Why I Ditched the "Free" Apps and Self-Hosted My Finances with Sure

For years, I relied on Mint to keep a bird’s-eye view of my financial health. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the standard. When it finally went dark, it forced me to re-evaluate what I actually wanted from a personal finance tool.

Most of the modern alternatives fall into two camps: they either lock essential features behind aggressive paid subscription tiers, or they are "free" because they are aggressively harvesting your transaction data to sell you credit cards and services.

I wanted something different. I wanted ownership, privacy, and no monthly fees for features that should be standard. That’s when I found Sure.

The Appeal of Self-Hosting

Sure is an open-source, all-in-one personal finance platform that you can self-host. For a privacy-conscious user, this is the holy grail. Instead of handing over my ledger to a third-party server, I can run the instance on my own infrastructure.

The platform covers all the bases you’d expect:

• Asset & Debt Tracking: A unified view of net worth.
• Budgeting: Granular control over categories and limits.
• Transactions: Automated imports and easy categorization.
• Privacy: Because it’s open-source and self-hosted, I know exactly where my data lives.

Connecting the Pipes: The Plaid Integration

The biggest hurdle with self-hosted finance tools is usually the "sync" problem. Manually importing CSVs is a chore that kills the habit of tracking. Sure solves this by allowing integrations with banking aggregators.

I integrated my instance with Plaid, and honestly, the process was smoother than I expected.

There is a common misconception that getting API access to Plaid is reserved for massive fintech startups. In my experience, getting approval for a Plaid Production account was surprisingly straightforward. Once approved, I connected my financial accounts, and it immediately started pulling live transaction data from my banks and credit cards.

Though Plaid isn't free, it is rather cheap if you have a reasonable number of banks. I'd argue the tradeoff for privacy is worth it even if you start to exceed the monthly cost of other paid providers.

Why This Matters

We are seeing a shift in the "tech trends" of personal data. Users are becoming increasingly wary of SaaS sprawl and data privacy. Tools like Sure represent a growing desire to reclaim control.

If you are comfortable with a little bit of setup (or just want to support open-source software), I highly recommend giving Sure a look. It fills the void Mint left behind, but without the data harvesting or the subscription fatigue.