If you’ve ever handed your bank credentials over to a budgeting app and felt that little knot in your stomach, you’re not alone. Most personal finance tools want you to trust them with everything — your login credentials, your transaction history, your spending habits — all stored on their servers, monetized however they see fit. Actual Budget takes a completely different approach, and after months of using it, I’m convinced it’s the best self-hosted budgeting app available today.
What Is Actual Budget?
Actual Budget is an open-source, local-first personal finance application built around the envelope budgeting methodology. If you’ve ever used YNAB (You Need A Budget), the concept will feel familiar: every dollar gets assigned a job, and you only budget money you actually have on hand. No projecting future income and pretending it’s real money.
What sets Actual apart is its architecture. The app runs locally in your browser or as a desktop client, with an optional self-hosted sync server that keeps your devices in sync. Your financial data never touches someone else’s cloud unless you explicitly set that up yourself. For anyone running a homelab or already self-hosting services, spinning up the Actual server in Docker is about as painless as it gets.
The interface is snappy in a way that web apps rarely are. Navigating between accounts, editing transactions, and managing your budget categories all feel instant. There’s no loading spinner while some remote server crunches your data. Everything happens locally, and it shows.
SimpleFIN Makes Bank Syncing Effortless
One of the biggest friction points with any budgeting app is getting your transaction data into it. Nobody wants to manually enter every coffee purchase and gas station fill-up. Actual Budget integrates with SimpleFIN Bridge for US and Canadian banks, and it’s been a game-changer for my workflow.
SimpleFIN acts as a privacy-respecting middleman between your bank and Actual. You create an account, link your financial institutions, and generate a setup token that you plug into Actual. From there, you can sync your transactions with a single click. At $1.50 per month or $15 per year, it’s incredibly affordable, and you can connect up to 25 institutions under one account.
The sync pulls up to 90 days of historical data, and SimpleFIN refreshes each linked account roughly once per day. It’s not real-time, but for budgeting purposes, daily updates are more than sufficient. The setup process took me maybe ten minutes from start to finish, and I haven’t had to think about it since. Transactions just show up, ready to be categorized and budgeted.
The Rules Engine Is Where It Really Shines
If I had to pick a single feature that makes Actual Budget stand out, it’s the rules engine. Rules let you automate the tedious parts of transaction management — automa7tically categorizing transactions, renaming payees, splitting expenses, and more — based on conditions you define.
For example, I have rules that automatically categorize every transaction from my local grocery store into my “Groceries” category, rename messy payee strings from my bank into clean readable names, and flag certain transactions for review. Once you set up a handful of rules, the vast majority of your imported transactions arrive already categorized and cleaned up. You go from spending twenty minutes a week sorting transactions to spending maybe two or three.
The conditions are flexible enough to handle most scenarios. You can match on payee name, amount, account, notes, and more, with options for contains, equals, and other operators. And rules run automatically on every import, whether you’re syncing through SimpleFIN or importing a CSV. The more rules you build, the more the app works for you instead of the other way around.
Python Automation Opens Up Endless Possibilities
Here’s where things get really interesting for the technically inclined. Actual Budget has a well-documented API, and the community has built actualpy, a full Python implementation that lets you interact with your budget programmatically using SQLAlchemy ORM.
This means you can write scripts to do just about anything. Want to automatically import transactions from a source that SimpleFIN doesn’t support? Write a Python script. Need to generate custom reports that go beyond what the built-in reporting offers? Query the database directly. Want to build a scheduled job that reconciles accounts or flags anomalies? The API gives you full access.
Since the underlying data is stored in SQLite, you get all the flexibility of SQL queries combined with the convenience of Python’s data ecosystem. For someone who already leans on Python for automation, this is huge. The community has built all sorts of integrations too — Home Assistant connectors, custom bank sync tools, tap-to-pay transaction loggers, and AI-powered categorization tools. The ecosystem around Actual is thriving precisely because the developers made it easy to extend.
Don’t Want to Self-Host? Try PikaPods
I know not everyone has a homelab sitting in their closet or wants to deal with Docker containers and reverse proxies. If that’s you, don’t let the self-hosting aspect scare you away from Actual Budget. PikaPods offers one-click hosting for Actual at roughly $1.50 per month, and you get a $5 credit when you sign up — enough to run it free for about three months.
PikaPods handles all the server management, updates, and maintenance for you. They test each new Actual release before deploying it, so you don’t have to worry about a broken update ruining your Saturday. You still get all the same features — bank syncing, multi-device access, end-to-end encryption — without touching a terminal. Your data stays on an isolated container, not mixed into some giant shared database.
What I especially appreciate about PikaPods is that a portion of the hosting revenue goes directly back to the Actual Budget project. So you’re not just paying for convenience — you’re helping fund the development of the app itself. If you ever decide to go the self-hosting route later, you can export your data via SFTP and migrate at any time. No lock-in, no hassle.
What I’d Love to See Improved
No app is perfect, and Actual Budget has a few areas where I’d love to see some growth.
The built-in reporting is solid but limited. You get net worth and cash flow charts out of the box, plus a custom report builder. But I’d love to see more chart types and visualizations baked into the core app — spending trends over time, category breakdowns by month, year-over-year comparisons, that sort of thing. The custom report engine is capable, but having richer defaults would lower the barrier for people who don’t want to build every report from scratch.
My other big wish is a native Android app. Right now, the mobile experience is a progressive web app (PWA) that you access through your browser. It works, and it works offline if you install it to your home screen, but it’s not the same as a purpose-built native app. Quick transaction entry on the go, push notifications for budget alerts, a widget showing category balances — these are the kinds of things that would make Actual feel complete as a daily-driver finance tool. The community has built an iOS widget as a workaround, but official Android support would be a welcome addition.
Who Is This For?
Actual Budget sits in a sweet spot for people who want serious budgeting tools without giving up control of their data. If you’re already running Docker containers, self-hosting other services, or just generally uncomfortable with handing your financial data to a third party, this is your app. And if you’re not into self-hosting, PikaPods makes it accessible to everyone.
It’s also a fantastic choice for anyone coming from YNAB who’s frustrated with the shift to subscription pricing and cloud-only hosting. The envelope budgeting methodology is the same, the interface is arguably faster, and you own everything.
The learning curve is gentle if you’re familiar with envelope budgeting, and the documentation is thorough. The community on Discord is active and helpful, and the project sees regular updates with meaningful improvements, not just minor patches.
Final Thoughts
Actual Budget represents what I think personal finance software should be: fast, private, extensible, and respectful of the person using it. It doesn’t try to upsell you on premium tiers. It doesn’t harvest your data. It doesn’t break when the company behind it decides to pivot or shut down — because you’re hosting it yourself, and the code is open source.
Between SimpleFIN handling my bank imports, rules keeping my transactions organized, and Python giving me the power to build whatever I need on top, Actual Budget has become one of those tools I genuinely look forward to using. That’s a weird thing to say about a budgeting app, but here we are.
If you’ve been on the fence about self-hosting your finances, give Actual Budget a shot. Your data will thank you.