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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

#91

Post by djvk »

Alifatisk wrote: post #57

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

I also wish this. I initially tried to build direct integrations to my financial institutions from Firefly, but found that none of them (mine, at least) give API access to their peon customers, you have to be a full-on fintech company. I eventually just built an integration [0] with Plaid since it seemed the most mature solution for where I live (US) and I've been fairly happy with the results. My main irritation is that Plaid used to be free if you were just using it with a few institutions, but is going to be paid-only in a few months. The prices do seem fairly reasonable ($.30/institution/month for transactions), so I'll probably stick with it.

[0]: https://github.com/dvankley/firefly-plaid-connector-2

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

#92

Post by rc_mob »

bberenberg wrote: post #22

The founder of Maybe[0] oss’d it recently and they’re working towards making it easy to self host. Seems like it could end up being a fairly modern SaaS level open core alternative. 0 - https://github.com/maybe-finance/maybe

well now I'm just overwhelmed with options

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

#93

Post by mdhowle »

igortg wrote: post #48
mdhowle wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been using the self-hosted ActualBudget for ~6 months and found it mostly perfect. The mobile version of the site is not complete but it's at least usable for managing transactions. The only drawback is no user accounts, but you can have multiple budgets. I was originally on YNAB4, and then financier.io for ~2 years.

I've being using YNAB4 for about 10yrs now. But I miss a mobile version to report daily expenses. Do you see any major drawback comparing to YNAB4?

I haven't encountered any major drawbacks. The reporting is a bit lacking. ActualBudget has simple Net Worth and Cash Flow charts.

Other than that, it has all the features of YNAB4 I can recall.

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

#94

Post by InitialLastName »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #67
AndreiCalazans wrote: post #62

What's with people building open source finance managers? This is like the 1000th one I have seen.

Along with note taking and todo apps, it's low hanging fruit. It's a problem most people / developers can understand without having to do a lot of studying, and it fits in people's heads. But it's also often an example of people not willing to learn a new tool, or not willing to pay for one, so why not build a new one? How hard can it be?

It's also (similar to note-taking and TODO) a problem that can be approached in a lot of different ways, for people with very different needs and mental models.

Building an app that fits your mental model can be very instructive (including helping you flesh out your own understanding of the problem space).

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

#95

Post by enobrev »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #90
theappsecguy wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It does - mostly (only?) using plaid. I tried YNAB for a few months. It's not really for me. But it was able to sync _most_ of my accounts without issue.

I've been trying out Monarch more recently (which seems to use plaid, mx, and other methods). They have a discount for people coming over from mint as well as a way to import mint history.

I'm still cleaning up my mint data before running the import. I've liked it thus far; I'd say it's pretty much what I hoped Mint would become when I started using Mint a decade ago.

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

#96

Post by octobus2021 »

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…

HTML and CSS are most definitely NOT better for the UI comparing to the native desktop apps. HTML was designed for cross-reference documents and people spent decades enriching it with CSS/JS/whatever to get some resemblance of acceptable UI. Not even mentioning all the resources required to run all the frameworks that the modern Web UI is running on.

If you want to be able to check your finances on the phone you have to put it on a 3rd party server along with your data. Might as well go with SaaS like Mint. I don't.

You do lose some cross-platform capabilities when you do desktop apps, that is true, but there are some toolsets available (eg Qt).

So I guess it comes down to what people are used to work with, which is Web-first.

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

#97

Post by wintermutestwin »

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.

>You can download all transactions of your bank as a CSV

Unless you have an Apple Card. I went to download last year's transactions and found out that they only allow you to download a PDF statement for each month!

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

#98

Post by ebiester »

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…

The short of it is that nobody has cracked the free cross-OS problem in the same way as electron has. Lazarus requires pascal and is unattractive. JavaFX, afaik, still requires a jvm download to use, and the documentation is minimal. QT is expensive for anything that isn't OSS, and the tools are minimal if you are on the free plan. Most of the rest require C++ and most don't have a great default visual design.

Electron has great documentation and we have a great variety of ready-to-use js widgets.

I really don't like this pattern either, but every time I've gone to trying to build a desktop app I get stuck in the mud. (I used JavaFX last time and got far enough to be usable, but I'd go to Electron if I wanted to have something to distribute.)

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

#99

Post by hiatus »

mdhowle wrote: post #9
zargon wrote: post #7

The author has a weird take on zero based budgeting [0]. To me it seems like a distinction without a difference. I never did try Firefly because at first it wasn't very mature and then later I found Actual Budget, which is (or at least was) perfect. (I haven't transitioned to the open source version yet, so I'm not sure if they broke it.) [0] https://docs.firefly-iii.org/explanation/firefly-iii/backgro...

I have been using the self-hosted ActualBudget for ~6 months and found it mostly perfect. The mobile version of the site is not complete but it's at least usable for managing transactions. The only drawback is no user accounts, but you can have multiple budgets. I was originally on YNAB4, and then financier.io for ~2 years.

How do you get transactions into ActualBudget? Do you run a manual import job at a set cadence?

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

#100

Post by ebiester »

octobus2021 wrote: post #96
wccrawford wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

HTML and CSS are most definitely NOT better for the UI comparing to the native desktop apps. HTML was designed for cross-reference documents and people spent decades enriching it with CSS/JS/whatever to get some resemblance of acceptable UI. Not even mentioning all the resources required to run all the frameworks that the modern Web UI is running on. If you want to be able to check your finances on the phone you have…

The developer experience for Electron is much better than PySide + QT free, and nobody is spending 5,000 a year to write their own apps.
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