Maybe Finance is an open source personal finance platform for tracking net worth, managing accounts, monitoring investments, and budgeting, with an AI assistant that answers questions about your own financial data without sending it to a third-party analytics service.
The Problem
Mint shut down in 2023. YNAB costs $14.99/month and focuses on zero-based budgeting rather than broader wealth tracking. Personal Capital (now Empower) shows investment performance but requires a financial advisor relationship to access its planning tools. Every mainstream personal finance app sends your linked account data to their servers for analysis, where it may also be used for advertising or sold to third parties.
How Maybe Finance Solves It
Maybe Finance runs on your own server via Docker. Your bank transaction data, investment positions, and account balances stay in your own PostgreSQL database. An AI assistant layer lets you ask natural-language questions about your finances (spending trends, net worth changes, allocation breakdowns) against your own data without it leaving your server. It supports connecting over 10,000 financial institutions via Plaid or manual CSV import.
Key Features
- Net worth tracking across bank accounts, investment accounts, loans, and real estate
- AI assistant that answers financial questions against your own locally-stored data
- Investment performance monitoring with allocation breakdown and return tracking
- Transaction management with custom categories, merchants, and rule-based auto-categorization
- Budget setup and spending analysis by category
- Self-hosted via Docker with AGPL-3.0 licensed source code
Self-Hosting
Deploy via Docker Compose using the configuration in the GitHub repository. Setup requires Docker and takes under an hour; a Plaid API key is needed for automatic bank connections, or import transactions manually via CSV. A PostgreSQL database is included in the Compose stack.
License
AGPL-3.0. Free to self-host for personal use. Distributing a modified version as a network service requires open-sourcing your changes under AGPL.
Who It's For
Maybe Finance is best for individuals who want Mint or YNAB-style financial tracking but do not want their account data processed by a commercial service's servers, and who are comfortable running a Docker app on a home server or VPS.
Compared to YNAB
Unlike YNAB, Maybe Finance runs on your own server so your transaction data never leaves your own database. YNAB focuses specifically on zero-based budgeting; Maybe provides broader wealth tracking including investments, net worth, and a self-hostable AI assistant for financial questions.
