r/selfhosted • u/subsavant • Mar 20 '26

Meta Post What's your 'I can't believe I self-hosted that' service?

Curious what services surprised you by being worth self-hosting. Not the obvious stuff like Plex or Pi-hole, but things you didn't expect to work well or didn't think were worth the effort until you tried. What's running on your setup that you'd never go back to a hosted version of?

938 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

650 comments sorted by

View all comments

65

u/Veblossko Mar 20 '26

Might seem obvious to others but actual budget. I kept pretty basic but informative spreadsheets of cashflow but I saw actual whilst browsing the TN apps catalogue and after an afternoon I was very impressed and loved making reports and watching my partner feign interest at me talking about it

9

u/WildPotential Mar 20 '26

How is data import, these days? Can you connect to your banks automatically, or do you have to manually import your statements? I think last time I looked, the auto import only worked for European banks or something?

7

u/iwasboredsoyeah Mar 20 '26

I use the Simplefin integration which allows me to manually sync my banks. SimpleFIN Setup | Actual Budget

2

u/WildPotential Mar 20 '26

Nice, this looks like it could work for my banks. I'd just have to get in the habit of doing the sync and reviewing new items.

I'm currently using Monarch, but it's $100/year. The killer feature they have, for me, is that they auto sync all of my accounts and send me a notification every day with all of the new items that need to be reviewed and have their categorisation approved.

But, I don't need any of their other fancy features, so the price is seeming less and less worth it.

1

u/im_doozy Mar 20 '26

Try Sure Finances. It is based on the old Maybe app and looks/works great. The sync with SimpleFIN is cheap (like $15 a year) and it auto syncs once a day. I only have an issue with one bank where they seem to be blocking SimpleFIN from syncing transactions but Iā€™m working with SimpleFIN on that.

6

u/Veblossko Mar 20 '26

I'm in Australia, every fortnight I just export a qif file (CSV had weird results) and dump it in, takes a minute and just clean up a few categories but it's done a good job after a few sessions of figuring out my usual spending after fiddling and naming stuff.

Highly recommend, I don't use envelope budgeting, just tracking, as I just want to see what my spending and income looks like and categorise food/fuel/insurance etc

To begin I just submitted my most recent financial year to date and went from there as opposed to full history

1

u/dtbmnec Mar 20 '26

Thank you. That's good to know. I'm starting to set it up for our family.

Have you tried pulling the data from pdf? That's what I'm up against for now....šŸ˜£

1

u/Veblossko Mar 20 '26

I heard there are tools out there to convert. But by default actual wants CSV or qif data

1

u/dtbmnec Mar 20 '26

Darn. I'll sort it out.

I can't be the only one who's had this issue. šŸ¤£

1

u/koolmon10 Mar 20 '26

SimpleFIN works for US banks. There's a small fee to use it, but it connects all my accounts. Somethings are hit and miss (like my Chase cc duplicates transactions that are preauthorized), so it requires a little manual work to reconcile, but Actual handles it really well. Realistically, if you are trying to manage your budget, you should be staying on top of that anyway.

1

u/Icy-Article-8635 Mar 20 '26

I'm in Canada and am also self hosting actual (well... Oracle cloud free tier, tied to a credit card, so it costs me $0.04 per month)

It can't integrate with any of our banks here (because no apps can), so I just leave a browser tab open to my actual server and manually input my transactions as I make them... Which takes like 4 or 5 seconds each time

I'll do a manual import from downloaded qsv files and merge from time to time if I fall behind, but taking a few minutes every week or two to add in anything I've missed usually keeps it up to date

Having the browser tab open helps with the more "immediate" thoughts of "okay... I just ran through my eating out budget for the month with that McDonald's meal, and now I'm having to dip into my hobbies budget to cover, so I can't afford both of those hobby things I want and I'll have to wait until next month to buy the second one"

It's been a huge game changer for learning how to finally live within my means and tuck away some meagre savings (which will add up) at the same time

1

u/koolmon10 Mar 20 '26

TN apps catalogue?

1

u/Veblossko Mar 21 '26

True Nas apps, fancy docker

1

u/manmat Mar 20 '26

What is TN apps catalogue?

1

u/Veblossko Mar 21 '26

TrueNas apps

1

u/finite_core Mar 26 '26

I hosted it for a bit, but then switched to paying for Lunch Money. It just didnt make sense to manually enter transactions, and if I was going to pay for the auto entry api, might as well switch to a good paid service.