"I completely underestimated how much work it takes to build a business. There's so much overhead. I'm always figuring out why a build failed, taxes, how to triage issues, responding to support, designing UIs, responding to Apple's complaints, and more. There's so much that goes on behind the scenes. There's no way a single person can possible do this alone, especially as a side project."<p>This is the part that resonates a lot with me even though I have been able to build a small business that is reasonably successful with a small team but it takes a toll. It is a frikin slog and there are days when you feel like jumping off a cliff. Also the cost of doing something so small can add up when you can have a cushy tech job making 200K relatively easy. To do your own thing requires a very different mindset and incredibly hard.<p>There is a HUGE difference between building a quick side project for fun VS turning it into a real business (no matter how small). I have full sympathy for the owner and totally understand where they are coming from. No judgement and I wish them all the best.
Great to see it going open source! I hope Actual can keep development going with the community support.<p>Similarly, a local-first (PouchDB) budgeting app I built[1] went open source[2][3] a few years ago. It's worked out well, I love seeing what everyone does with it in their forks. Unlike Actual however, I maintain a paid subscription service while being open source.<p>It's worked out quite well. Luckily it's not a huge time commitment as a side project, probably due to no native apps. I've also shifted from active development to maintenance, with sporadic updates every now and then. For example, I recently moved everything from Gitlab to Github[4] and upgraded a bunch of dependencies under the hood to get everything compiling on Apple Silicon. (For example, I now run AngularJS tests with Jest, hehe.)<p>[1] <a href="https://financier.io/" rel="nofollow">https://financier.io/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/financier-io/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/financier-io/</a><p>[3] <a href="https://blog.financier.io/financier-is-now-open-source-bdfe98a5b9b6" rel="nofollow">https://blog.financier.io/financier-is-now-open-source-bdfe9...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://blog.financier.io/weve-moved-to-github-4617239b9fa3" rel="nofollow">https://blog.financier.io/weve-moved-to-github-4617239b9fa3</a>
There are a lot of tools like Actual (YNAB, Monarch, Mint, Aspire google sheet etc). All are focused on budgets and mostly managing cash accounts.<p>I've always wanted an equivalent but for investments. I know you can sync investment accounts to some of these, but that only reports the balance generally.<p>I'd love to have the equivalent for investment accounts that answer these questions:<p>What is my sector exposure?<p>How much, across multiple accounts and brokerages, of Apple (or any stock/etf/mutual fund) do I own as a total percentage?<p>How much money are in retirement accounts vs non retirement accounts?<p>What is my IRR (rate of return) in aggregate and per account?<p>And of course things like projections, safe withdrawal rates, analysis in the form of charts and graphs like what Actual and the rest offer.<p>etc
I love Actual, one of the best local-first apps I've used. I'm excited that it's been open sourced, but I also understand that this release is a bit bittersweet. Awesome work James, best of luck in your future endeavors :)
I did the SaaS-side-business thing for about 6 years. Early on I decided the SaaS was going to be my next career move and I would stay at my employer until I could quit employment altogether. A new job means you have to earn your place on a new team and how could I do that successfully with one eye on my SaaS at all times?<p>When James joined stripe I was surprised both that stripe was agreeable to side projects and that James was courageous enough to try to do both. Open sourcing here just looks like more courage.<p>Good luck James and congrats on what you’ve built here!
The blog post says 810 paid subscribers, and the price was $4/month so that's $3.2k/month.<p>I mean that's not bad, that sounds like they'd nearly made it. Maybe they'd need 2-3x that to live off (depending where they live). But if they got that far I sort of feel they might have been able to make it. Then they wouldn't need any other job, they could just live off the product. And then any additional revenue growth would be profit.<p>I mean they were a lot closer to it being able to sustain them than a business with e.g. $0/month revenue, or e.g. 3 users at $10/month (I've worked for a few such projects without product/market..)
I am curious, what do people use for budgeting?<p>Mint seems like the most feature rich, but not only do I not want to support their parent company because of their Tax lobbying... but I don't trust them from a privacy standpoint (Considering its free).<p>YNAB and Monarch both seem like really good options. But I have not looked into them much yet.<p>I currently use Copilot (iOS only... really just iPhone, no iPad app). I have found it really nice but the lack of a web or iPad app makes doing some tasks more of a pain.<p>I am curious if anyone has found any that work well for couples that don't have joint finances but do obviously share some expenses. My partner and me struggle with figuring this out and inevitably loose track of certain small things. Rent and standard expenses are easy. But going out, groceries, etc. those are the complicated ones.<p>I know there is an app you can use that you can mark transactions as shared, but I don't want to use that for privacy reasons. I would love if there was an app that had some functionality like that built in without making it so we have one account that just has all of our accounts in it.
Hey James, we’re really sorry to hear about you closing down the business from a revenue standpoint! It sounds like it was the right choice for you though. Thanks for the contribution back to the community, as well as for prettier! We are building a platform to support local-first application development, and have appreciated your various articles / interviews / blog posts about the topic! Best of luck in the future, and thanks again.
Sad to see this. We were big fans of Actual.<p>We're working on a product in this space. While there is a ton of demand for products like this (the incumbents, like Mint, aren't really evolving or providing the privacy people want), it's not easy to grow. We ended up raising venture capital to bridge the gap, but once we did, things started to come together. In fact, we ended up having a few people who were trying to build an app solo join the team (because they're so passionate about the space, and had build great products, but couldn't get a lot of traction).
Sometimes I feel that society forces us to be economically successful in all aspects of life.
I'm in the first steps of my career, and even though I just want to learn new things and do exciting projects, the first thought that come to my mind when I have an idea to develop is: "How could this be profitable?"<p>> One thing I'm really excited about open-source is I no longer have to deal with any of the business or deployment stuff. I can focus on being a project manager.<p>I think that having this feeling it's the best achievement you can get from this.
Interesting. I wonder why James didn't attempt to sell it at the very least?<p>36K ARR means you could have rather quickly found a buyer for 60k+ and gotten rid of the thing for a small but not in-significant payday. Also i wonder if the users are truly happy with being told they have to migrate to their own server as i'd assume they're the type who'd rather pay $4 a month instead of having to deal with the hassle.<p>In any case, it's quite a courageous move and seems very well-intentioned.
> In June, all existing subscriptions will be cancelled. Specific dates coming soon.<p>On one hand, good for being this transparent about it. I'm sure none of these decisions are easy. On the other hand... June is... 6 weeks away? I don't know the size or tech skills of the userbase - perhaps this is a decent time frame? It seems overly aggressive going in to 'shut off' mode so quickly. But... dragging it out longer may not help that many more people.<p>Probably no simple decisions that don't inconvenience people in the short term, regardless of which way you go.
I still use YNAB4 regularly. I have a paid copy from before they moved to an online model. I'm running it on ubuntu in wine. It still works fine.<p>I had never heard of Actual till today. It looks like it would cover my use case. I'm not sure why I would have switched, though, as YNAB4 still works for me and has no recurring charge and is fully local.
I’ve used YNAB before and really liked it, this seems conceptually similar. Did anyone use both and would like to share their experience?<p>My main problem with YNAB was that entering transactions manually all the time was time consuming, and I wasn’t able to stay consistent for more than a few months at a time (in my country there was no way to import automatically).
Sad that this app didn't achieve the scale of subscriptions it deserved. A good reminder that awesome tech isn't usually enough. Do you regret not taking capital to fund marketing and support full time? Or put another way, any other ideas of where you could have spent someone else's money to give you a boost into higher subscription numbers?
An excel spreadsheet to track reoccuring expenses and income with additions made for upcoming expenses, etc. hyperpersonalized for you has been the best for me, have tried a few budget apps. Micromanaging food expenses should be something that you decide on the spot rather than seeing 600$ on food this month oh-no.<p>Caveat: Software Engineer salary with large discretionary income
I feel your frustration about business not going as envisioned. My current failure rate is two failed attempts to build profitable busines. Actually the second project is similar to yours. Invoice app for small entrepreneurs. Till today I'm the only user of the app. To reduce costs, I made it run completely without server support, all data is stored in local storage and hosted on netlify for free (no own domain). <a href="https://moja--fakturazdarma.netlify.app/" rel="nofollow">https://moja--fakturazdarma.netlify.app/</a>. It was nice challenge for me to make it work completely without any backend (generation of pdfs using pdfmake, generating qrcodes and lzma compression ...) I still use it for main own invoicing and use to in my resume as work reference, but with zero money income.
I still have yet to find something that works as well as Microsoft Money. I have to run it on VMWare Fusion on a Mac to make it work. Moneydance is the next closest thing. Something that has real support for investments and tax reporting. Everything else is too... simple.
I'm looking for a solution in this space that lets you plot the waterfall effect. What I'd like this solution to do is the following:<p>1. Enter all my bills that require full payment each month
2. Enter my bills that can be variably paid (ex. credit cards, medical bills, etc)
3. Enter my monthly income
4. Enter my budgeted personal/home expenses (food, gas/transport, etc)<p>Then the solution should be able to model a few different paths to maximizing my savings and plot out a waterfall that says if I payoff X over 6 months and pay the minimum on Y then here is what my savings would look like.<p>I'd like to be able to see what my projected payoff dates for different bills are and what my projected savings look like if I was to follow the model.
Hi! Saw your remarks about the difficulty of maintaining mobile apps - I agree this is an extremely large overhead, Apple and Google make it an absolute pain most of the time, but if you are willing to put in initial effort to port the screens / main functionality to a mobile friendly website, you can create a hybrid app through a WebView and significantly reduce the shipping times / app store burdens (and most updates, if not all, can go through the web and thus webview, instead of having to build and ship a native app(s)!)<p>If it helps. I don't know the technicalities of the mobile app at all, i.e. how many native functionalities the mobile app needs, if any.
I work for a company that does this kind of product for banks. We spend a huge amount of time integrating our solution into traditional banks contexts. There for sure is a lot of overhead. But being inside banks also gives you better data access.
Would be curious if you'd be open to talking about some of the history in terms of user growth, revenue and costs. Just curious about how these types of projects go.
>responding to Apple's complaints<p>I really wish people would utilize the web more rather than heading for the app ecosystems. From the article it's not clear if this is possible due to some particular tech choices they have made but in general it can reduce overhead quite a lot.<p>If you have a few hundred subscribers and you can do with one engineer less that can make a huge financial difference.
I’m working on a similar product at <a href="https://mygraph.ca" rel="nofollow">https://mygraph.ca</a> and always looked up to James and Actual. Great product and well engineered.<p>It was amazing to see how productive he has been the past few years working on it while also being at Stripe. Not surprised to hear it got to be a bit much.
I've been using Mint for several years and it's been slowly getting more and more useless since the Intuit acquisition.<p>As a technical user, does Actual let me do similar things myself, and now with the ability to contribute to code? Or is this completely different?
If it's running locally (or in a cloud the user choses to trust), it doesn't need to be a CRDT any more to get the same security properties, which would ironically mean it is now easier to develop.<p>(Granted CRDTs might enable other features although OT is generally considered simpler)
The most critical feature I need for a budgeting app is account syncing. Does anyone know any service like this that allows me to automatically import transaction data from accounts?<p>I currently use Personal Capital which works pretty well for integrations.
What is a good desktop-first budgeting application?<p>I've been using Homebank[1] for a few years now but I'm open to suggestions.<p>[1]: <a href="http://homebank.free.fr/" rel="nofollow">http://homebank.free.fr/</a>
I wish people wouldn't use "we open sourced it" as a synonym for "this product is dead". Especially for a SaaS company, there is a totally valid business strategy in open sourcing your codebase but continuing to provide a paid SaaS offering for users that are not interested in self-hosting.<p>It causes confusion every time a company open sources their software. Always have to wonder, "Is it dead and they are yeeting it over the fence?"
Awesome how James handled this!<p>Unrelated, I'm looking for something that can help me create finance projections.
Eg: How's my account going to look like in the next 3 months if I go for a holiday.<p>Any suggestions for that?
Shameless plug: OP mentioned Plaid as a way to sync bank accounts, but if anyone wants to use a Plaid alternative in Europe, check out Nordigen (it's free).<p>Full disclosure: I'm one of the founders.
As someone focused on sticking to FLO software, I've been using Skrooge for accounting. It's just local, but it works well. How does Actual compare?
Yep, making clients apps is kind of hell, that's why I chose PWAs for my web app collAnon, "installable" on iPhones, Androids and Desktops
oh, you just casually drop this. like these latest years has been heckin stupid and you just do such nice thing. heckin legend. if there is a creator ill tell them youre a good person. legend.