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Show HN: Wealthfolio: Private, open-source investment tracker

wealthfolio.app

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Re: Show HN: Wealthfolio: Private, open-source investment tracker

#211

Post by grepLeigh »

alanbernstein wrote: post #206
grepLeigh wrote: post #196

I strongly encourage you to charge (lots) of money ASAP. I love the open source, offline, rent-free ethnos but also if you've built something truly valuable, charge money for it. Donations don't count as a viable monetization strategy. Even if the software is free and you're just offering $500/hour consulting as an add-on to the software, that helps me trust the project has sticking power. P.S. I think Tauri is such…

I think this is the mindset that ruined the web.

Indie developers getting paid for their craftsmanship ruined the web?

If a solo dev builds a tool that helps even a handful of people manage 5-6-7 figure portfolios, that's worth more than a cup of coffee.

Re: Show HN: Wealthfolio: Private, open-source investment tracker

#212

Post by jchook »

klinquist wrote: post #49
diggan wrote: post #5

First question from reading through the landing page is about this part: > Import your statements from your broker or bank. Exactly what brokers/banks that are supported should be listed somewhere and linked here, as that's a "make or break" feature for a lot of people I bet. Not much point in replacing my homegrown "Banks CSV export -> Data processing > Import into spreadsheet" workflow unless I just replace that la…

I just assumed it uses Plaid.

Imagine if Plaid was open source...

Re: Show HN: Wealthfolio: Private, open-source investment tracker

#213

Post by andrewmcwatters »

langcss wrote: post #204
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the fault lies with the banks who do not allow their own customers access to their data. Plaid, Intuit, and other private companies scrape financial institutions unless they provide more secure methods to obtain customer data, and most of them do not do this. So the state of the art to connect to banks... is Selenium with stealth modifications. I own a business which does the same work as Plaid, Intuit, et a…

An open source repo of selenium scripts for different banks would be a decent thing.

I’m going to risk speaking for other people in the space and say that’s not actually a good idea since at the time of writing there are detection strategies that can shut all of us out of every financial institution if they so chose to do so due to recent changes with specific browsers.

It’s unsolved at the moment, and may not be for some time. So it’s a matter of time before the current scraping approaches break. We basically have to recompile the browsers from scratch to stop leaking information that distinguishes automation.

Re: Show HN: Wealthfolio: Private, open-source investment tracker

#214

Post by shaklee3 »

dgemm wrote: post #181
ryandrake wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an avid, daily Quicken user, yes, seamless integration with financial institutions is my #1 requirement. I am not willing to manually navigate a dozen banks' broken UIs to find their "download CSV" option, hope it works, download a bunch of files to my computer, and then hope that they can be imported into my application--and then repeat every day when I update. I have in the past switched physical banks purely be…

Interesting perspective because my #1 requirement is that no 3rd party gets financial login credentials at all. I'm willing to do CSVs in order to not compromise on security, although the experience most certainly is bad.

This is a huge waste of time and not worth it. The amount of hours you spend fixing errors manually vs the small risk your info gets out I don't think is worth it.

Re: Show HN: Wealthfolio: Private, open-source investment tracker

#216

Post by freddie_mercury »

floathub wrote: post #189
maxwelljoslyn wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to use Beancount religiously (before some job and health difficulties left me less capable of tracking my finances as closely.) My biggest complaint was always that I didn't have something like autocomplete/syntax highlighting to cut down on the manual-ness of data entry. Most of the aforementioned difficulties are behind me, and Paisa looks like an awesome way to help ease me back into Beancount. Thank you! I…

There is a beancount mode for Emacs that does a lot of what you want, but only really of use if you use Emacs. https://github.com/beancount/beancount-mode

The beancount mode for VS Code is also pretty good with syntax highlighting, autocomplete, tabbing, autoformat, etc. It's what I've been using for years.

But I think the "real" answer, especially as more countries get increasingly cashless, is to just import a CSV or OFX every few weeks so you're not actually manually entering anything.

Re: Show HN: Wealthfolio: Private, open-source investment tracker

#218

Post by alanbernstein »

grepLeigh wrote: post #211
alanbernstein wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the mindset that ruined the web.

Indie developers getting paid for their craftsmanship ruined the web? If a solo dev builds a tool that helps even a handful of people manage 5-6-7 figure portfolios, that's worth more than a cup of coffee.

No, the idea that every minuscule scrap of content in the world exists to be monetized.

There are a million other projects that are monetized, why do you need to "strongly recommend" against the very idea of one that is not?

If that's what the author wants, then great, they should do it, and I hope they make a nice profit. The post suggests it's not what they want.

Re: Show HN: Wealthfolio: Private, open-source investment tracker

#219

Post by JonChesterfield »

shaklee3 wrote: post #214
dgemm wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting perspective because my #1 requirement is that no 3rd party gets financial login credentials at all. I'm willing to do CSVs in order to not compromise on security, although the experience most certainly is bad.

This is a huge waste of time and not worth it. The amount of hours you spend fixing errors manually vs the small risk your info gets out I don't think is worth it.

Is it a small risk? The track record of information security with corporations is dreadful and brokerage login details are about the most expensive things one could have stolen.

Re: Show HN: Wealthfolio: Private, open-source investment tracker

#220

Post by johntash »

brutal_boi wrote: post #55
diggan wrote: post #5

First question from reading through the landing page is about this part: > Import your statements from your broker or bank. Exactly what brokers/banks that are supported should be listed somewhere and linked here, as that's a "make or break" feature for a lot of people I bet. Not much point in replacing my homegrown "Banks CSV export -> Data processing > Import into spreadsheet" workflow unless I just replace that la…

For that very reason I tried selfhosting Actual Finance[1] but it is more of a budgeting app than a networth tracking app. I ended up coding a small exporter[2] since I already had some stack in place that queries SimpleFI[3], which essentially allows querying balance and transaction information for most US-based banks (read only); most similar to plaid but a lot more developer-friendly afaik. [1] https://actualbudge…

Do you have any experience with plaid to compare it to simplefin by any chance? I started a similar project with plaid before, but haven't really gone back to it since dev accounts became a lot more limited.
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