Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by dogline | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

dogline

Personal Finance links I've assembled:

Free/open:

- Gnucash -- solid app: https://www.gnucash.org/

- Beancount -- Text based: https://beancount.github.io/docs/index.html

- Fava -- Web interface for Beancount: https://beancount.github.io/fava/

- Plain Text Accounting -- there are several apps with a similar approach: https://plaintextaccounting.org/

Others/Paid:

- You Need a Budget -- Popular a couple years back: https://www.youneedabudget.com/

- Moneydance -- https://moneydance.com/

- Lunch Money -- https://lunchmoney.app/

View on HN

I've been using YNAB for years now looked at the competitors from time to time.

While their pricing has increased quite a bit (by now also for long time users coming from YNAB 4), for me it is worth every penny and better than anything else out there. I can't recommend it enough and I don't even get paid to write this comment.

I think I'd keep paying for YNAB even if the price doubled twice more, it's worth that much to me. I'm not saying other budgeting tools can't compare/complete but for me it works really well and has lead to my saving literal 10's of thousands of dollars over the span of just over 2 years.

Once you get everything dialed in you can almost run on auto-pilot (repeating transactions and goals are your friend). Could I drop YNAB and continue with my better financial behavior? Possibly, probably in the short-term for sure but I know I'd slowly drift until I was back where I was before starting YNAB. The yearly cost ($99/yr) is well worth the cost to keep me on the right track and notice early when I'm slipping.

I've been using Firefly III (https://www.firefly-iii.org/) since it came up on HN a little while ago. It's aimed more at the budgeting/personal finance side of things rather than a full accounting solution. I like that you can enter things like expected bills, so you can get a bit of a look forward, and good breakdowns of your spending over certain time periods.

https://manager.io is also nice, although perhaps targeted more towards small businesses

I'm a big fan of https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com/

Thank you for linking this! I just ran the gauntlet comparing all these tools and this is the first that feels sane. YNAB is fine, but they did me dirty in 2008

What happened in 2008? I'm looking at YNAB and would love to know about the bad things that have happened.

I funded their crowdsource and bought 2 more licenses for gifts. Then they moved to a subscription model webapp which nullified the OG licenses.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com