Replace Mint or YNAB with something you host

Two things brought you here and they are not the same problem. Mint disappeared on 23 March 2024. YNAB still works and costs more every year. Choosing a replacement on price rather than on model is the mistake this page exists to prevent.

What you are actually giving up#

YNAB's method is half the product and the software is the other half. The four rules, the workshops, the community that talks you through a month where the numbers do not work: that is what changes behavior, and Actual Budget ships none of it. Actual implements the mechanics of envelope budgeting faithfully and then leaves you alone. If YNAB fixed your spending, be honest about which half did the fixing.

Automatic bank feeds. This is the concrete loss and it is bigger than people expect. YNAB includes direct import in the subscription. Self-hosted, you have three options and none is free and universal:

• SimpleFIN Bridge, North America, 1.50 US dollars a month or 15 a year. It pulls at most 90 days of data per linked account, not all of them have 90 days available, and it updates roughly once every 24 hours at a time that varies by bank.
• GoCardless Bank Account Data, Europe, which Actual's own documentation now lists as not accepting new accounts. Enable Banking is the current European route, with Akahu for New Zealand and Pluggy.ai for Brazil.
• CSV by hand. Download, import, categorize. Firefly III's import rules classify and split automatically once trained, and this is the path most self-hosters end up on.

Mint's "it does it for you" property. Automatic categorization, bill reminders, credit score, net worth across every account you ever linked. None of it comes back. Firefly III reconciles to the cent, but only because you told it what everything was.

The mobile app. Actual is a responsive web app you install to a home screen and Firefly III has community clients. Neither has a widget or a share sheet.

Get your data out first#

If you are leaving YNAB, there are two different files and you want both.

1. YNAB's own export, from the budget settings, gives you a zip with a register CSV and a budget CSV. This is your permanent human-readable archive. Keep it forever. It is not what Actual imports.
2. The nYNAB JSON, which is what Actual's importer actually wants. Actual's documentation points at a json-exporter web tool that authorizes against your YNAB account, or you can generate a Personal Access Token in YNAB's developer settings and pull it yourself with the ynab-export CLI, the API documentation interface, or curl.

Then import: open Actual, use the dropdown to Close File, choose Import file, choose nYnab, and select the JSON.

What survives: accounts, categories, category groups and transactions. What needs hand work, and Actual's docs are direct about it:

• Credit card debt is recategorized by hand. Actual does not carry debt over the way YNAB does, and this is the largest single cleanup task.
• Leftover money in To Budget is expected after an import and has two common causes; you reconcile it rather than assume the import failed.
• Duplicate category names get renamed with a -1 suffix rather than merged.
• Budget allocations for historical months are the part that reproduces least faithfully. Check three past months against YNAB before you cancel.

If you are leaving Mint, there is nothing left to export and Credit Karma does not restore your history. A transactions.csv saved before the shutdown has date, description, amount, category and account, and both tools take it. Otherwise download everything your bank still offers, usually 12 to 24 months, and accept that your history starts there.

For Firefly III, imports go through fireflyiii/data-importer, a separate container by design. It takes CSV, camt.053 and aggregator connections over the API, and needs FIREFLY_III_URL set to the address reachable on the container network (http://app:8080 in the official compose). Any other value returns a 500 rather than a useful message.

Which one to run#

Pick on the question you ask your money, not on the feature list. If the question is "can I afford this next week", that is envelope budgeting and it is Actual. If the question is "where did 40,000 go last year and does it balance", that is a ledger and it is Firefly III.

Actual Budget vs Firefly III goes through the day-to-day differences.

What the migration actually costs#

Actual Budget: about an hour to stand up. One container, no database service, publish 5006, mount one volume at /data, set a server password on first visit. Then 3 to 8 hours cleaning up the YNAB import, mostly credit cards and historical budget months. Watch ACTUAL_UPLOAD_FILE_SYNC_SIZE_LIMIT_MB, which defaults to 20: Actual stores every mutation in the budget file, so it grows steadily even when transaction count does not, eventually hits the ceiling, and presents as sync failures rather than a size warning. The fix is Reset Sync, which compacts history and forces every other device to revert and re-download.

Firefly III: half a day, then a month. Four containers in the shape most people land on: fireflyiii/core on 8080, a mariadb:lts, a small Alpine container running crond, and the data importer published separately. APP_KEY must be exactly 32 characters, STATIC_CRON_TOKEN exactly 32 characters, DB_CONNECTION must match your database because it defaults to mysql and a Postgres stack that skips it fails at startup with a connection error that names nothing useful, and TRUSTED_PROXIES=** behind any reverse proxy or you get http:// links inside an HTTPS site and login loops that look like session bugs.

Ongoing, both: a backup that you have restored. For Actual that is /data, holding server-files/account.sqlite and user-files/, plus a scheduled export from the app itself (Settings, Export Data), which is the only readable artifact that survives losing the server. For Firefly it is a mysqldump or pg_dump, the upload volume at /var/www/html/storage/upload, and APP_KEY, because Laravel uses it for encrypted values and a dump restored under a different key leaves data you cannot fully read.

Firefly III also has an upgrade scar worth knowing: v6.6.0 invalidated every OAuth token and client, so the data importer and any script talking to the API had to be reconfigured with newly generated tokens in the same window.

What breaks and how to tell early#

• Bank sync, on day one. Link one account and see what arrives. On SimpleFIN, note the 90 day ceiling before you assume you can backfill a year.
• Phone. Add a transaction at a checkout. If that takes longer than pocketing the receipt, you will stop reconciling.
• Sharing with a partner. Actual handles a household sharing one budget across devices; real multi-user needs its preview OIDC login. Firefly III trusts a proxy-injected header and dropped LDAP, so Authelia in front is the pattern.
• Restores that undo themselves. Actual's server holds change history, so restoring an older local file and letting it sync pulls you straight back. The order is restore, reset sync from that device, then revert every other device.
• The silent cron. For Firefly III, put a check on the cron container. Nothing else tells you it stopped.

The point of no return#

One rule dominates everything else here.

Write the Actual encryption password into Vaultwarden or a password manager the moment you set it, and store a printed copy somewhere physical. It cannot be reset, recovered or brute-forced. The server cannot help because the server cannot read the data. Bank sync credentials, incidentally, are stored on the server and explicitly not covered by that encryption, so an encrypted budget still leaves live banking connections on that disk.

Then, before you cancel YNAB:

1. Restore /data (or your Firefly dump plus upload volume plus APP_KEY) onto a different machine and open last month's budget.
2. Reconcile one full month against a real bank statement and get it to zero.
3. Export from the app itself, not just the server volume, and keep it offsite with restic.
4. Keep the YNAB register and budget CSVs forever. They are the only copy that opens in ten years without any of this software.

Next#

Read Backups that actually restore and Backing up a running database before your first month closes, because a finance ledger is the one thing on your server where a silent corruption is worse than an outage. The rest of the category is in Productivity.