Instead of a subscription

Self-hosted alternatives to Monarch Money

Monarch Money aggregates accounts, budgets and goals for a household on a subscription. The budgeting recipe here keeps the ledger on your server; account data arrives by import rather than through a bank connection somebody else maintains.

2 applicationsFilter the catalog by Monarch Money Compare these applications

Catalog

Recipes that cover it

Fully verified28,528

Personal finance

Actual Budget

Envelope budgeting that syncs between your own devices

512 MB RAMamd64 / arm64TypeScriptVery easyMITVersion 26.10.0

Alternative to: YNAB, Quicken, Monarch Money

Open

Fully verified25,032

Personal finance

Firefly III

Accounts, transactions, and budgets on your own server

1024 MB RAMamd64 / arm64PHP / JavaScriptMediumAGPL-3.0-or-laterVersion 6.7.9

Alternative to: Quicken, Monarch Money

Open

Requirements

Side by side

Requirements and recipe status of the applications on this page
Application	Minimum RAM	Disk estimate	Database	Installation difficulty	Backup	Recipe verification	License
Actual Budget	512 MB RAM	2 GB	SQLite	Very easy	Yes · Restore tested	Fully verifiedCheck is current	MIT
Firefly III	1024 MB RAM	5 GB	PostgreSQL	Medium	Yes · Restore tested	Fully verifiedCheck is current	AGPL-3.0-or-later

The bill

The subscription against a server

Both figures are editable, because only you know which of them you actually pay. The server is sized from the figure the recipe recommends — the same one the catalog calls a comfortable fit on your profile — and not from the cheapest row of a price list.

Subscription, $ per monthReplaced byServer, $ per month

Actual Budget asks for 1 GB of RAM, 1 vCPU and 2 GB of disk — $6 a month on DigitalOcean Basic.

The difference

Per month: $2.33
Per year: $27.96
Over three years: $83.88

Hosting it yourself is cheaper — $27.96 a year stays with you.

Not counted: your own time, a domain, and a backup kept anywhere other than that same server. A machine you already run costs nothing extra — set the server to zero.

Monarch Money · Core, billed annually, price checked 2026-09-10 Server prices: DigitalOcean Basic, checked 2026-09-10

Migration

What changes when you host it yourself

The data stops leaving your network, and so does the responsibility for it: backups, the restore you have actually tested, and the disk it all sits on.

Feature parity is never exact. Read what each recipe states about limitations and the smoke test before planning a migration.

The bill turns into work: updates, certificates and an eye on the release notes. The catalog shows how much of that each recipe asks for.

Guides with these applications

Applications with a minimum of 1 GB RAM or lessSmall declared resource requirements for a VPS or thin client, with new metrics, notifications, notes and utility recipes. The limit applies to each application separately.