Actual
Robust and simple budgeting that works.
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James Long

Actual Budget - Robust and simple budgeting that works

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Actual is a personal finance tracker with a powerful budgeting system. Only budget money that you have and see exactly how much you're saving each month. Track all your accounts in one place.

It's also a completely free local app which keeps your data private, with an optional service for syncing across devices.

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James Long
Maker
Hey everyone! I'm James and over 3 years ago I got tired with not knowing where my money was going. Eventually I decided to build Actual because I wanted something that provided a robust budgeting system, like envelop budgeting where you only budget money that you have, without being so overbearing with it. Also, this is a completely local app and your data by default isn't hosted anywhere. You might like this if you don't want to depend on a company hosting your data, and want to start tracking your finances more closely! Since it's a local app, I'll be able to do a lot of cool things too like crazy custom reporting since all your data is right there locally. Let me know what you think!
Gunar Gessner
I'm kind of disappointed James did not "use the platform" —which means no love for Linux nor Android. I would prefer this were a webapp.
James Long
Maker
@gunar It actually is using Electron as as stopgap for now and I'd like to explore interesting ways to serve it via your browser. The important part is that it keeps your files locally though and you're not trusting somebody else with your whole data, and the web makes that hard. Linux and Android are definitely coming! Need to focus and get something out there and iterate. Most of the code is cross-platform, but I still need to tailor it each platform.
Gunar Gessner
@jlongster Thanks, James. Really excited to test it out. Forgot to say this before but the product looks awesome. Keep it up!
Alexander Forsén
Interesting release! How do you differentiate Actual Budget with YNAB (You Need a Budget)? It's a similar service where you allocate the money you already have. I also think that YNAB has a great community alongside with daily live webinars helping people gaining more control over their money.
James Long
Maker
@tyckr I wrote about some of the practical differences here: https://actualbudget.com/differe... YNAB is great, and has a good community for sure. Personally I don't think many people need to be reading books and watching webinars to have a good grasp on their finances. Learning the basic workflow and keeping the product simple makes it easy to use. Generally Actual doesn't dictate what you do as much, so it's more flexible, and eventually it'll have powerful custom reporting so detailed users can go in and do anything they want. They'll also be able to share these reports with others, which I think will create an interesting community. Not to mention that if you don't want syncing, Actual is a completely free app!
Brandon Bayer
Can you tell more about the custom offline syncing engine you built? And will it be open-sourced?
James Long
Maker
@beedesignllc I'm not planning on open-sourcing it right now because the most interesting parts are actually relatively small and a blog post with a few of the files pulled out would be just as good. Open-sourcing would require thinking through the whole API and making it generic. I will blog about it though. It's based on modern distributed system techniques: CRDTs using hybrid logical clocks for causal ordering. That's really just a fancy way of saying that every single change (per-field in the sqlite db) is tracked with a message that's given a special timestamp (HLC), and since ordering is guaranteed as long as all client gets all the messages the will converge into the same dataset. Doesn't matter which order they get them.
Brandon Bayer
@jlongster what’s the architecture of your cloud? I’m considering doing the same thing for AcornBookmarks.com. Have a tiny desktop process that exposes the SQLite DB over HTTP to browser extensions.
James Long
Maker
@beedesignllc The server basically just acts like another client. When it syncs it gets a bunch of messages and stores them in a db, and other clients will sync with it and it'll send out the messages. Basically it's a dumb server for moving around messages. There is another interesting aspect which is a merkle tree: a merkle tree keeps hashes representing data over time. This lets clients compare what messages they've already received and say things like "ok we're up-to-date 5 min ago but we're diff since then, send all messages since 5 min ago" and it'll eventually converge Definitely warrants a blog post
Scott Mathson

I’ve been doing envelope budgeting for almost a decade and my household only runs smoothly when I can stick to my weekly budgeting update schedule. I’ve been able to use Actual in beta for almost a year with no interruptions to this process. James has been an amazing steward of the product and I’m sure it’s only going to get better over time.

Pros:

Clean implementation of an envelope budgeting system. Exactly what I’ve been looking for since YNAB 4 was killed off. Privacy-first.

Cons:

If you consider automatic transaction downloading a necessary feature then you’ll want to wait for a later update.

Mateusz Zatorski
Awesome stuff James, congrats on the release!
James Long
Maker
@matzatorski Thanks Mateusz!
Craig McInroy
Congrats, James! 👍 I think I'm equally excited about the product *and* the tech that you have so careful curated and constructed to create it.
Brandon Bayer
Woohoo, congrats on the launch!! I’ve been a user of YNAB for many years, so I’m excited to try Actual. Is there any easy way to import my YNAB cloud data?
James Long
Maker
@beedesignllc Thanks! It doesn't have automatic YNAB 5 import yet, but soon I want to expose an API where all importers can build on top of. Then we can all develop importers together. YNAB 5 is going to be harder because I'm not sure how much data they give you when exporting (not sure you can re-construct a full zero-based budget from it?)
Brandon Bayer
@jlongster Cool. Ideally you could import all data, but the most important things to me would be importing my categories and accounts.
j
Nice! Do you anticipate a Linux release at any point in the next few months?
James Long
Maker
@jqtrde Yeah! I want to prioritize linux soon because people have been asking for it since I soft-launched last April. It's only a matter of getting to know the tools and distribution methods. Expect it within the next month.
j
@jlongster looking forward to it! 🙏
Jared Reich
Hey James, awesome work. I've been following Actual since the start and I love your attention to detail and polish. One of my main questions is, does Actual Budget for desktop use electron?
James Long
Maker
@jaredreich It does use electron. I see it as as stopgap. I really like having a local app, but as the web evolves maybe electron can fade away. We'll see. I make sure to be conservative on memory usage and at least from what I've tracked it's lightweight compared to other Electron apps.
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