application VS hledger

You could use Budget with Buckets. It's free to use, but you can get a license too. Downside: it doesn't have an app (well, it does, but it's read only and sucks big time).

I use buckets https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com/

I track my balances across various sources, updating once a month. I also set my outgoings.

Funnily enough I don't really use the buckets feature too much, simply the graph over time of savings, and ability to set goals / monthly costs for review is enough.

Right now I'm testing software called Buckets, and I am liking it so far. It's a one-time payment, and the dev seems pretty cool by offering an extremely generous demo. It's kind of a hybrid between manual and automatic, with some macro import options and statement import options that can be helpful. It also has the option to import financial data automatically using SimpleFin for only a fraction of the monthly price of YNAB and Aspire. So far I'm really liking it.

Buckets - I just started to look at this app. It is very basic from what I have seen so far. And while writing this I learned the iOS app is a closed beta. Unlimited FREE trial until you determine it works for you. After that, there is a one-time fee of $49. In September the price is going up to $64.

You might look into budget with buckets

I haven't used it, but the team (person?) that makes [Buckets](https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com) makes [SimpleFIN](https://www.simplefin.org), which seems like it exposes exactly what you want: simple transaction data from arbitrary banks.

Plaid offers [transactions APIs](https://plaid.com/products/transactions/), but I guess to your point these APIs are geared towards fintech companies, not personal use.

I’ve been happy with Budget with Buckets as a YNAB alternative - https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com/

I'm surprised that there is no mentions of a great hacker-friendly plain-text accounting software called `ledger` https://ledger-cli.org/ in this thread. It has amazing documentation when it comes to understanding basic principles of double-entry bookkeeping and goes through many typical situations and usecases. There are also several forks, most popular and advanced is `hledger` https://hledger.org/ (h is for Haskell), which provides some neat features out of the box, such as a simple web interface. All of them are very primitive compared to "professional" accounting software, but in return it offers great opportunities for hacking around while ensuring validity of your books.

I've been using hledger[1] - similar tool but has more features like balance sheet, income statement generation with a plain text file for the last 3 years and it's been working out great. Before that I used iBank (rebranded as Banktivity) and don't miss it at all.

[1] - https://hledger.org

I can offer this (warning, crufty real-world scripts ahead!): these [make](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/137d825/Makefil...) [files](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/137d825/Makefil...) and this [bash script](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/a3c300b/bake) have been replaced by this roughly equivalent [Justfile](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/137d825/Justfil...) (some old things were commented out, some new things were added).

I'm only a few weeks in, and just has its own learning curve, but I'm very pleased overall. Cognitive load is down, usability is up, robustness is up.

https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/issues/2047 . Thanks!

For help getting started or more info, see https://hledger.org and join our Matrix/IRC chat or mail list: https://hledger.org/support . Newcomers, experts, contributors, sponsors, feedback are welcome! For more about plain text accounting, see https://plaintextaccounting.org .