Instead YouTube gives me literally nothing but AI spam. :/
I scrolled down a bit more and got this: https://i.postimg.cc/fJcPhG45/Screenshot-20251118-150802.png
Scrolled down some more and this: https://i.postimg.cc/v1khnhRp/Screenshot-20251118-151325.png
I kept scrolling until I ran out of relevant results. Not a single video was legit. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much AI slop in one search term and by the gods there is a lot of crap on YouTube.
Anyone have a good comparison video? I’m just wanting a decent comparison of Actual, Firefly III and possibly HomeBank. Feel free to also give me your 2 cents on whatever you use :)
We need platforms where AI content is just banned. We’re past the point we need to start systematically excluding all this crap.
We need more PeerTube devs to develop it further
Also to switch everybody to Vanillo (not open source but definitely a way better alternative)
Best if they make it so there is no AI Content allowed too or at very least segmented away from human content
This “culture” of stealing video titles, thumbnails and even entire ideas wholesale has been going for a while on Youtube, unfortunately.
I remember back in the day using gnucash but I’m sure there are better alternatives on awesome-selfhosted, if you want to go that route. I imagine a raspberry pi or some low power hardware can also run those. They’re great because they’re not platform dependent. Docker might be a hurdle though
I’ve got a family member interested in switching to Linux but the finance software is an obstacle. I had a look and landed on gnucash which I thought I would trial myself and then see if if would work for them. I like it!
Just FYI, take a look at how YNAB works — which is a paid app, but with a great approach: you track your spending for a while, and then basically always know how much you can spend on various categories of things. Idk what the workflow is in modern budgeting apps, but back in the day YNAB was rather different from the more typical accounting-type software like GNUCash. One of its tenets is that you don’t spend money which you don’t actually have, i.e. the credit card dept.
Actual Budget is a straight FOSS clone of YNAB. It’s very, very good IMHO, but their big selling feature was bank import with PSD2 APIs across the EU and they’ve backed away from that as you need to be a commercial provider to use APIs directly and their dependency on GoCardless is getting nerfed.
Thanks, but as a non-quite-EU person I’d like you to know I understood your comment fine until a bit after the second comma in the second sentence, following which my grokking declined sharply to just the surface level when met with a bunch of peculiar terms forming a mighty wall of obstruction to my comprehending.
The EU has instigated the Payment Service Directive 2 (the previous one being PSD1). This requires that all EU banks over a certain size provide APIs to access transactions and other data.
However banks are required to set strict requirements to use their APIs, including requiring lots of knowledge and a documented approval chain that pertains to each user. In practice this means only other big companies have access and most have solved it by buying the “access account and transaction data” service from a third party company.
GoCardless is one such company. They previously had a developer tier that you could sign up to, which would provide you an access token that you then provided to Actual Budget so they could access your accounts on your behalf.
GoCardless have however limited what their free developer accounts can do, which means Actua Budget can no longer get real time access to your acccohnt data.
Thanks again! This is very comprehensive and much more comprehensible.
I would avoid YNAB. They had an offline version years back that was really nice until they did a rug pull and disabled it in order to get people to buy their subscription service.
I still have the offline version in my Steam library. It still works, just no syncing to cloud.
As do I. I don’t really recall why I just stopped using it - it could just be because I didn’t feel ok feeding my personal finances into software controlled by a shady company.
We’re going to need another project like SponsorBlock and Dearrow for labeling AI spam…
Just label things broadly with ‘Capitalist Slop’ - and have a set of standard tools to get rid of that harmful religion. Sponsorblock, dearrow, ublock, most privacy tools, and all other attempts at un-shittifying the net, are just working against that infantile belief system and its natural consequences.
Well your first mistake was going to YouTube for information
Articles are mostly AI slop. For a bit YouTube was actually the best way to have information written by an actual person.
Not anymore unfortunately, now I honestly don’t know how to reliably find AI free information online.
At least to compare software you can use alternativeto.net
It seems that the best way to avoid AI slop is to find a small community on the the topic.
Before all the slop-deluge, you had some chance that some niche channel had an actual human behind it who knew their shit.
Some handyman on youtube helped me learn how to install kitchen counters, cupboards, sink etc. a few years ago.
The difference is, thers’s no stakes in teaching you how to install a counter, nobody has the incentive to generate fake AI videos of that. Product comparison is something where youtube always sucked, whether by paid actors or - now - AI
I’d say it really depends on the channel. If it’s some hobby project by some 'tistic nerd who really likes to compare dehumidifiers, it can be ok.
Okay, not dehumidifiers, but what abut space heater -
There’s also Matthias but try finding any of these videos with just search. Youtube is against authenticity now.
Nowhere is safe from AI spam. At least these ones are obvious. Written spam is far easier to generate.
Web search gives you pages of slop results too, now
Maybe not what you’re looking for, but there’s a program called “Money Wallet” on Android. It’s on F-Droid and free software. Maybe my favourite because every time I spend cash I just open it up and I enter what I just spent.
For professional use, I’d recommend GNU Cash, though.
I don’t have a video for you but I’ve been using Actual for over a year and really like it. I recommend it. Caveat, I very actively interact with my budget (inputting things manually) and cannot speak for it’s account linking features.
I use actual as well.
The docker compose works really well, basically set it up once and then it works, even with running updates by pulling new container versions.
I used the account importing to start but now input everything manually and don’t do live sync.
Never heard of the other options so didn’t know about them to compare before setting up actual. I do like the methodology of actual, where it has you only budget money that actually exists in your account, that feels very sane to me.
I just installed Firefly yesterday, and I can say that the docker compose setup was easy. I’ve got no real opinions yet, just wanted to mention this for OP in case he reads your experience as it being easier. I imagine they’re both easy.
I’m curious, when you say you stopped importing, does that mean you were getting info from your banks, and stopped doing that? Why did you stop? My next step was to set up the automated importer for Firefly.
I never set up the actual bank sync, I think what I did was basically a CSV export and then import, rather than the bank sync.
But it’s been about a year so not remembering exactly how the import was.
Got it. Thanks.
I use it as well with automation and can confirm. Unfortunately with Simple fun you do have to manually sync accounts but it’s a small price to pay. Just have to remember to hit the sync button when you open the dashboard.
I think its budgeting features are lackluster, but I have highly enjoyed gnucash for tracking my expenses, incime & where everything goes.
It’s all manual more or less, and you do double ledger accounting, so all the money is accounted for somewhere.
Seconding gnucash, there’s modern stuff that’s slicker but nothing that works better imo
Im reasonable happy with Actual Budget. I like that it has desktop apps that can sync woth a server that was easy to set up, I can import various things via .csv, rules to automatically categorise stuff are nice. I dont care about the envelope budgeting or whatever it’s called they’re on about but it’s easy to ignore / turn off.
Ive started seeing a lot of these sadly… Luckily they’re still somewhat easy to spot.
I’ve been using Actual for a while now, probably close to a year. Before that I was on YNAB, which isn’t FOSS but does have a huge library of material for how to make your budget work for you instead of the other way around.
I got off YNAB after they kept raising their subscription fees for seemingly no reason. Actual is not nearly as feature-rich but you can’t really argue with the price.
At least on YouTube you can tell at a glance that it’s AI.
I tried Actual Budget for a while, but didn’t stick with it long term. I also looked at Firefly III, never tried it though.
Eventually I figured out I just want an expense tracker instead of full budgeting and settled for ExpenseOwl
I’ll have a look into that, thanks! :)
