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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

#101

Post by hiatus »

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…

If it's a self-hosted web app it is trivial to give yourself access on all of your devices using something like tailscale or wireguard. The same cannot be said for sharing access to a desktop app.

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

#102

Post by brnt »

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…

Agreed completely. I've used Gnucash for a small business, but found it a bit to cumbersome for personal finance. I've had a look at Homebank, Eqonomize. Anyone use these?

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

#103

Post by snvzz »

moorlagt wrote: post #77
snvzz wrote: post #28

I am already using GNUCash. How does this compare?

I tried GNUCash and opted for this. I think the UI is more understandable and polished. Still a lot of depth to Firefly and has its own learning curve. Its also written in PHP using Laravel which can be appealing.

UI might be more understandable and polished to someone new to both programs, but I have used GNUCash for over a decade. Change is effort.

As for PHP, it has never been confidence inspiring. I will say this despite having used Laravel professionally.

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

#104

Post by hiatus »

plondon514 wrote: post #54
hysan wrote: post #10

Any recommendations for a self-hosted finance tracker that supports multiple users who share bank accounts? I don’t think I need a budgeting tool? Ideally, what I want is a simple to use tool that will let me add my expenses, categorize them, and view breakdowns of where I’ve spent money each week/month/year. Does firefly work well for that?

I built https://porkybank.io for my wife and I for this very purpose

Where is the code? The parent asked for something self-hosted.

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

#105

Post by avirut »

Alifatisk wrote: post #57

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

Consider SimpleFin Bridge [0] - it's essentially a wrapper around MX (Plaid competitor) that lets you very simply pull your own credit card/bank data for $15/yr.

[0] https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/

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

#106

Post by vlucas »

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.

BudgetSheet supports most US and Canadian banks: https://www.budgetsheet.com

You can try it for free to see if it work for you first, and if you want to upgrade you can pay either monthly or annually.

Disclaimer: I am the creator of BudgetSheet :)

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

#107

Post by ta988 »

plondon514 wrote: post #76
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…

After reading the comments in this thread I may consider open sourcing my side project porkybank.io. You can check out an example here: https://porkybank.io/example/overview It's a simple daily budgeting app I put together for my wife and I to help us be more cognizant of our daily spending. Upvotes count as interest.

This looks like a great tool. Not sure what the crystal ball does.

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

#108

Post by marcinzm »

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…

Because many people (or their partners) use phones more often than desktops. Many may not even own a desktops aside from a dusty laptop and their work computer.

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

#109

Post by stnmtn »

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…

I think the original point is that if you're goal is to build cross-platform quickly, nothing right now beats html+css in electron.

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

#110

Post by plondon514 »

ta988 wrote: post #107
plondon514 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After reading the comments in this thread I may consider open sourcing my side project porkybank.io. You can check out an example here: https://porkybank.io/example/overview It's a simple daily budgeting app I put together for my wife and I to help us be more cognizant of our daily spending. Upvotes count as interest.

This looks like a great tool. Not sure what the crystal ball does.

Thanks for the feedback, it's like a forecasting feature. Say you want to spend over budget today, you can see how that changes your daily budget 1 day, 2 days, 3 days, etc. out from today. Or let's say you plan on being frugal for the next few days and will spend only $20.00 over the next 3 days, by the 4th day your daily budget will adjust accordingly: https://imgur.com/a/hD9R2zv
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