Track your household's net worth without itemising a single transaction.
Each month you enter your balances; Balances tracks your net worth over time.
Live demo · Self-hosting · The domain model
What it is
Most personal-finance apps make you record every coffee. Balances doesn't. It's built on a single
ritual: at the end of each month, you read the balances off your statements and type them in. From
those snapshots it computes your household net worth over time — no bank sync, no transaction feed, no
categorising.
That one design choice is deliberate (ADR-0001). Itemised
cash-flow tracking (Mint / YNAB style) is a non-feature. If you've bounced off budgeting apps because
the daily upkeep never stuck, this is the opposite bargain: ten minutes a month, and you still get the
one number that matters.
Why it's different
- Household-first, not person-first. Every position, snapshot, and income event belongs to a
Household — the people sharing economic life. Multiple members, one shared picture of net worth,
with per-member and Joint breakdowns. No app in this niche is built household-first.
- Snapshot-first, not sync-first. You own the numbers. Nothing is scraped from your bank; nothing
leaves your control. The month-end reading is the source of truth.
- Real coverage for the instruments people actually hold — bank accounts, property, and vehicles;
stocks, mutual funds, and gold by the gram; bonds and time deposits with coupons and maturity. It
handles Indonesian retail instruments most apps ignore outright — ORI/SBR/SR/ST government bonds and
deposito — alongside everything else.
- Multi-currency when you need it, invisible when you don't. Hold a foreign account and the currency
pickers and FX entry appear; otherwise the whole surface stays pinned to your reporting currency.
- The residual-expense insight, for free. Because net worth, earned income, and investment returns
are all tracked, the app derives what you spent last month as a single residual number — without you
logging a single expense.
What you get
- Net worth over time, per-Household and broken down per member and by household-defined Tags
(by goal, by bank, by risk — you decide).
- An income statement and a cash-spending proxy, both derived from the same snapshots.
- A transaction ledger only where it earns its keep — investment instruments — for cost basis and
income reporting. Everything else is just the monthly balance.
- Spreadsheet import for backfilling history, and a full-fidelity backup/restore that moves an
entire Household between instances (SaaS ↔ self-host, either direction).
- English and Indonesian throughout.
Try it
- Hosted demo — https://balances-demo.fly.dev. A shared, resets-nightly instance;
poke at it without signing up for anything.
- Self-host it — one
docker-compose.yml, a published image, Postgres, done. See
Self-hosting below.
Self-hosting
The repo-root docker-compose.yml is the operator stack (ADR-0037):
it pulls the published image ghcr.io/kerti/balances:<tag>, runs Postgres, applies migrations once, and
serves the app on a single origin — no build step.
cp .env.example .env # edit: pin BALANCES_TAG, set APP_URL + Google OAuth client
docker compose up # migrations apply once, then login at http://localhost:8080
Upgrade by bumping BALANCES_TAG and running docker compose pull && docker compose up -d. The full
operator walkthrough — three TLS topologies, the Google OAuth client, the upgrade contract, and database
backups — is in SELF-HOSTING.md.
Licensed under AGPL-3.0 (ADR-0042).
Local development
Prerequisites: Docker (OrbStack recommended on macOS), Go 1.26.4+, Node 24+ (.nvmrc pins the version).
make setup # first clone only: git hooks + frontend deps + seed .env
make up # starts Postgres + Mailpit (docker-compose.dev.yml)
make backend-migrate-up # applies pending migrations
make backend-run # http://localhost:8080 (terminal 1)
make frontend-dev # http://localhost:5173 (terminal 2)
Mailpit's web UI is at http://localhost:8025 for inspecting dev emails. The Vite dev server proxies
/healthz and /api/* to the backend at :8080. make help lists every target.
Going deeper? docs/architecture.md is how the pieces fit;
CONTRIBUTING.md is the workflow; CONTEXT.md is the domain glossary;
the decisions behind the design live in docs/adr/; and HANDOFF.md tracks current
project state (written for AI agents, but the fastest read on where things stand).
Coverage note: the frontend codecov number is scoped to src/lib/** and
src/components/positionList/** (frontend/vitest.config.ts), not the whole frontend — most
components and hooks aren't in the denominator yet.
