Self-hosted Mint alternative: own your budget with Firefly III

Your bank statements are the most detailed diary you keep -- every place you went, everything you bought, who you pay and what you earn. Free budgeting apps read all of it, and "free" usually means the data itself is the product. Then Mint shut down in 2024 and took years of history down with it, and YNAB's subscription keeps climbing. Firefly III is the other option: a full personal-finance manager that runs on a server you control, holding your entire financial life somewhere nobody else can mine it.

What Firefly III is

Firefly III is a mature, open-source personal finance manager built on double-entry bookkeeping -- the same accounting model banks and businesses actually use, applied to your household. Every transaction moves money between accounts, so the books always balance and nothing quietly goes missing or gets double-counted. It is not a stripped-down demo that nags you to upgrade: budgets, an automation rules engine, detailed reports, multiple currencies, savings goals, recurring transactions and a full REST API are all in the box, free, with no seat limits and no locked "pro" tier. Where Mint showed you charts and monetized the data behind them, and YNAB gates its whole method behind a monthly fee, Firefly III just hands you the engine. It has been developed steadily for most of a decade by a dedicated maintainer and a large community, and the depth shows.

The features that actually matter

None of this is a teaser for a paid tier -- it is the whole app.

• Double-entry accounts. Asset, expense, revenue and liability accounts mean every dollar has a real source and a real destination. Your net worth is a consequence of the data, not a number you type in and hope stays honest.
• Envelope-style budgets. Set a monthly amount per budget, watch what is left, and see overspending immediately. This is essentially YNAB's core method, un-paywalled.
• The rules engine. Define triggers and actions -- when a description contains "Shell," categorize it Fuel, tag it Car, and rename it. Firefly runs your rules automatically so categorizing stops being a chore. Automation like this is a premium feature almost everywhere else.
• Bills. Register recurring bills with expected amounts and intervals, and Firefly tells you what is due, what was paid, and what you missed.
• Piggy banks. Savings goals you fund over time, with progress tracked against a target so "vacation fund" is a real balance instead of a vague intention.
• Reports. Deep reports on income, expenses, budgets, categories and net worth over any date range you choose -- the breakdown a free app has every incentive to keep shallow.
• Multi-currency. Native support for multiple currencies and exchange rates, so accounts and transactions in different currencies coexist without spreadsheet gymnastics.
• Reconciliation. Reconcile any account against a real statement so your books match the bank to the cent, and a query-style search cuts across the whole ledger when you need to find one thing.
• Data importer and API. Import CSV files or connect banks through GoCardless and Spectre, and drive everything through a documented REST API with webhooks for your own automations.

Why self-host it instead of the hosted version

Your data stays yours. Personal finance is the single most sensitive dataset most people own, and handing it to an aggregator means it gets analyzed, cross-referenced and sometimes sold. Self-hosted, your transactions sit in your database on your server, read by you and nobody's marketing team.

The cost doesn't scale. A hosted budgeting app charges per month, per user, forever, and the price only goes one direction. Firefly III is free software -- you pay for the modest server it runs on, not for the privilege of seeing your own money, and adding your partner is a second login, not a second subscription.

You control it. It's your instance: your backup schedule, your retention, your currencies, your rules, exportable to CSV or through the API any time you like. No account gets frozen, no feature disappears in a redesign, and no company sunsets your years of history the way Mint did to millions of people overnight.

Who it's for

Firefly III asks for a little involvement and pays it back in clarity, so it fits a few people especially well.

Mint refugees who lost their tool and refuse to hand another company the same power to disappear. Firefly imports the history you exported and gives it a permanent home.

Privacy-minded people who simply don't want a fintech company reading every transaction they make, and would rather run the software themselves than trust a promise.

Serious budgeters and households who want double-entry rigor, automation rules and real reports -- the couple splitting shared expenses, the freelancer separating business from personal, the person who genuinely wants to know where the money went.

The honest setup notes

We'll be straight with you: rolling Firefly III yourself is a real project. It needs a database -- MySQL/MariaDB or PostgreSQL -- provisioned, secured and backed up, because that database *is* your entire financial history. It needs a daily cron job (`artisan firefly-iii:cron`) or recurring transactions and bill reminders silently stop firing, a failure with no error message. It wants an `APP_KEY` for encryption and an SMTP server so registration and password-reset emails actually arrive. Bank imports run through a separate Data Importer container you also have to deploy and wire up. None of it is exotic, but it is a chore that never fully ends: updates, backups, and a database to babysit.

Or let us run it. We handle the database, the cron, the encryption key, the mail and the updates, and you just log in and start budgeting.

Deploy it in one click

Doing this by hand means a Docker host, a database, environment variables, a cron entry, a mail relay and a second container for imports -- an afternoon if it goes well, longer if it doesn't. On Caliber Node you deploy Firefly III in one click and skip all of it. We provision the database, generate the encryption key, schedule the cron so recurring transactions and reminders work from day one, and connect SMTP so your emails send. You get a running instance on your own subdomain with TLS already in place. It stays yours -- real logs, SFTP access to the files, and a database you can back up or export whenever you want. The managed part is the plumbing, not your data.

First run

1. Create your first asset account -- your checking or savings account -- and enter its current balance as the opening balance.
2. Add a couple of expense and revenue accounts (rent, salary), or just let Firefly create them as you go.
3. Enter a handful of recent transactions by hand, or import a CSV export from your bank.
4. Create a budget, name it something like Groceries, and set the monthly amount you want to hold to.
5. Open Reports and watch the month take shape -- income, spending and what's left in each budget.

That's a working personal-finance ledger in about five minutes, and every number in it traces back to a transaction you can see.

The bigger picture

Knowing where your money goes shouldn't require renting the knowledge from a company that also profits from watching you spend. Budgeting, of all things, is about control -- and a tool that can raise its price, change its terms or shut down entirely isn't something you control at all. Self-hosting Firefly III flips that: the software is free, the data is yours, and the only thing you depend on is a small server that answers to you. Own the ledger, and you own the whole picture.

Deploy Firefly III in a few minutes → https://calibernode.com/cloud-apps

Or browse the full app catalog to see what else you can bring home.

One-click self-hosted apps, managed for you -- real logs, SFTP, and your data always exportable. Never a black box.