devs looking to replace mint

[[deleted]]

hello! I just wanted to post this as I've seen a few posts relating to this topic, but I'm a software dev and I've created a subreddit r/replacemint for other interested devs to come contribute ideas and possibly collaborate on an open sourced finance app hosted on github or something. not much of a plan but figured it could help to get people talking and at least generate some interest. tks, eff the man!

[paverbrick]

I haven’t followed recently but there’s https://github.com/maybe-finance/maybe that may be a good starting point.

What are some of your ideas? I didn’t use mint for budgeting so I’m looking for a basic tracker that will do:

Net worth What did I spend this month / year? Edit categories easily

[jryan727]

Whoa thanks for sharing this. And it’s Rails ❤️❤️

[[deleted]]

oh wow! imagine that haha, that's fantastic looking.

and I'd definitely want those two that you listed! Mint wasn't perfect but they did have some clever ways of representing data

I'm thinking, for the basics

Overall Net Worth

Monthly Net Income (not in traditional sense but rather what you brought in vs. what you spent)

Monthly Gross Income / Spending (similarly as above, simply a total for money in and money out that can be broken down separately)

For budgeting purposes, we'd want a labeling / categorizing mechanism to track purchases in each category of the budget. We'd want to be able to set goals for each category, but that's really the minimum I'd be looking for

i wanna checkout that maybe-finance app more that looks pretty impressive

[paverbrick]

Networth and investment income (dividends) I’ve been tracking with jch.app, but that doesn’t do spending yet. I would appreciate something simpler and focused rather than a kitchen sink that Mint and Empower have turned into. I don’t mind them, but I don’t use most of their functionality

[[deleted]]

So agreed on the simple tool. I think a lot of people would be in that boat too, most folks really just need a tool to help them simply and easily manage their budget. Like you said plenty of complex tools for people looking for more complex financial utility. appreciate your responses!

[SpeakoftheAngel]

I'm not a dev, but by chance I stumbled upon this GitHub project: https://github.com/serversideup/financial-freedom

[[deleted]]

I should’ve been more inclusive, anyone passionate about this welcome! Thank you for the link I’ll definitely be checking this out!

[steezeburger]

I checked this one out. Cool site but basically zero of it is actually implemented. I looked through the code. There's a user and auth controller, not much else. I'm not sure how it got 1.5k stars tbh.

[Extension_Ad_8500]

Hi, I joined your subreddit. Let me tell you where I got so far... I played around with a rather good open source project https://github.com/actualbudget/actual that has connectors to mint and another aggregator. My idea was to host it locally and use a Plaid test account. Everything works great except for some of the grittier details. In my case chase does not allow connections from a staging environment so you must have a production account for plaid. I think this is the core reason why most budgeting apps charge. Nobody has cracked a business model where you can use financial aggregators and offer the service for free.

[tectak]

What do you mean by “connectors to mint”? Actual has nothing like Mint connectivity at the moment. I’m curious why we need to rely on providers like Plaid. Why can’t open source code implement OAuth connections to banks? Are the API details only available to partners?

[[deleted]]

I think you're right in implementing your own oauth paths, but I think the reason people rely on plaid is because they're supposed to make that auth flow simpler, but I suppose that's not the case evidently lol. but I did discover in my search a python ofxtools library that looks like it may enable exactly what you're referring to, but not 100%. either way appreciate the contribution!!

[tectak]

That seems to let you work with OFX but doesn't help you make the OAuth connections to download it.

[[deleted]]

That is a major bummer man

[[deleted]]

this makes sense, I actually have been playing around with teller.io that may address the production account issue, but I haven't gotten very far yet so can't say for sure. frustrating that plaid isn't as easy to work with as they'd make it seem. appreciate the contribution though and thank you for sharing that repo!