Ocular is an open-source, self-hosted budgeting and expense tracker built with Vue under the MIT licence, aimed at individuals and households who want to plan, track, and review budgets across multiple years without handing their financial data to a hosted service.

What it is

Ocular lives in the Vue ecosystem and ships as a single self-hostable container. It tracks budgets across years and turns recorded income and expenses into a dashboard of statistics and charts, backed by an all-time overview. It installs as a Progressive Web App, is optimized for mobile devices, offers light and dark themes, supports multiple languages and all common currencies, and allows a customizable financial year that can start in any month. Budgets can be carried over into the following year. The README states that no AI was used during development except for translations.

The concrete thing it replaces is the annual budget spreadsheet. People who plan their year in a Google Sheet tend to lose the history or rebuild the sheet every January, and the sheet has no authentication, no mobile entry, and no analytics beyond whatever formulas were written into it. Ocular accepts an import from Google Sheets' annual planner so an existing sheet is not wasted, exports data as JSON, and keeps several years side by side so carry-over and trends stay visible. It adds what a spreadsheet lacks: user management and authentication, a privacy mode, and keyboard navigation.

Key capabilities

• Self-hosted deployment as a single container, with images published under the project's GitHub packages page at github.com/simonwep/ocular/pkgs/container/ocular.
• Import from Google Sheets' annual planner and export of data as JSON.
• Dashboard with extensive statistics and multiple charts, including a Sankey diagram, plus an all-time overview of budgets with analytics.
• Multi-year budget tracking, carry-over of budgets into the next year, and a financial year that can start at any month.
• User management and authentication available through both the app and the CLI.
• Installable as a Progressive Web App, optimized for mobile devices, with light and dark themes and multi-language support for common currencies.
• Privacy mode for use in public places, keyboard navigation for power users, and inline expression evaluation.

Who uses it and how

• Individuals and households who keep a yearly budget in a Google Sheet and want the history to accumulate instead of resetting; the Google Sheets annual planner import is the migration path.
• Privacy-conscious self-hosters who keep financial data on their own hardware, since the single container is the only deployment artifact the README names.
• Small multi-user setups, because user management and authentication can be driven from the app or from the CLI.
• Mobile-first users who record spending as it happens, since the app installs as a Progressive Web App and entry is sped up by keyboard navigation and inline expression evaluation.

Getting started

Deploy via Docker using the single container published under the project's GitHub packages page, following the guide at simonwep.github.io/ocular/pages/deploy.html. A documentation site and a fully featured demo are available at simonwep.github.io/ocular.

How it compares

No comparable budgeting or personal-finance tools are named in the facts provided, so Ocular stands alone in this registry. Its listed category is Business Software / Finance & Accounting, and the distinguishing facts given are the MIT licence, the Vue codebase, and the single-container self-hosted deployment.

When to use it — and when not to

A self-hoster must run and maintain the container, and the README excerpt says nothing about the storage or database backend, backups, or whether email and SMTP are required, so those details should be confirmed in the documentation before committing. Choose it if you already plan budgets in a spreadsheet, want to self-host, and are comfortable with Docker. Avoid it if you need a fully hosted service, or if a documented release history matters to you: the facts give no release version or date, and the repository carries 18 open issues.