Finance and accounting decision
Lunch Money
A competent developer can recreate a useful CSV/manual-import budgeting app and dashboards in ~30 hours, but reproducing Lunch Money’s bank sync, crypto tracking, polishing, and hosted convenience makes keeping the paid product reasonable.
Visit website↗Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need — the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship.
What a replacement has to do
- A minimal self-hosted replacement would ingest transaction data, store and categorize it, present simple analytics and budgeting, and allow CSV imports and manual entry.
What it still won’t have
- Automatic bank sync / account aggregation
- Crypto portfolio live sync
- Mobile companion apps and polished UI
- Hosted backups, dedicated support, and community programs
- Long-term feature roadmap and price-lock guarantee
What remains hard
- Brand trust
Trusted and loved across 30+ countries by many:
- Compliance and regulation
All of your data in Lunch Money is encrypted at rest with AES-256 and protected with bank-level security.
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 1 seat.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal single-tenant personal-finance web app using Next.js (React) frontend, Node/Express API, and Postgres database deployed to Vercel/Heroku. In scope: CSV and manual transaction import, transaction schema and category/tag model, simple rules engine for auto-categorization, per-user budgets, monthly spend/net-worth dashboards, basic multi-currency conversion (use a free FX API), developer JSON API endpoints for imports/exports, user auth (email + password, optional 2FA), migrations, error handling, and unit/integration tests. Out of scope: automated bank aggregation (Plaid/Ynab connectors), native mobile apps, crypto exchange integrations, advanced analytics, and paid hosting SLA. Include automated tests, input validation, logging, and scripted DB backups.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Hard moats found in the evidence-3
- Evidence score60
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time — so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productLunch Money — official product
- official pricingLunch Money — pricing
- official docsLunch Money — features
- open sourcefirefly-iii/firefly-iii
- open sourceactualbudget/actual
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
