds it.
Ship it like Vercel, on a server you own
This site runs on ShipTiffin. A push to GitHub deploys it, the way it would on Vercel, but the server is a Hetzner box in your own account. Postgres, sign-in, email, jobs and analytics are already on it, every project gets a hard limit, and nothing is billed by usage.
$19 a month per box, plus about $10 for the server at Hetzner. Open source, so you can also run it yourself for free.