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Actual Budget

Local-first envelope budgeting (ex-commercial, now MIT)

verified 2026-07-02MITself-hostable

Arete score

4.8 / 5

Autonomy5

Return5

Efficiency4

Transparency5

ἀρετή “AH-reh-tay” — excellence: a thing being good at what it’s for. Mean of the four principle scores. How we score →

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✓ Verified by a human against the public rubric on 2026-07-02 · see the evidence ↓

Why it's listed

Written by the ValueIndex editor, from the verification pass of 2026-07-02.

Actual was a commercial budgeting app whose developer open-sourced the whole product under MIT. Local-first envelope budgeting with optional encrypted sync — your financial data stays in a SQLite file you own. The community now maintains it actively. We verified the license history and local-first architecture.

Facts

License: MIT
Pricing: Free
Funding model: Community OSS
Self-hostable: Yes — deploy difficulty: easy
Replaces: YNAB, Mint
Verification: Verified against the rubric on 2026-07-02

Evidence notes

Formerly paid product open-sourced; local-first sync; small footprint

Recorded during the rubric pass — every score must carry evidence a stranger could re-check.

Also in bookkeeping & budgeting

Firefly III (4.3) — Personal finance manager, double-entry

Spotted a problem — trackers added, dark patterns, abandonment? Report a violation. Scores change when evidence does.