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Firefly III: A free and open source personal finance manager

firefly-iii.org

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Re: Firefly III: A free and open source personal finance manager

#81

Post by wccrawford »

octobus2021 wrote: post #80

Help me understand, I must be dumb. If people seem to value privacy and security more so that they don't trust their data hosted at a third party, why are many of these are self-hosted Web apps as opposed to a simple desktop application? I'm not just talking about this particular one, just in general on the idea of replacing SaaS (like Mint) with self-hosted. What is self-hosting buying here? If it's installed on the…

I haven't done desktop UIs in a while, but my experience is that html and css work really well for UI, and there are a ton of competing desktop UIs that all have their own issues. Last time I tried making a desktop UI, I definitely preferred html over it.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot more web devs than native devs, too.

And finally, if you have something you want centralized, it's generally a lot easier to just have a web server than setting up some kind of system to sync the data between different computers. For finances, I could see wanting to use it on both mobile and desktop on a daily basis. That makes web a lot more desirable.

Re: Firefly III: A free and open source personal finance manager

#82

Post by rolha-capoeira »

octobus2021 wrote: post #80

Help me understand, I must be dumb. If people seem to value privacy and security more so that they don't trust their data hosted at a third party, why are many of these are self-hosted Web apps as opposed to a simple desktop application? I'm not just talking about this particular one, just in general on the idea of replacing SaaS (like Mint) with self-hosted. What is self-hosting buying here? If it's installed on the…

I imagine it's because whomever created it is a web developer, primarily.

Re: Firefly III: A free and open source personal finance manager

#83

Post by theappsecguy »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #69
jader201 wrote: post #65

With Mint being deprecated, I’ve been looking for something to replace it. I know there are a number of paid alternatives, but it seems like they all are missing at least one or two things that I liked about Mint. Is there an OSS option that comes close? Seems like the biggest hurdle is finding one that is close to reliable when authenticating with other sites (and able to adapt to changes they make, 2FA, etc.). I gu…

Are there any good paid ones, even, for Canadian institutions specifically? We have 4 credit cards and two chequing accounts plus mortgage etc at different institutions. It would be worth some small amount of money for me, especially for a desktop not SaaS solution, to get a unified view I can categorize, filter, sort, graph, etc.

Only one I have been able to find is YNAB and I hate it. It’s expensive and forces a weird opinionated budgeting approach onto its users.

Re: Firefly III: A free and open source personal finance manager

#84

Post by noeontheend »

Akashic101 wrote: post #70
Alifatisk wrote: post #57

I wish I could get data about my transactions through an api from my bank

Firefly kinda worked around this. You can download all transactions of your bank as a CSV, then use the Firefly importer to automatically map the data and save it inside Firefly. I usually do this once a week and it works pretty quickly, maybe a minute of work.

This certainly works well if you only need to track one account, but my finances aren't even _that_ complicated and I still have accounts I try to keep up to date with five different banks (hometown bank with checking/savings, two credit cards, employer-sponsored retirement account with Fidelity, and a three-fund portfolio with Vanguard). All of those accounts have 2FA, so logging into each one, navigating to the download screen, and downloading it into the right spot easily adds up to fifteen minutes of work.

Ironically, I've found that since I started to rely more on downloading the CSVs and importing them (as opposed to entering everything by hand), I've been entering things less regularly because of the increased start up time. If each account just had an API to pull transactions, I could schedule a job to download everything daily and life would be so much better.

Re: Firefly III: A free and open source personal finance manager

#85

Post by dewert »

octobus2021 wrote: post #80

Help me understand, I must be dumb. If people seem to value privacy and security more so that they don't trust their data hosted at a third party, why are many of these are self-hosted Web apps as opposed to a simple desktop application? I'm not just talking about this particular one, just in general on the idea of replacing SaaS (like Mint) with self-hosted. What is self-hosting buying here? If it's installed on the…

I use Goodbudget. The appeal is that I can enter expenses from my phone, and my partner can do the same, and we can both see how much is left in each budget category. If we were to switch to a self-hosted version, it would run on a home server, but it would be accessible from anywhere. I don't think this is an option you considered.

Additionally, even if you use a third party host, it seems less likely they'd be snooping through your application data, as it would provide no benefit to their business of selling you hosting infrastructure. The providers of a budgeting app, on the other hand, have many reasons, benign and possibly not so benign, to be looking at your data.

Re: Firefly III: A free and open source personal finance manager

#86

Post by eeghyrdcg »

wccrawford wrote: post #81
octobus2021 wrote: post #80

Help me understand, I must be dumb. If people seem to value privacy and security more so that they don't trust their data hosted at a third party, why are many of these are self-hosted Web apps as opposed to a simple desktop application? I'm not just talking about this particular one, just in general on the idea of replacing SaaS (like Mint) with self-hosted. What is self-hosting buying here? If it's installed on the…

I haven't done desktop UIs in a while, but my experience is that html and css work really well for UI, and there are a ton of competing desktop UIs that all have their own issues. Last time I tried making a desktop UI, I definitely preferred html over it. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot more web devs than native devs, too. And finally, if you have something you want centralized, it's generally a lot easie…

Indeed. I can’t imagine doing native desktop development unless it was absolutely required for my project, and then I’d ask myself if maybe I shouldn’t just work on something else. All that work and it runs on one OS.

Re: Firefly III: A free and open source personal finance manager

#87

Post by internet101010 »

cromka wrote: post #61
2Gkashmiri wrote: post #14

is there a home-assistant addon for doing personal finance?

Why on earth would you want to use HA as a host for that?

Not the person you responded to but I can see asking "how much money do I have left in my entertainment budget?" without having to open the software would be helpful.

Re: Firefly III: A free and open source personal finance manager

#89

Post by ambigious7777 »

octobus2021 wrote: post #80

Help me understand, I must be dumb. If people seem to value privacy and security more so that they don't trust their data hosted at a third party, why are many of these are self-hosted Web apps as opposed to a simple desktop application? I'm not just talking about this particular one, just in general on the idea of replacing SaaS (like Mint) with self-hosted. What is self-hosting buying here? If it's installed on the…

There's a lot of web developers, becuase the entire development process of web is much easier compared to other platforms, including setup, debugging, and distributing. Also, with a web app you can access it from several devices, instead of just one.

Re: Firefly III: A free and open source personal finance manager

#90

Post by NikolaNovak »

theappsecguy wrote: post #83
NikolaNovak wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any good paid ones, even, for Canadian institutions specifically? We have 4 credit cards and two chequing accounts plus mortgage etc at different institutions. It would be worth some small amount of money for me, especially for a desktop not SaaS solution, to get a unified view I can categorize, filter, sort, graph, etc.

Only one I have been able to find is YNAB and I hate it. It’s expensive and forces a weird opinionated budgeting approach onto its users.

Thanks! Does YNAB actually plug into bank accounts like Mint used to? I thought you had to manually enter everything, but it may have evolved since I last looked at it.
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