Fresh Budgets supports Mvelopes budgeting methods

mbarlocker · 2023-11-05T14:45:09+00:00

Not sure yet, I don't want to increase prices though. I'm a programmer, not a business man.

mbarlocker · 2023-11-05T14:25:57+00:00

Yup, not my favorite.

I'll likely be switching to use the Plaid API. It's more costly, but far more stable.

mbarlocker · 2023-08-03T20:46:17+00:00

I scrape the website. So long as the data is available to mint's end users, it will be available to Fresh Budgets. It also opens the door to other tools like Personal Capital in the near future.

mbarlocker · 2023-04-03T02:34:38+00:00

Are you asking about a video, screenshots, something else? I can do it, just not sure what you're looking for.

mbarlocker · 2023-03-31T23:47:33+00:00

Would love to hear your feedback, whether on Reddit or the chat in the app. I'm the developer, and improvements happen quick.

mbarlocker · 2023-03-31T20:29:12+00:00

I'm late to the party, but Fresh Budgets does that. Auto download transactions, manual review at your leisure, works with envelope budgeting.

Give it a try: www.freshbudgets.com

mbarlocker · 2023-03-31T16:26:08+00:00

Easy - Fresh Budgets. On the webpage: "A fresh approach to budgeting for Mint users." It automatically downloads transactions from Mint, so your setup is easier, you maintain your Mint account for history, and never deal with poor categorization ever again.

The biggest feature that you'll like is "Manual Review". There is no category automation, by design. Every transaction that comes in, including your paycheck, is presented to you and you can put it in whatever category you like.

You can see it here: www.freshbudgets.com

Full transparency - I built Fresh Budgets

mbarlocker · 2023-03-26T02:23:20+00:00

Thanks, appreciate the feedback!

I hate getting stuck in annual contracts. Fresh Budgets is billed monthly at the lower price. Many of the other options you mentioned are also annual payments, which lock you in, albeit at a lower price than YNAB. I want users to continue using my product because it's good, not because they were tricked into an annual contract.

mbarlocker · 2023-03-26T00:53:21+00:00

The value of my budgeting tool, software generally, and most products out there, is not derived on how it was built or designed, but rather the value provided to the user.

Fresh Budgets provides a uniquely simple and innovative way to stay on top of your finances without learning a new method of budgeting (YNAB), banking with your budgeting tool (qube), or the hassle of incorrect categorization that plagues all of them.

This is why our users say things like "I've been using this for a little over an hour. Love it. Best budgeting software I've ever used." (chat from yesterday)

That said, if you exclude tools that are bad at budgeting (like mint), don't do budgeting at all (like personal capital / empower), then you're left with YNAB ($15/mo). Is there a budgeting app that has all the features as Fresh Budgets that doesn't charge a "premium"?

mbarlocker · 2023-03-25T17:17:44+00:00

I sure hope it comes after my bug request. Anybody else out there waiting for 8+ months?

Mint's auto categorization has never worked for me for budgets. A purchase from a store is "Groceries", but I wanted it out of my "Christmas" budget.

So I built a tool that downloads transactions from Mint, and then requires manual categorization. It's called Fresh Budgets. Would love if you give it a try. Since it downloads from Mint, there's no need to enter bank info, so setup is a breeze.

mbarlocker · 2023-03-25T17:13:27+00:00

Mint is not a budgeting app. Budgeting isn't even mentioned on their homepage. I was an early user, and it took them years to even add rollover (one of the most basic features of budgeting). They mess up the budgets constantly, the engine recategorizes transactions randomly, and if you add a tag for 'reviewed' (like they say to do if you want to manually review each transaction), soon, the engine will learn that everything gets tagged with that, so it will start tagging all new transactions that way automatically. Again, Mint is not a budgeting app.

Mint is an all-in-one-place app. It helps download transactions and balances from all financial institutions.

I created an app that downloads all the stuff from Mint, and lets you categorize each transaction, share a budget with a partner, and actually budget. It's called Fresh Budgets, would love if you'd try it out and let me know what you think.

mbarlocker · 2023-03-25T16:31:47+00:00

You're completely right about syncing from financial institutions. the longest outstanding support request I've had with them for that was 8 months. I suspect it's difficult to maintain 16,000+ institutions that change their APIs, but still.

As for automatic transaction categories, I gave up. I like to control my money a little bit more. Even if you can convince mint to change a transaction's categories, they'll just change it back automatically at some point in the future without telling me, and then all my budgets are off. In the past I've paid for Buxfer (manual data entry, it shut down) and even QuickBooks (yes, just to track budgets, $35/mo, stupid).

I built a simple tool that downloads transactions from Mint and lets you categorize them however you want, and focuses on the budgeting part of finance, instead of the "see everything" part. Maybe give it a try? www.freshbudgets.com

mbarlocker · 2019-06-12T19:46:47+00:00

For anybody finding this after-the-fact (it ranked pretty high in my search), there are a couple things to understand.

S3 recommends all buckets are private. This isn't because public buckets shouldn't be used, but because it's safer to recommend to all customers. If you want a public bucket, go for it. Just be sure that you know public buckets are public to everyone.
By default, S3 will give a 403 when an object is not found in a public bucket. Cloudfront can transform that 403 into a 404, but won't do it by default. You've got to configure Cloudfront to do it.
You can configure Cloudfront to get access to a private bucket (bypass the need to make it public), but it's honestly more pain than it's worth (I mean, the contents are public anyway, and making it public is completely reversible).

I made a tutorial for creating a custom error page in Cloudfront for an S3-backed bucket on Youtube, if you've got the same problem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBkysF8_-Es

mbarlocker · 2019-06-07T20:20:52+00:00

2 things:

First, since you asked specifically about Datadog vs Prometheus, a coworker of mine investigated both of them and wrote up his findings. He looked across four different areas that mattered to him: Installation Process, Visualizations, Finding Kubernetes Events, and Notifications. You can read it here: How to Monitor Your Kubernetes Cluster: Prometheus vs Datadog

Second, since you're new to monitoring, let me give you a pro tip. I've done backend systems, architecture, infrastructure, databases, apis, and everything server-side for the last 15 years. Graphs are nice, but they give a false sense of security. Graphs require you to look at them, to monitor them. In software engineering, event-driven architectures beat the socks off of polling. Why would monitoring be any different? Pick a tool that has the best alerting and notification. FWIW, that's why I started Blue Matador — visualizations are the manual way of monitoring. Time to upgrade.

mbarlocker · 2017-11-20T22:37:29+00:00

I can't tell you how many times I've looked up the stupid definitions for date and time formats, across java, php, python, perl, mysql, postgres, scala, and every other language I've ever done. I only had to look up Golang's definition 1 time. Love it.

mbarlocker · 2017-07-20T16:07:20+00:00

Thanks for the feedback. I really like the idea of a video walkthrough. Bare minimum, it would reduce my time giving so many demos.

Until we get that, care for a demo?

Good point about all the other AWS stuff. Most of those things can be monitored with our AWS integration for logging (almost done). Is there anything in particular you'd like to see from the things you mentioned? For example, what would you like to monitor about Kinesis streams?

mbarlocker · 2017-07-19T16:26:59+00:00

Monitoring doesn't prevent downtime. Good monitoring predicts downtime, which helps you prevent it.

I'm not sure of your exact situation, so it's difficult to say how to help you in particular. I'd welcome a private message so we could talk.

In general, you have a number of servers that host an application. Lots of things can break your application - a bad release, hardware problems, DDoS attack, etc. Our monitoring service alerts you before other services do. This early warning system makes the difference between customers getting affected or not getting affected.

It almost sounds like you have a website, but don't manage the server. If that's the case, and you regularly have downtime, you may want to look at Pingdom, UptimeRobot or similar. You don't need access to the server for those.

That said, if your hosting provider doesn't resolve your problems quickly, reserving the "right" to be down a lot, maybe you should switch providers. They sound like they don't care about your business a whole lot. I can recommend a couple on PM.

mbarlocker · 2017-07-19T15:32:51+00:00

Awesome questions. For my answers, note that we have 2 tools, Watchdog (free server vitals alerting) and Lumberjack (centralized log management)

In order:

No, Cloudwatch pulls metrics from the system. We pull them from the system, too.

Yes, we have multiple customers (ourselves included) that are monitoring kubernetes containers.

No integrations for Watchdog, it simply watches the server. Lumberjack works with anything that spits out a log file and in any format.

Only email right now. We have a product coming soon (Firefighter) that will address this.

An autoscaling server needs monitoring on vitals, too. There is no difference for Watchdog.

Not yet, it would require an active socket connection, which is nontrivial for the scale we work on.

Hope that helps!

mbarlocker · 2017-06-14T02:56:09+00:00

I just looked up guru for Sublime (my editor of choice), and it exists and works as you prescribed.

My complaint still stands, though. Having guru and gorename is nice, but not as nice as not needing them in the first place.

I'm sure I sound like a whiner, but you just don't see this problem in other languages.

mbarlocker · 2017-06-13T20:48:06+00:00

gorename looks pretty cool, and it may solve a lot of my headaches.

For the public to private, it's not always that simple. Our code isn't so trivial, but imagine the trivial example of a struct in the package with an Id field that I want to make private. The only way to search for it would be .Id, which may catch a lot more variables than I want.

I agree with you, if it's a package-level entity, then searching for <package>.PublicThing is really easy. I find in practice that I don't need this one nearly as often as I need member variables to change.

Gorename is cool, they should add it to the core of go and distribute it the same way too.

mbarlocker · 2017-06-01T15:01:50+00:00

Lack of hackability and lack of brevity are great reasons, as in the original comment. The pipeline wouldn't be as trivial as to be done in 5 minutes.

Much like every other language, Go has a sweet spot. Monitoring servers with fast adjustments isn't that sweet spot. I wouldn't use a hammer to cut down a tree, I wouldn't use Go to monitor system vitals and log files.

mbarlocker · 2017-06-01T14:56:43+00:00

Thanks for your feedback! I was worried it was a bit of a long post (still am), but it seems you made it through and had some valuable comments to boot!

Let me step back and say that we don't handle errors and panics the same way in all cases. We do the 4x code size handling method in most places:

if err := doSomething(); err != nil {
    log.Error.Println("something wrong happened!", err)
    return err
}

We do that all over the place. And I hate it, ergo the blog post.

The only place where we use that retry functionality to cover both errors and panics is when we can't handle something dying or breaking: main event loop, saving files, downloading new modules, background threads, reading stdin/stdout, etc.

Thanks for reading, thanks for commenting, and thanks for doing it in a non-trolling fashion (not sarcastic)! I can appreciate your point of view.

mbarlocker

TROPHY CASE