ZeBill

A self-hosted personal finance app — budgets, accounts and net worth, on my own server, in the shape that matches how I actually think about money.

Why I built it

Money software makes two demands at once: give us all your financial data, and pay monthly for the privilege of looking at it. I wanted the envelope-style budgeting I use, owned end to end.

The problem

Budgeting tools split into two camps. The polished ones hold your credentials and your history on their servers. The self-hosted ones tend to be accounting software — built for a business, not for a household deciding whether it can afford a holiday.

What I was using before

A spreadsheet, then a commercial budgeting app for a while. The spreadsheet was entirely mine and entirely manual; the app was convenient and entirely theirs.

What it does

• Envelope budgeting — money assigned to a job before it is spent
• Accounts, transactions and categories, reconciled against statements
• Net worth and cash-flow views, built from the same data
• Recurring transactions, so fixed costs are not re-entered every month
• Everything on my own hardware, with no third party in the middle

Where it is now

In active use. Built and iterated against my own real numbers, which is the only honest test for finance software. Still being developed, and some roughness remains.

Who it might interest

Anyone who wants to budget properly without handing a complete picture of their finances to a company. It is the project I would point at to explain why self-hosting matters to me.

Open Zebill →
It needs an account, so the door is a sign-in page rather than a demo.