Actual Budget is switching to open source

Actual is a great product – we use it for personal finance. The author decided he did not want to continue the business, as it was draining him, so he decided to open source the project and discontinue the syncing service. If you are interesting in supporting a great OSS personal finance app, this is probably the one.

Lots of business lessons here.

James has done some excellent work with CRDTs and synchronization.

This is a very interesting discussion. James was getting lonely/burnt-out working on Actual and decided he could not continue solo. So lightly pursued selling it, but ended up open sourcing it. This has generated a lot of interest and and in the end he might have more commercial opportunity. There is a bit of filler to wade through, but some real insights as well:

  • example of why the app stores are such a pain
  • lots of lessons learned
  • broken things should be fixed right away – otherwise, the longer they stay broken the more likely they will stay that way and drag down the rest of the project with it
  • a discussion of absurd-sql

docs site is up: