Back to Blog
team@tinypod.app

Self-Hosting Actual Budget: Personal Finance Management

Actual Budget is a self-hosted personal finance app. Envelope budgeting, bank sync, and powerful reporting — your financial data stays private.

actual-budgetfinancebudgetingprivacy

What Is Actual Budget?


Actual Budget is a self-hosted personal finance app using the envelope budgeting method. It's a privacy-focused alternative to YNAB (You Need A Budget).


Envelope Budgeting


Every dollar has a job:

1. Income comes in

2. Assign dollars to categories (envelopes)

3. Spend from those categories

4. When an envelope is empty, stop spending or move money from another envelope


Features


Budgeting

  • Envelope/zero-sum budgeting
  • Monthly budget views
  • Category groups
  • Carry-over handling
  • Goal tracking

    • Transactions

  • Manual entry
  • Bank sync (via SimpleFIN or GoCardless)
  • Import CSV, OFX, QFX
  • Split transactions
  • Recurring transactions
  • Transfer tracking

    • Reporting

  • Net worth over time
  • Spending by category
  • Income vs expenses
  • Custom date ranges

    • Sync

  • End-to-end encrypted sync
  • Multiple devices
  • Offline-first (local-first architecture)

    • Actual vs YNAB


  • Actual: Self-hosted, $0/month, privacy-focused
  • YNAB: SaaS, $15/month, more polished
  • Both use envelope budgeting methodology

    • Deployment


    1. Deploy Actual Budget on TinyPod

    2. Create your budget

    3. Set up bank sync (optional)

    4. Assign categories to your income

    5. Track spending


    Resources: 1 CPU, 256 MB RAM. SQLite-based, lightweight.


    Actual Budget proves that personal finance tools don't need to access your banking data on some company's servers.