Actual Finance· Instead of YNAB
Envelope budgeting — no bank connection, no subscription.
Ocular
Budgeting without a bank connection: income and expenses at a glance, lean and fast.
Screenshots
What Ocular does
Ocular records income and expenses, groups them by category and shows how they develop over months and years.
Deliberately lean: no bank connection, no automation — just a clear overview of what you enter yourself.
Monthly and yearly overview with charts- Categories, currencies and multiple years
- CSV export
- Runs on the smallest resources
Good to know before the first start. Ocular does not create accounts on its own. The first account comes from what you enter when creating the pod.
Ocular instead of YNAB
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
- Spreadsheet budgets, Finanzguru
- 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
- simonwep/ocular
- Links
- Website
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 Ocular and you only pay for storage.
No. No server, no Docker, no terminal commands. You click start and Ocular runs. Updates are tested on our own instances first and then rolled out.
In your own Ocular instance on servers in Germany and France; bulk storage sits in Frankfurt. Add your own S3 bucket and we back up there daily, encrypted.
Ocular 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.