lofextra

LOcal-First EXpense TRAcker

https://github.com/pycan-jouza/lofextra/assets/141557160/cbee233a-5f01-43ae-b325-b54cad624569

Motivation

I've been looking for a solution to track my family's expenses. Being a privacy aware individual, I've naturally discarded all the commercial solutions. True, there are a few self-hosted options that I've tried like Actual or Firefly III, but I found both of them unnecessarily complex. Luckily, I've got a skillset that allows me to build a solution myself. The solution that will leverage human right for (sensitive!) data ownership.

High level overview

This expense tracker differs from other apps of similar nature by storing all the data locally on your device in SQLite database. Yet, it's still powerful enough to enable realtime collaboration using a server to sync updates across devices. These updates are encrypted so the server has no idea what's flowing in and out. You as a user don't need to register, you don't need email nor password. You get 12 word mnemonic phrase (like in bitcoin) that acts as your account key. Use the mnemonic on other devices and see your data sync automatically.

Other important aspect is offline support. The app works offline seamlessly when you install it as a PWA, the updates are synced when you come back online. Possible conflicts are resolved using LWW (last write wins) algorithm.

Plans

Upcoming plans & features.

Progressive Web App [DONE]

Ability to make the web version feel like a native app.

Statistics [DONE]

View your spending across categories in a given time period.

Categories [DONE]

Manage your own custom categories.

Multiple currencies

You're on vacation and pay in a different currency? This is the basic use case that should be supported. The plan is to pull the exchange rate from some open API when adding/editing transaction with a non-default currency and display the expense amount in both currencies.

Recurring transactions [DONE]

Saves you time so that you don't have to input transactions that happen on regular basis.

Budgeting

I never really needed it, but if there's a demand..

Extract lofextra's tooling [DONE]

Initially, lofextra was built without from the ground up without any library for building local-first apps. In the future, me or someone else might make use of the tooling that lofextra used to use.

Therefore, some effort went into extracking the lofextra's underlying logic and turning it into its own library. That library, lofik, now lives back inside lofextra in src/lofik, sync server included, so lofextra deploys as a single app.

ORM

The web version is not using any ORM because there just aren't any good that work in the browser environment flawlessly. I've implemented a few functions that help interacting with the database, but there isn't a very good type-safety, especially for queries, yet.

Hopefully, ORM like Prisma is going to support browser databases soon.

Contributions

I'm doing this in my free time to solve my own need and also spread privacy-focused thinking when building apps. I'm very open to any ideas, feedback and help with improvements and new features.

Alternative solutions for building local-first apps

I've strongly considered using Evolu as a tool for building local-first app. Despite the maintainer's effort to offer a straightforward solution comprehensible to all developers, the library's integration of Effect, a tool not widely adopted among developers, doesn't help achieving this goal. I personally didn't have a good developer experience with the project, therefore, I decided to build a custom solution and challenge myself a bit.

Donate

If you find this app at least a tiny bit helpful and want to support the work that I do in my free time, you can do so here. I really appreciate it, thank you.

Disclaimer

The app is using Plausible analytics to collect anonymous data about the page visits. I'd like to have a general idea how many people are using lofextra.