earmark
I am, by any reasonable measure, too into personal finance. I tried every budgeting app I could find, never quite got one that fit — so I built my own. I bounced between EveryDollar, YNAB, Mint, and a long tail of spreadsheets. Each one got something right and then made me work around it: monthly resets that wiped out progress I'd been building for months, categories that didn't match how I actually think about money, or a subscription for the privilege of handing my transactions to somebody else's server. After enough years of that, building the thing myself started to sound easier than compromising again. **earmark** is what came out. The whole app is one idea — **every dollar you keep gets a job, and jobs persist.** Money lives in funds: envelopes that roll over instead of resetting, so saving for a car or a trip is a fund quietly filling up rather than a line item I re-create every month. It syncs real transactions through **Plaid**, tracks goals and net worth, installs as a PWA on my phone, and ships an **MCP server** so I can just ask how much is left in groceries from any AI client. FastAPI + React + Postgres/pgvector, running entirely on my own machine with Docker — my financial data never leaves it. It's built for exactly one user, and that user is me. But it's MIT-licensed and self-hostable, so if the same apps have been frustrating you, it might fit you too.
View case study