project
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.
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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 runs on 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, and Postgres with pgvector, all running on my own machine under Docker, so 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.