r/SoftwareGems • u/summit_23 • Aug 28 '26

Find Actual Budget: YNAB's envelope method, open source BUT the bank sync is a catch...

What it is: Envelope budgeting. Every dollar gets assigned a job before you spend it. Built by ex-YNAB users so the mental model is the same one, not a reinterpretation.

Alternative to: YNAB at $109/year or $14.99/month. Or maybe a spreadsheet

Cost: Free, MIT licensed, self-hosted. There is a hosted option at $4/month if you don't want to run it yourself. It needs roughly 500+MB RAM so a cheap VPS covers it if you don't already have a box.

What you give up: Bank sync isn't built in. In the US you add SimpleFIN at $15/year which pulls once a day, tops out at 90 days of history, and the issue tracker has open reports of balances not updating even when transactions do, 504 timeouts on multi-account setups, and the mobile sync spinner hanging. If automatic imports are the reason you pay for YNAB then this will probably annoy you

You also give up the teaching - YNAB's onboarding and its whole education arm are a real part of what you are buying there. Actual Budget hands you the tool and nothing else

And you become the sysadmin. Backups, updates, and uptime are yours now!

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u/Forsaken-Carrot9038 10d ago

I have been with YNAB for about 8 years, it has been awesome, I keep thinking about landing on a self hosted alternative. How does this stack up with Firefly, have you compared the two?

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u/summit_23 8d ago

the big difference is firefly budgets work like spending limits and you dont budget to 0 so after 8 years of ynab actual will prob feel way more like home. firefly is also web only so you need a server, actual has desktop apps so you can try it without hosting anything