Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kovah | Hacker News Reader

I feel you. I spent countless hours trying to find a suitable YNAB replacement, but there is none. I want to see what is possible, not was has happened to my money.

I am about to leave YNAB because I am using version 4 (standalone software) which is 32-bit only. My main machine is a Mac so I won't be able to use the software with the next major version. Also, I do not want to use the new YNAB web-based app because the privacy policy is contradictory and their subscription offer is just shitty.

Currently I am using Outbank, which is more like a banking app but has automatic categorization which is quite cool, and you can define budgets. Still, no suitable replacement. I really hope for Firefly to take off with a powerful budget planning somewhere in the future.

View on HN

There's an open-sourced clone of YNAB (standalone version) called financier (https://financier.io). There's been a few efforts to easily run it locally:

-https://gitlab.com/caleb3141/financier

-https://gitlab.com/josh-whitney/financier-backend

Biggest downside is that it doesn't have an OFX/QFX import option.

Yeah, I also tried Financier. Although it provides everything needed, I didn't feel very comfortable with it running in the browser and storing the database in the browser too. Backups are hard in this case. Also, when moving to a new system, the import of transactions was a requirement.

I feel your pain – but I'm a happy YNAB user and I've only ever 'known' the web version. (I'm aware of the desktop versions.) I don't use the auto-import features anymore – they never worked consistently with all of my financial providers and I've found that manually reconciling is much better anyways.

Given how awesome YNAB is for me managing my finances, I'm more than happy to pay the subscription.

I honestly thought about moving to the web version, but as stated, especially the storage of my financial data on some server of a random company is a no-go for me. The privacy policy is also everything but nice. They state that all data is encrypted but somewhere else they state that they may have access to it for support and in case of legal obligation. Not really trustworthy.

There's an option in your settings to share your data with their support people and you have to explicitly enable it for them to see your data/info.

But I understand your reluctance nonetheless.

Thanks. Makes sense and really appreciate you clarifying.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com