Show HN: Mintable – Roll-your-own Mint clone for managing personal finances | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Mintable – Roll-your-own Mint clone for managing personal finances

github.com

87 pointskevinschaich31 comments

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How is this not just a copy of this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18838127

https://github.com/yyx990803/build-your-own-mint

What additional have you added?

At least some semicolons where added. But the author is open about its heritage:

https://github.com/kevinschaich/mintable/commits/master/scri...

Hey! Thanks for the great question. I've expanded on the Credits section and added a detailed comparison on the README:

https://github.com/kevinschaich/mintable#credits--alternativ...

As mentioned by another commenter I apologize for the less-than-helpful commit messages as I approached the initial release, I realize these make the differences hard to discern! :)

Please let me know if you have any additional questions.

What are the core differences between this and evan you's mint clone[1]?

edit: I read to the bottom and saw that this is a fork, but if all it does is add defaults ("This repo is a lot more opinionated about defaults and gives you a working transaction spreadsheet out of the box"), why not contribute those defaults upstream rather than fork?

1. https://github.com/yyx990803/build-your-own-mint

Thanks for the feedback! I updated the README with a detailed comparison which also hopefully explains why they became incompatible.

if its just for your personal finance i would rather use firefly because it does not use third party services and is open source.

https://firefly-iii.org

https://github.com/firefly-iii/firefly-iii

Never heard of it, thanks for showing me!

Firefly looks like a better choice. The mint clone uses Plaid, a financial intermediary that has been heavily criticized on this forum.

Firefly uses Spectre. Anyone know of security or privacy issues with using that?

Hi! I've created Firefly III. I want to note that the tool doesn't require you to use Spectre. It's one of the available ways to kickstart your financial administration.

Personally, I would always do this by hand.

Cool, thanks for your reply.

What does by hand mean in this case? Entering all of the data myself? Is there a way to import CSV data of portfolio and transaction information?

Yes, by hand. I strongly recommend it if you want to get a feel for your finances. But yes, there is a CSV import too.

Cool. I will give this a try in the near future.

Apologies for having to be this person in the room.

I won't be jumping at the opportunity to funnel my PII through something developed by an employee of Palantir. (Effectively a mass surveillance company.)

It's open source

"Open source" has absolutely nothing to do with GP's concerns. For an example why the concern has merit: Chromium is open source, yet it still routes every single thing you type into the Omnibox through Google's servers, even if you abandon the search and delete what you typed before pressing "Enter".

It has everything to do with that, because we can see the source and see whether it does anything like that, and build it from source ourselves.

Where is Google Sheets source?

https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/ [edit] Plus https://nextcloud.com/collaboraonline/

And again, a project being open source doesn't prevent the parent company from siphoning your data, all it does is (usually but not always) shed light on such practices.

A few years ago there was a scandal where Chromium was downloading an encrypted payload at build time, this was discovered by the Debian package maintainer for Chromium, and it was only found during the build. Open source isn't a panacea to ward off all evil.

Uhh, are there any reasons for the single emoji commit messages?

no, no there isn't...

*edit, tried to add a fire emoji to end of comment and didn't work but here's something: U+1F525

Hey – apologize and thanks for the feedback! I saw this on another repo and thought it was a cool idea just for the initial release. All the “fire” commits were just README edits and polish, will be sure to post more helpful comments moving forward! :)

For those like me who didn't know, mint is a web-based personal financial management service (mint.com). This is a clone that uses Google sheets as a backend.

How the data tracking here?

Can I avoid to share my core financial data with third party services?

Hey! Mintable relies on Plaid for fetching transactional data but you’re free to plug in whatever Google Sheets alternative you prefer!

This would be perfect if I don't have to sign up for Plaid and give them my password. I can download CSV's from Bank of America site. Has someone written a small piece of code to read the CSVs and populate "Mintable"? Scrapers anybody?

Since we are on the topic, I would like to know if we have any alternatives to Plaid APIs?

Hey! Not currently – but please feel free to discuss and contribute here!

https://github.com/kevinschaich/mintable/issues/2

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18838127

Anything to handle business finances?

Hey! Out of the box there's nothing groundbreaking. I find what works for me is to include a column to mark individual expenses as "business related", and then calculate a total at the end of the month that I make sure to get reimbursed for through expense reports.

At the core though, this is just a spreadsheet, so you can add custom formulas and analytics to your heart's content!

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