Firefly III: A free and open-source finance manager

Previous HN Thread [2020]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20916920

I literally had to reinstall this to a new free instance on Saturday after getting my instance deleted accidentally.

I have been tracking and exporting backups of my finances using Firefly since 2020. I am young, my finances are nothing fancy, they are mostly credit card purchases, my salary, and my rent.

I love the flexibility of personally serving this on a dedicated server. Similar to the other commenter it consumes a lot of my time too. I tried to automate by writing small custom shortcuts in Apple Shortcuts for repeated things like posting a grocery purchase. Firefly has a comprehensive API, I have widgets on my homescreen showing my credit card balances at all times etc.

I like knowing how much I spend on grocery each month, how much I spent clothing last year vs this year, the effect of having a Costco membership. It is fun and I am sure in the next 10 years it will be so much more interesting looking at data from early years.

I found out about Firefly III a couple of weeks ago and wanted to try, but it seemed a bit more than what I needed. That's when I found out about Actual, which does seem to be an interesting solution. My issue with it is that they seem to have made the web version (intentionally?) not compatible with mobile, and their iPhone app requires a subscription of ~$10 a month. At first I thought I'd give it a try then felt sort of cheated. I don't mind paying for a solution but this seems like a shady way to charge money for me. Also I'm not a fan of subscription.

Anyway, I gave Firefly III a try and now I'm very happy that I did. I think those extra features that seemed too complicated at first are proving to be pretty useful.

I recently discovered PocketSmith[0] which is not free nor open-source, but I have found it to be the easiest to keep up to date. It automatically pulls transactions from most banks and credit providers, which I've been unable to replicate with other solutions.

[0]: https://www.pocketsmith.com/

Honestly seems a bit confusing to me...

The dashboard is a bit configurable, ok, so I can cut things I do not want but a default with just balance/all translations scrollable, the latest visible/stock option with mean price paid and actual value, optional widgets for other financial means (raw materials and their value, currencies etc) would be far nicer than a big load of graphs...

Ease to add transactions is not much a thing since at least personally all must come from external sources like bank exports in ofx/qif/sv etc with manually just tagging, description etc and a merging feature for upcoming transactions when the date is due to merge them with the actual new entry from the bank, so better import/export (i.e. woob integration for banks who do not offer exporting) would be very nice.

Generally graphs are nice but data in tabular form + operations on such tables are much more useful, especially if can be done with a programming language like "hey, that's the table, now you can generate new ones with some query language and lisp/python/ as you wish, just add a "programmed entry" and you get input in sv form for code, SQL-alike for query DSL, output view as a table for sv data or graph or raw at your option.

Surely the last paragraph might not appeal end users, but a user who self-host likely use/can use/dream such features...