Ocular Finance· Instead of Spreadsheet budgets
Budgeting without a bank connection: income and expenses at a glance, lean and fast.
Actual
Envelope budgeting — no bank connection, no subscription.
Screenshots
What Actual does
Actual is an envelope-style budgeting app: you assign your money to categories instead of just sorting expenses after the fact. All data lives in your pod; there is no bank connection to the outside.
The interface is fast and works offline; phone and desktop sync through your instance.
Envelope budgeting with categories and goals- Import from CSV, QIF and OFX
- Reports across months and years
- Works offline, syncs later
Good to know before the first start. On the first visit you set a server password. It protects all access — Actual has no separate user accounts.
Actual instead of YNAB
Also instead of Mint, Finanzguru, Monarch Money, Copilot Money, EveryDollar, Goodbudget.
What you get out of it
- Your financial data stays with you, there is no outside connection
- No subscription that gets more expensive every year
- Import from CSV, QIF and OFX instead of bank sync
Bringing your data over from YNAB
Actual has a dedicated import for YNAB, both today’s version and YNAB 4. Budgets, categories and transactions come along.
| YNAB and Podless | YNAB | On Podless |
|---|---|---|
| Where the data lives | YNABOn the provider’s servers | On PodlessIn your own instance in the EU |
| Source code | YNABNot open to read | On PodlessOpen, you can read what runs |
| Ads and profiling | YNABPer the provider’s terms | On PodlessNone |
| Your own domain | YNABUsually not offered | On PodlessIncluded, certificate too |
| Getting out again | YNABAs far as the provider allows | On PodlessSFTP, database, backups to your storage |
| If it gets shut down | YNABYou have to move | On PodlessYou decide when you leave |
Additional information
- Category
- Finance
- Replaces
- YNAB, Mint, Finanzguru, Monarch Money, Copilot Money, EveryDollar, Goodbudget, Excel budgets
- Recommended size
- 0.25 cores · 0.5 GB RAM · 5 GB Storage
- Estimated per month
- €1.67 At the recommended size, running around the clock. Stop the app and CPU and RAM stop costing.
- Source
- actualbudget/actual
Common questions
At the recommended size (0.25 cores · 0.5 GB RAM · 5 GB Storage) about €1.67 a month, billed by the hour. Stop Actual and you only pay for storage.
No. No server, no Docker, no terminal commands. You click start and Actual runs. Updates are tested on our own instances first and then rolled out.
In your own Actual instance on servers in Germany and France; bulk storage sits in Frankfurt. Add your own S3 bucket and we back up there daily, encrypted.
Actual is open source and keeps running on your own server. You fetch the files over a time-limited SFTP access and reach the database with the credentials from the dashboard.