Maybe: Open-source personal finance app

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Backstory

We spent the better part of 2021/2022 building a personal finance + wealth management app called Maybe. Very full-featured, including an "Ask an Advisor" feature which connected users with an actual CFP/CFA to help them with their finances (all included in your subscription).

The business end of things didn't work out and so we shut things down mid-2023.

We spent the better part of $1,000,000 building the app (employees + contractors, data providers/services, infrastructure, etc).

We're now reviving the product as a fully open-source project. The goal is to let you run the app yourself, for free, and use it to manage your own finances and eventually offer a hosted version of the app for a small monthly fee.

End goal

Ultimately we want to rebuild this so that you can self-host, but we also have plans to offer a hosted version for a fee. That means some decisions will be made that don't explicitly make sense for self-hosted but do support the goal of us offering a for-pay hosted version.

Features

As a personal finance + wealth management app, Maybe has a lot of features. Here's a brief overview of some of the main ones...

• Net worth tracking
• Financial account syncing
• Investment benchmarking
• Investment portfolio allocation
• Debt insights
• Retirement forecasting + planning
• Investment return simulation
• Manual account/investment tracking

And dozens upon dozens of smaller features.

Getting started

This is the current state of building the app. We're actively working to make this process much more streamlined!

You'll need Docker installed to run the app locally.

First, copy the .env.example file to .env:

cp .env.example .env

Then, create a new secret using openssl rand -base64 32 and populate NEXTAUTH_SECRET in your .env file with it.

To enable transactional emails, you'll need to create a Postmark account and add your API key to your .env file (NX_POSTMARK_API_TOKEN). You can also set the from and reply-to email addresses (NX_POSTMARK_FROM_ADDRESS and NX_POSTMARK_REPLY_TO_ADDRESS). If you want to run the app without email, you can set NX_POSTMARK_API_TOKEN to a dummy value.

Maybe uses Teller for connecting financial accounts. To get started with Teller, you'll need to create an account. Once you've created an account:

• Add your Teller application id to your .env file (NEXT_PUBLIC_TELLER_APP_ID).
• Download your authentication certificates from Teller, create a certs folder in the root of the project, and place your certs in that directory. You should have both a certificate.pem and private_key.pem. NEVER check these files into source control, the .gitignore file will prevent the certs/ directory from being added, but please double check.
• Set your NEXT_PUBLIC_TELLER_ENV and NX_TELLER_ENV to your desired environment. The default is sandbox which allows for testing with mock data. The login credentials for the sandbox environment are username and password. To connect to real financial accounts, you'll need to use the development environment.
• Webhooks are not implemented yet, but you can populate the NX_TELLER_SIGNING_SECRET with the value from your Teller account.
• We highly recommend checking out the Teller docs for more info.

Then run the following yarn commands:

yarn install
yarn run dev:services:all
yarn prisma:migrate:dev
yarn prisma:seed
yarn dev

Set Up Ngrok

External data providers require HTTPS/SSL webhook URLs for sending data.

To test this locally/during development, you will need to setup ngrok.

1. Visit ngrok.com
2. Create a free account
3. Visit this page to access your auth token
4. Paste it into your .env file: NGROK_AUTH_TOKEN=your_auth_token

You should claim your free static domain to avoid needing to change the URL each time you start/stop the server.

To do so:

1. Visit the domains page
2. Click on Create Domain
3. Copy the domain and paste it into your .env file: NGROK_DOMAIN=your_domain

That's it! As long as you run the project locally using docker with yarn dev:services:all you'll be good to go.

Contributing

To contribute, please see our contribution guide.

High-priority issues

The biggest focus at the moment is on getting the app functional without some previously key external services (namely Plaid and Finicity).

You can view the current high-priority issues here. Those are the most impactful issues to tackle first.

External data

To pull market data in (for investments), you'll need a Polygon.io API key. You can get one for free here and then add it to your .env file (NX_POLYGON_API_KEY).

Tech stack

• Next.js
• Tailwind
• Node.js
• Express
• Postgres (w/ Timescale)

Relevant reading

• Learn about how the app is organized as a monorepo
• Data model assumptions and calculations
• Handling money
• REST API

Repo Activity

Credits

The original app was built by Zach Gollwitzer, Nick Arciero and Tim Wilson, with design work by Justin Farrugia. The app is currently maintained by Josh Pigford.

Copyright & license

Maybe is distributed under an AGPLv3 license. "Maybe" is a trademark of Maybe Finance, Inc.