monetr is a free, self-hostable budgeting application written in Go that helps people plan around recurring expenses and see exactly how much money is left over for unplanned spending.
What it is
monetr is an open-source personal finance and budgeting application, written in Go, distributed through GitHub at github.com/monetr/monetr and documented at monetr.app. Its stated goal is to make it easier to budget around recurring expenses while keeping it absolutely clear how much remains available to budget or spend on unplanned purchases. It lives in the personal finance management space, alongside the broader category of budgeting apps, and it connects to real bank data through Plaid.
The concrete problem it solves is the gap between knowing what is in an account and knowing what is already committed. Recurring bills, subscriptions and other predictable expenses are easy to lose track of, so a balance can look healthy while most of it is already spoken for. monetr is built around those recurring commitments rather than around after-the-fact categorisation of transactions, and it is designed as a replacement for the now defunct Simple, the bank whose approach to budgeting it is based on. Where Simple was a closed banking product that users could not run themselves, monetr is a self-hostable application.
Key capabilities
- Budgeting centred on recurring expenses, with the remaining balance presented as what is genuinely left to budget or spend.
- Bank account connectivity through Plaid, using a Client ID and Client Secret obtained from the Plaid dashboard.
- Free self-hosting, with installation documentation published at monetr.app/documentation/install.
- A local development environment started with
make develop and torn down with make clean.
- Continuous integration and code health tooling wired into the repository, including GitHub Actions, Codecov, Go Report Card and DeepSource.
- FOSSA licence-compliance scanning, reported through a FOSSA project badge.
- A Discord community for contributors and users, linked from the README.
Who uses it and how
- Individuals who want their own budgeting service and are willing to run it themselves rather than trust a hosted finance product with bank-linked data.
- People with many recurring commitments, such as subscriptions and regular bills, who need a running view of what remains after those commitments are covered.
- Developers and contributors working on monetr itself, who run the project locally via
make develop after signing up for their own Plaid credentials.
- Self-hosters in a homelab or small-server setting, installing from the project documentation and keeping the deployment under their own control.
Getting started
The README points to monetr.app/documentation/install for self-hosting, and the project is described there as completely free to self-host. For development work, a local environment is started by running make develop in the project directory once Plaid sandbox credentials are available; make clean removes it.
How it compares
monetr is based on Simple, the banking product that has since shut down, so the comparison the project itself draws is with a service that no longer exists rather than with a live commercial competitor. No other comparable tools are named in the material available here, so monetr stands alone in this registry as a self-hosted, Go-based budgeting application for recurring expenses.
When to use it — and when not to
Self-hosting means running the application and managing Plaid credentials yourself, so anyone who wants a managed service with no operational work is not the target user. The repository is also thin on operational detail: it carries no topic tags, the README is brief and largely a screenshot plus contribution notes, and the licence is reported as NOASSERTION despite the presence of FOSSA scanning, which means the exact licensing terms should be checked before any commercial or organisational use. The project is actively pushed and maintained, with 677 stars, 49 forks and 88 open issues, but prospective users should read the install documentation carefully before committing to it.
project readme (upstream, from github) — read inline
monetr
monetr is a budgeting application that aims to make it easier for people to budget around recurring expenses. While
making it absolutely clear how much you have left over to budget or use for other unplanned spending. It is based off of
the now defunct Simple. It is also completely free
to self-host.
Contributing
In order to run monetr locally you will need sandbox credentials for Plaid, you can obtain your own credentials here:
Plaid Sign Up. Once you have a Client ID and a Client Secret you can run the
following command in the monetr project directory to start a local environment.
To start working on monetr, you can follow the Local
Development documentation. Or if you want to just dive
in you can run the following command in the project directory:
make develop
This will set pretty much everything up that you need to work on monetr.
When you want to tear it all down, you can run the following command:
make clean
Contributions are more than welcome!
License
