I gotta say since switching to FOSS finance tool, Actual Budget, I've been really happy with the experience. They've struck a nice balance between minimal, but powerful.
@proactiveservices I have not, but I'm surprised by how readable it is. I used to use Mint and similar finance tools that basically sell all of your data, so that's the driving factor I started looking at self-hosted solutions like Actual Budget.
@chris_hayes I also can't find any meaningful hits for "telemetry" or "analytics" in their Github repo. Why does their brief and cromulent privacy policy, and the lack of telemetry seem so rare these days?
@proactiveservices Yeah for real. I actually work at a marketing agency now, while I do fight the good fight, I can say that decision makers at any business when faced with the question, "do we want data about our customers", it's a no-brainer and hard to convince otherwise!
People are definitely becoming more aware of how apps use their data, but I think the real issue is we don't have enough alternatives like Actual Budget.
@blakeashleyjr They have a integration for both GoCardless (EU banks) and SimpleFIN (USA banks). GoCardless is definitely the more mature solution. I'm in the US, so I use SimpleFIN. Actual Budget considers the SimpleFIN integration to be still an "experimental" feature, so it may not be perfect yet.
SimpleFIN for the most part works perfectly fine for me. I do have an issue with one bank that doesn't sync automatically. But, SimpleFIN is looking into it.
@blakeashleyjr For connecting banks, the EU seems quite a bit ahead of the US in that area. The SimpleFIN protocol has been around for a while, but banks aren't really incentifized to use it (SimpleFIN relies on 3rd party data providers). Every bank in the US does their own thing. So, naturally this is an annoying problem. But SimpleFIN is extremely affordable at $1.50 / month, so I've been happy with what they offer. (Including the ability for me to use the API for my own personal projects)
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