Show HN: Wealthfolio 2.0- Open source investment tracker. Now Mobile and Docker

I love the idea of keeping my finances private while still having a useful tracker/planner. And I love that this would give me some protection against a new version making things worse. I also love the option to write my own plugin or to hack the source code itself (even though I probably wouldn't).

But I don't think I'm willing to give up fully automated data refreshes at this point. I have too many accounts to track.

> I love the idea of keeping my finances private

I'd love that too, but I'm not sure it's even feasible or possible, at least in the EU country where I live. I, like most people (I think?) need to file taxes each year, and those include my new positions, or what positions have disappeared, including how much I have in savings. And, the only way for me to keep savings without losing money, is to keep it in a bank, so it's again not private.

Feels like "private finance" been dead for a long time, unless you start using cryptocurrencies specifically for privacy, like zcash, otherwise you'll be having non-private data at least somewhere.

Yeah, makes sense. I’ll probably toss in an add-on or optional integration with an account aggregator later, so folks can either opt in or just stick with a local-only setup if they prefer.

What you describe sounds more like keeping your assets a secret... and if you feel defeated because the government can know, how do you feel about hiring an accountant? Or executing stock trades? You can't keep those activities a secret from those agents working for you. You would probably expect them to keep their privileged information about you _private_ though, right?

And I think that's what the parent post is talking about. Today's companies make you agree to 3 50-page documents which they can update at any time and your continued use after such silent updates constitutes consent.. and at some point they will sell your financial status/well-being to people for profit. So the more you feed them the more of your data that is being easily sold.

We ultimately probably can't stop that, but we can make it more difficult. Many apps like this would take your information and sell it.. having an option that lets you track your own finances without becoming a product is nice.

> I love the idea of keeping my finances private while still having a useful tracker/planner.

YNAB4 was a local client, but with YNAB5 they sadly (to me) went online and subscription.

I happily paid for v4 (one-time purchase), but was/am not willing to pay for v5 because (a) I don't like renting software, and (b) I have no need for syncing (which a subscription could justify to pay for ongoing server costs).

Right on. In this case, I used "private" to mean "the makers of this particular product don't have a ton of my financial information." I don't expect a product like this to prevent my government, or my brokerage, or my bank, or even a middleman account aggregator, from knowing about my money. But something like this can be one less thing, at least.

I'll certainly give this another look if you do. Good luck with it.

Also it’s more about having the optionality. There are tons of cloud-based and connected SaaS trackers out there, but very few local ones. Having options to:

– Install a piece of software and run it locally, no subscription, no cloud – Have to right to use a nicer app instead of a spreadsheet – not hand over your banking creds. Some banks will void your account insurance if you do – Reduce your exposure by not putting all your financial data on some startup’s servers

ActualBudget is a pretty great YNAB alternative that is free and locally hosted.

sort of different but I built https://paperright.xyz budgeting app to address some of my frustration with budgeting apps, bank connections, ease of use, privacy, etc. It doesn't connect to your bank or take any info other than your email (+stripe if you sign up for pro). I built it because i needed a budgeting app for my brain. Also research shows AI/automated financial management doesnt work you need to manually track things to really understand whats going on.

I second that. Switched from ynab4 (used some version since 2011) to Actual Budget a few month ago. Some tiny ux issues, but improvement in many more areas. Don't regret finally kicking ynab out.

Odd, earlier this week I was cleaning up some ooooold VMs/docker stuff and came across something I was using to try out actualbudget, so it's an interesting coincidence hearing it mentioned again today.

IIRC I was pretty impressed with it back then. It looks like there are more non-direct install options now. (Flatpack, appimage, etc.)

This is one where I don't quite get the angle of hosting locally to preserve privacy.

By nature of the economic system, you must interact with 3rd parties, unless you somehow live a life where you can manage to be all crypto or (increasingly harder) cash based. At that point, there is no real benefit to privacy outside of ensuring that whatever institution(s) you work with aren't doing anything odd.

I'm open to missing something here.

It’s more about having the optionality to not be tied to a SaaS provider and trusting them with all your financial data and bank credentials. Having options to:

1– Install a piece of software and run it locally, no subscription, no cloud 2– Have to right to use a nicer app instead of a spreadsheet 3– not hand over your banking creds. Some banks will void your account insurance if you do 4– Reduce your exposure by not putting all your financial data on some startup’s servers.

It's also maybe more useful in the US where we're behind the times w.r.t. better APIs for accessing banking & investment data

Well, one of the benefits is that it won't go away.

I used Mint for years, and I LOVED it. Hooked it up to all my accounts, it could track purchases and spending and kept everything up to date automatically. It would remember how I categorized things.

Of course, then Intuit decided to get rid of it and force everyone to move to Credit Karma, which doesn't do the same things AT ALL. I don't care about tracking my credit scores, and I pay off all my credit cards every month, I don't need help finding a loan for anything. The only thing it does is try to offer me loans and credit cards. It doesn't have any transaction history, so it doesn't do the one thing I care about.

The decade+ of transaction history I had in Mint was just GONE. It really sucked, and I have not found a replacement yet.

I don't mind if it is hosted, or even if I have to pay for it, but I would like to be able to keep my historical data, and for it to automatically populate from my accounts, and not go away if a company decides it can't make money from it anymore.

I love the transaction history in YNAB. I refer to it all the time.

Trusting some random VC-backed SAAS not to sell my data is (to me) as mad as trusting that the tide won't come in - it would be astonishing if they _didn't_ sell my data.

My bank has both commercial & cultural reasons not to sell my ID & transaction history. They might still do it anyways, but it's at least plausible that they wouldn't, if only due to the harm to their reputation if it ends up in the papers.

You mean your bank that shares your info with its marketing partners unless you explicitly opt out, that bank?

My threat model is one well placed technical employee who knows a buyer that will pay fuck you money. Judas can work at any organization and frequently does.

Have you considered https://tiller.com/ ? They can pull feeds in and refresh automatically but have a big privacy play so that only you get to see your finances (and display and manage it in Excel or Google Sheets).

Actual Budget uses SimpleFIN [1] in the US. The integration is pretty good. The big alternative is Plaid and I don't trust them at all. It's a shame we don't have a standard for electronic banking yet.

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

Hey

Happy to help build an integration with [Lunch Flow](https://lunchflow.app), which aggregates multiple open banking providers for global coverage behind a single API.

Have you tried financier?

https://financier.io/

I'm a founder in this space (Fulfilled - posted above). Here's the reality: You're right that incentives matter. But selling your data would be idiotic for us, same reason it would be for your bank in that trust is the entire business model.

If we want to monetize insights from aggregated data, we'd do it in-house and offer you better products. Example: Why sell your mortgage readiness data to some broker when we could source competitive mortgage offers and present them directly to you? Keep you in our ecosystem, add value to your experience, and build a revenue stream that doesn't destroy the core product.

The wealth space is crowded. Companies that burn user trust get exposed fast and die faster. The only sustainable path is treating your data like it belongs to you and not us. Any company here who doesn't get that is building on quicksand and I'd be very surprised to hear any of the larger players engaging in those practices but maybe I'm naive.

Either way, it's why we're a Fiduciary and that blankets the entire product suite.

> it would be astonishing if they _didn't_ sell my data.

Sell the data to whom?

Financial data is the most valuable data there is. Such a naive question.

Did you find a suitable replacement? What do you use now? I'm interested to hear how big of an sticking point this still is with this a verbose range of options now.

I trust that the VC-Backed SaaS will be beholden to not wanting to get cut off from the bank(s), meaning not selling that data. If they sell aggregate anonymized transaction data, I'm also not sure I give a shit.

At a certain point paranoia gives way to practicality.

This is, as far as I can tell, the only real applicable reason to run a self hosted tracker like this that anybody has put forward. Kudos.

I manage all of my finances with Beancount (https://github.com/beancount/beancount). It has a native document store and I primarily use it to archive all of my statements to share with my accountants via Fava (https://github.com/beancount/fava). It’s not pretty, but it’s all in one (local) git repo.

Language models are great at turning those statements into Beancount postings and fixing errors, but the local ones not so much yet.

Yeah I was taken a back as well, "sell gold? To whom??" To the people buying gold, is not reasonable to have to pinpoint who exactly that might be given there is not shortage.