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Would you use an open source personal finance app?

· 3 min read
Bekah Hawrot Weigel
Bekah Hawrot Weigel
Developer Experience Lead

Today is day 27 of my 29 Days of Open Source Alternatives series, where I'll be exploring open source alternatives to proprietary software in the categories of Game Development and Multimedia, Development Tools and Platforms, Productivity and Collaboration Tools, and more. If you'd like to see the list of the open source alternatives I'll be covering this month, head over to my 29 Days of Open Source Alts Page.

On January 1, 2024, Mint, the personal finance app - acquired by Intuit in 2009 - shut down. If you're not familiar with Mint, it allowed users to see multiple accounts, to track spending, savings, and create budgets. Mint was one of the top personal finance apps, and despite Intuit encouraging users to move over to their other product, Credit Karma, the broken trust didn't exactly sit well with a lot of users. Although there are other alternatives, like YNAB, Pocketguard, and Oportun, choosing a personal finance app is, well, a personal decision, and not one to be taken lightly. All of these are closed-source, which lack the transparency that you might want from a finance app. Maybe Finance becomes and interesting alternative because of it's open source nature.

Maybe Finance​

https://github.com/maybe-finance/maybe

It's worth starting with the state of Maybe Finance right now. If you go to their website, you're greeted with this message.

Message from Maybe about open sourcing

I'm not sure if that conveys confidence or if it sends up red flags for users - that's for you to decide. Let's look at some reasons that you might want to use an open source finance product.

  1. Privacy & Security: Open source code allows you to see how the app works and ensures your data isn't being used for hidden purposes.
  2. Customization & Control: You can potentially modify the app's code to fit your specific needs and preferences.
  3. Community & Collaboration: There's an active community where users can contribute ideas, report bugs, and help improve the app together.
  4. Cost-Effective: For Maybe Finance, specifically, "The goal is to let you run the app yourself, for free, and use it to manage your own finances and eventually offer a hosted version of the app for a small monthly fee."

Of course, there are reasons you may not want to use an open source personal finance app, including:

  1. Limited support
  2. Required technical knowledge
  3. Concerns over stability and reliability

But what kind of open source project is Maybe? Let's take a look:

Maybe Dashboard

Check out the full dashboard here.

We see a high activity rate over the last thirty days, with about an average size PR velocity. Although their star history seems to be leveling out, you can see from this chart that they've built kind of a staircase, so it's worth watching to see what's coming next. I imagine those spikes correspond with an announcement or activity.

Star History Chart

Metrics for their project over its lifespan include:

  • Stars: 25k
  • Watching: 148
  • Forks: 1.9k Contributors: 59

We can take a look at what the breakdown over the last thirty days looks like as well:

last thirty days metrics

What's most interesting to me, is that we see an equal stars to forks ratio over the last thirty days. That tells me that not only are people interested in following the project to see how it progresses, but people are also interested in contributing, which is ideal.

So what do you think? Would you use an open source personal finance app?