Currently balance updates are manual. The idea of account linking is actually a bit of a contentious topic in the PL community. Initially I wanted to steer clear of that notorious support/maintenance/cost tar pit and design a tool where the focus is more on long-term projection rather than fixating on the latest daily stock price fluctuations and possibly missing the forest for the trees.
Later this year I do plan to take another look at those services though.
There was a fairly recent, well-upvoted blog post shared here about a guy who worked for a few years polishing his iOS stocks app and ultimately gave up due to the data feeds becoming untenable. Excellent article... that I can't find :-(
The shared homepage experience on HN is one of the most underrated aspects IMO.
With other platforms, the algorithmically curated and individualized feeds just feel like these claustrophobic little echo chambers to me.
There's a ton of interesting stuff out there on the internet, but it's hard to actually encounter it when you have to fight against the feed algorithms to get exposure to new concepts and ideas.
I hadn’t thought of this, but yes, it very much makes me feel connected to everyone who reads regularly (and interestingly I feel differently about the posts and people who read HN on the weekends too). It’s probably as important as the strict adherence to the rules of the forum that keeps it fresh and generally positive.
I feel very fortunate that this place hasn’t succumbed to the noise and negativity that most places I’ve haunted on the internet have in the previous decades.
Thanks! There are times where burning the candle at both ends for that long started to wear me down. But I really love the project, and after growing a community around it, I knew I had to push through.
I also put an exercise bike next to my desk, and that's helped to keep the blood pressure under control.
Most of the folks who initially asked for a self-hosted version wanted a way to pay once and then know their deployment could operate offline indefinitely. I hoped there might be a bit less piracy risk that way too.
If others would be more interested in a recurring model for self-hosting though, I'd definitely consider it.
For pricing models, JetBrains (PyCharm) has a nice setup, although it could be more user friendly. After 12 months of payments you get a perpetual fallback license[0].
The more user friendly version would be getting perpetual access to the current version of software after 12 months of payments, rather than the backdated version. But I understand their reasoning.
I think it was dealing with the myriad different environments they could be deployed in. I’ve done a lot of sysadmin work, and I can tell you that a lot of companies just don’t have a repeatable environment. That said, my suspicion is these days, with a good container type solution, if you maintain that, and support just what’s inside that boundary, that can go a long way to mitigate calls. Of course, I love containers until they break, especially when they break because of some implied dependency changes.
It’s so funny, because I’m engineering from electron to container to saas. You’re going the other direction. I’m the label printer app dev that reached out a few days ago. Great job, Kyle!
This is backwards to what I am used to; self-hosting is normally the free option and hosted is paid, this is common among many projects.
We also certainly hear about companies or individuals looking for an easy way to send money for FOSS projects they rely on, so hopefully it works out for you!
It's interesting how many tools can analyze where your money has been going, but few go deep on the planning + forecasting side.
Have you thought about building out the "retirement" module more? If you need any inspiration, I've been working on a personal finance simulator [1] for the past two and a half years as a side project.
Really great job with the docs on this, and I love that you include a demo environment!
I imagine that eventually we'll see an app that pulls budgeting, tracking, and planning all together in a fully seamless way. Whoever manages that will probably be a force to be reckoned with.
I have seen projectionlab before and agree with you. There are few tools on the forecast side. Most of them stop at budgeting. I do have plans to make retirement page generic (aka Goals/Target), but I am yet to figure out the details.
In an ideal world, double entry accounting would be your database and there would be lot of tools that use that and focuses on a specific niche. But we are far from that and everyone wants to create their own data island.
Realistically, the data you need for retirement planning doesn't intersect much with double entry personal finance data. How much you spend on subway last week has nothing do to with your risk of financial ruin at age 90.
All you really need from that dataset is your current portfolio. Everything else you need is specific to investing -- variance of investment, portfolio mix, covariance of returns, age of retirement, life expectancy, etc. From that standpoint, it's practically an entirely new product.
There's also something to be said about the 4 percent rule, and whether additional forecasting work actually improves outcomes. Heuristics seem do to a decent job.
Thanks for checking it out! Did you make it to the full plan interface? Within the House form on the plan screen, there are additional inputs to model things like insurance, taxes, maintenance, etc., and I have these split out as separate inputs from monthly payment because A) those rates/amounts vary from place to place (and may adjust over time as property value changes), and B) this makes it easier to answer experimental questions like "how would my plan change if property taxes were higher."
And maybe I should do something to make this more clear, but the "years to pay off" text embedded in the house form is just a preliminary estimate -- other things like cash-flow priorities you create to make extra payments can impact the actual pay-off time in the full simulation.
On the cost topic, are you familiar with the pricing for other products in the planning space? I've made an effort to position PL competitively, and a piece of unsolicited feedback I get a lot in the wild is that current pricing is actually still too low.
Do you think dicing up the feature set to create a cheaper pricing tier could be helpful? If so, I'd be curious to hear opinions on which features should fall into each tier.
FWIW I do also offer general discounts on request (info on pricing page).
So I think the problem isn't actually the price (or at least not just price) and I'm not exactly surprised to hear some people are saying it could even be higher.
The real issue is the trial. Auto charge trials, especially ones I'm unsure of, are a turnoff. This brings me to 3 issues...
* 7 days is psychologically a short time to try this. For me, this means I have to set aside time in this coming week to set everything up and see how it works. A longer trial period might help.
* The auto charge at the end of the trial is, as mentioned, a dark pattern that I avoid whenever possible. If I'm not 90% sure I'm going to use the product, I won't sign up for something that needs my credit card in advance.
* The free option is too limited for me to start entering data and come back later. It's also missing functionality I think I'll need later. I have to pay at least $14, and setup an auto-charge, to pick up where I left off later, so this is a non-starter for determining if the product is worth the $14 to begin with.
In short, it might be worth $14 a month and it is even likely to be worth the ~ $100 a year, but the limitations and requirements around the trial keep me from feeling comfortable finding out. The most off-putting is the auto-charge, which make me nervous in any case.
I don't think I have much control over Paddle's free trial mechanic, but IMO a pretty effective workaround is to just subscribe and then immediately cancel. That should still give you access for the trial period and then simply not charge at the end.
I also grant extended trials on request. So if you'd like a longer trial (e.g. a month for free), you can just shoot me an email :)
