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Comment by not_a_cop75 | Hacker News Reader

Why is a self hosted financial manager your dream come true? I assume sharing financials to others is everyone elses's nightmare.

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How is it "sharing financials with everyone"?

Self-hosted means you control your data, though it certainly leaves you open to more attacks if it's open to the internet, but you can always protect it by hiding it behind a VPN. Having financials available everywhere is very convenient, and not having data on a mobile device (but accessible on your mobile device) is great for privacy-concerned people.

Sorry - I misread as opposite.

The success of cloud hosted products like YNAB suggests many people have no issue with sharing financials.

I think YNAB's popularity comes from the stand-alone desktop version which was really popular until they went cloud.

I'd have to disagree with you. There's tons of people who use them as a mobile-first service (my wife only ever uses the mobile app). I think a subset of tech/privacy savvy people don't like that they went to a cloud based model, but that's a small subset of a small subset.

Mint is another example of a popular financial management tool, that was always cloud-first. It would import transactions by using the same credentials you would use to login to online banking. This wasn't appealing to me. This didn't deter many other people.

I didn't like sharing my credentials either but I was using it – until it stopped working for most of my accounts.

I've since stopped using even the 'manual import' and I've found that reconciling to my bank/financial-company statements manually is much easier overall as importing auto-reconciled transactions but then it was basically impossible to then match any specific balance reported by the bank/financial-company.

To be fair, Mint was a mistake. It was always a mistake. Being ahead of hackers' time, it was successful. This is the only reason.

At least in my case, it's because I don't know of any better options. Mint is very easy but if something else was almost as easy but provided similar features (or more, even) I'd give it a sincere try. But other options I've heard of are cli tool/emacs packages, which is too much to ask for what is usually less robust and requires significantly more effort/time to get up to speed with and use.

Because everyone in this thread needs to recalibrate their sarcasm detector.

Edit: PHP is actually in a pretty good state right now, so I think it's a poor criticism, but probably a common one.

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