Actual is going open-source (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Actual is going open-source (2022)

actualbudget.com

129 pointsedward32 comments

Worth noting that the author, James Long, is the same one who made a great talk on using CRDTs called CRDTs for Mortals [0], and he uses them in Actual as well. He was a great source of inspiration when I was looking into using them for my offline-first, local-first apps [1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEcwa68f-jY

[1] https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/

Hey! Glad to be an inspiration :)

Congrats. Building something others use and deciding that isn’t sustainable are both great milestones.

I created a more modest finance app (forecasting [1] and budgeting [2]). The Plaid integration alone was one I quickly realized I didn’t want to support a lot of users on. I also don’t want to have a large team working on it - if it requires more than a couple people then it’s not for me.

I do hope that you are able to build an active community around it.

Even if not, be proud of your accomplishments.

[1] https://fiers.co/features

[2] https://fiers.co/features/spend

Neat, forecasting (especially multiple forecasts) is a nice feature set on its own compared to budgeting alone.

Its everything. Seriously

The forecast is what makes the budget worth following.

Its all I would ever pay attention to anyway. And it should be fast-forwardable or rewindable. You should be able to see in to the past as represented within the financial transactions data a d in to the future, same.

And it should allow you to fikter your view by temporal categories like year/month/week/day

I can't quite put my finger on the deeper truth I'm articulating but that not every personal finance app implements a significant and front-page forecasting function is insane to me. I dont care about budgets, I care about how much money I have in any account at any given time if I've been dilligent in populating the model and I care when it shows that my balances are red/negative cuz I can't have that in a financial and existential way.

I dunno

The budget is how I know I’m being diligent with my money - but it’s just a means to a goal.

Every financial app I’ve tried fall short in several areas I’m interested in. That’s why I built what I was looking for. I use it in conjunction with personal capital and that gets me most of what I’m looking for.

But if people just put all the data in and forecast it youalready have a budget (before) and after (balance) at any second in time essentially. Why cut off at the most important time (how does it affect my finances comprehensively at that point in time ?!)

If you're in the red, u good to go

NOT in the red

(this is a great example of why blog posts should always have a date: this is over a year old!)

One thing that sticks out to me here is the native app side: they can’t “just live” in the way an open source webapp can. They have to be removed from the App Store. What a shame that we can’t get to the point where you can easily build an open source mobile app and deploy it on your device. Progressive Web Apps for open source victory, I guess?

(obviously much easier to do on Android but still requires you to go down the “forbidden path”)

the internet is for marketing, like it or not. dates could deter sharing beyond a threshold of time and therefor limit the marketing potential.

I get what you're saying but a date is pretty much an essential part of the context for reading most posts. So you're welcome not to put a date and I'm welcome to skip past your post.

Yeah, cannot find many open source apps on the App Store in this area. There's Prudent.Me that's a desktop application but it's not available on the App Store. It can be downloaded here: https://prudent.me

I find it interesting as I am trying to build a business myself that someone would stop at 3k MRR. We are currently at 1.5k MRR and I agree that bootstrap is very hard. I can't even imagine hiring right now, that means doing a lot by ourselves. I live in Canada though, I keep my personnal expenses low and I do contracts on the side. I could make a lot more as an employee, it's just not me.

As someone with a solo business of ~2.5k MRR, I'm happy to stop leave it at this point because moving beyond would require scaling up, which takes it from a solo side thing to something that other people depend on to eat.

I use actual quite extensively now it's open source.

As a proprietary app it's local first focus was a selling point, as an open source project it's now a source of complexity that feels a touch annoying. After all I own and run the server, it's actually the client devices I trust slightly less (if I need to pop on at work for whatever reason)

You can try their demo on the web

https://app.actualbudget.com/budget

What kind of CRDT is it using? It looks like a merkle tree from the filename, but I'm not familiar with the implementation (like it's not a typical LWW, Grow-only sets, RGA, etc). Anyone know what it is?

Based on the author's talk [0], looks like it's grow-only sets. I haven't looked at the code though so it might have changed since he gave that talk in 2019.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEcwa68f-jY

Ah, ok. I guess you can implement sets with a merkle tree, so a grow-only set makes sense.

Correction. Based on his talk, the merkle tree isn't used to implement sets, but used as a quick way for you to know what timestamps have been applied across all clients.

As someone who recently migrated from YNAB4, I am incredibly thankful that this exists!

Does anyone know if the current apps are open source too?

Native apps were open-sourced yes in the repo, but the community moved them out into their own repos and archived them. Hard to build native apps open-source with all the tooling, and the community has been working on replacing them with a webapp

Thanks for the clarification. Makes sense about the webapp.

Worth noting that this happened a year and a half ago:

https://x.com/jlongster/status/1520063046101700610?s=46

The repo is pretty active too, wonder if there’s a follow up blog post about the transition. https://github.com/actualbudget/actual

Hey! I'm James, the original creator. Yeah, I tried to stay involved but over time I had to accept that my life right now just doesn't allow time to be very involved. We've had some incredible maintainers step up and their doing an amazing job stewarding the project along.

I'm long-overdue to check in with the maintainers and write some content about the transition. I was also intending to shutdown the hosted version late summer and hand over actualbdget.com to the open-source community. My goal is to do this by end of year.

Overall, I wish my life weren't so busy in some ways, but it's busy with really good and fulfilling things. The transition was a little rough for me (hard to give control away of something I worked so hard on) but it's turned out surprisingly good

I have not tried out Actual to this day, but I can imagine how you felt.

Thanks for your nice gesture to hand your project out to the open source community.

I will take a look, probably spin it up and contribute back.

You're not an uncool guy, OC

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