Open Net Worth

An open-source agent harness for personal finance. A real multi-currency ledger, budgets, and investments — plus an AI that can actually read and change them, not just talk about them. Self-hosted, on a machine you control.

Most personal-finance apps that added AI let it describe your data. Open Net Worth is built the other way round: the ledger, the budget, and the investment book are the substrate, and the assistant (Lucius) is an agent operating them through a registry of real tools — the same guarded write paths the UI uses.

	Chatbot bolted onto an app	An agent harness
What the AI touches	a summary of your data	the ledger itself, through real write tools
When it's wrong	you find out later	a confirm card shows the change before it lands
What it can do	answer	act, on a schedule, unattended if you allow it
Extending it	wait for the vendor	connect an MCP server and it gains tools

Every tool carries a permission level — always_allow, needs_approval (the default), or blocked — enforced at dispatch for every tool in the app.

Nothing leaves your machine except the calls you explicitly configure (an AI provider, a price feed, an optional connector), and there is no telemetry. The one exception is a problem report you choose to send: you read it first, and it goes only when you press Send.

What's inside

Ledger	Every account you own or owe, in any currency: banks, cards, loans, investments, retirement. Transfers, splits, reconcile, and statement import with a review step before anything books.
Budget	Zero-based envelopes (Ready to Assign, targets, credit card payments) or a simple 50/30/20 split, plus a cash flow projection.
Investments	Holdings, buys, sales, dividends, lots and realized gains, options, RSU and other equity grants, watchlists and price alerts.
Planning	Big dated commitments and how each is funded, and a retirement outlook: the odds your money lasts and the age you could retire.
Lucius	The AI agent on every screen. He works your real book through real tools: logs and sorts transactions, reconciles accounts, builds reports. Connect an MCP server and he acts in other apps too, like placing a trade with your broker. You choose what he does on his own and what he asks you first.
Automations	Jobs Lucius runs on a schedule or when something happens: a daily briefing, a weekly report, a bank sync, logging purchases from email.
Skills and memory	Saved playbooks he follows for a job (built in, or your own), and facts he remembers about you between conversations.
Connectors	Bank and broker sync (SimpleFIN, Plaid, Enable Banking, Lunch Flow, Alpaca, Interactive Brokers), YNAB, Lunch Money, your mailbox, Telegram, web search, and any MCP server.
Your AI	An API key (Anthropic, OpenAI or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, including a local model), or the Claude Code, Codex or Antigravity sign-in you already have. Other AI apps can use your book too, through onw mcp.

Is this for you?

Yes, if you want to self-host your own finances, you're comfortable running a small app on your own machine or a server you control, and you'd rather have an AI agent do the work (categorize a transaction, reconcile an account, explain a swing in net worth, act in the apps you connect) than just chat about screenshots of it.

Not yet, if you need a polished, install-and-forget consumer product, multi-user or family accounts, or mobile apps.

Requirements

• The desktop app: macOS on Apple Silicon, Windows 10/11 (x64), or Linux (x86_64, AppImage or .deb). It bundles its own Python, so nothing else needs installing. Intel Macs and arm64 Linux have no desktop build yet; what differs on Windows is listed in docs/WINDOWS.md.
• Running a server from source: Python 3.12+ and Node.js 22+ (macOS, Linux or Windows).
• An AI model — first run asks for one, with no skip: an API key (Anthropic, OpenAI, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint), an existing Claude Code, Codex or Antigravity CLI sign-in on the same machine (detected for you), or a free local model through Ollama.

Getting started

Option A — the desktop app (recommended)

Download it from opennetworth.ai, or from the public releases page:

Platform	Download	Terminal install
macOS (Apple Silicon; signed and notarized DMG)	opennetworth.ai/download/mac	curl -fsSL https://opennetworth.ai/install.sh | sh
Windows 10/11 x64 (installer)	opennetworth.ai/download/windows	irm https://opennetworth.ai/install.ps1 | iex (PowerShell)
Linux x86_64 (AppImage, or .deb from the releases page)	opennetworth.ai/download/linux	curl -fsSL https://opennetworth.ai/install.sh | sh

The Windows installer is not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may show a warning: choose More info → Run anyway. install.ps1 verifies the download against the release's SHA256SUMS; add -RequireSigned to refuse an unsigned installer. install.sh verifies the same checksum before it installs anything. The macOS and Windows apps update themselves in place; a Linux AppImage replaces itself after checking its SHA-256, and a .deb points you to the releases page.

Then follow the first-run screen: it asks where your book lives (a local folder, or an existing server), creates your login, picks a base currency, and hands off to Lucius to add your first account. Your data defaults to ~/.open-net-worth/, outside the app, so updating or reinstalling never touches it. See the desktop guide for background mode, start at login, watched folders and keyboard shortcuts.

Option B — a server

curl -fsSL https://github.com/open-net-worth-ai/open-net-worth-releases/releases/latest/download/install-server.sh | sh
onw start --open

Installs uv if needed, then open-net-worth on its own Python 3.12 (no system Python or Node.js). It provides the onw command (onw start --open, onw autostart install, onw upgrade, onw reset-password, onw mcp, onw version). The desktop app can connect to a server like this instead of using a local book. Working on the code instead? make setup start from a checkout (Python 3.12+ and Node.js 22+).

No .env file is needed. Everything lives in one working folder, ~/.open-net-worth/, holding data/, cache/, logs/ and backups/. First run lets you put it elsewhere and remembers the choice.

Option C — Docker

curl -fsSLO https://github.com/open-net-worth-ai/open-net-worth-releases/releases/latest/download/docker-compose.yml
AUTH_PASSWORD='pick a password' docker compose up -d

Pulls the public image ghcr.io/open-net-worth-ai/open-net-worth, pinned by that compose file to the release it came with (ONW_VERSION=x.y.z runs another). From a checkout, add -f compose.build.yml --build to build it locally instead. Then open http://localhost:8080 and log in with that password. The password is not optional under Docker: your browser reaches the container from Docker's bridge, not from localhost, so the "same machine, no login" shortcut never applies, and without a password nothing can operate the instance — details in the first-run guide. Compose refuses to start without it. Migrations run at boot; data lives in a named volume that survives docker compose down.

Coming from YNAB or Lunch Money?

Add the YNAB or Lunch Money connector with a personal access token and your transactions flow in, refreshed every 6 hours. Categories and budgets are not copied: set them up here, or let Lucius or an Automation categorize as transactions arrive. The budget works the way YNAB's does (every dollar assigned, Ready to Assign, envelopes that hold their overspend until month end). Steps: Bank and brokerage connectors.

Keeping it running

The desktop app does this itself: Settings → Desktop has Keep running in the background and Start at login. For a server, Open Net Worth is one Python process (onw start, which runs uvicorn and serves both the API and the built frontend on the same port) — there is no separate web server (no Apache, no nginx) in front of it, and none is required.

• Docker already restarts itself: docker-compose.yml sets restart: unless-stopped, which covers a crash and a host reboot, as long as the Docker daemon itself starts on boot (the default on Docker Desktop and most Linux installs).

• Not using Docker? One command installs it as a boot service, so it starts at login/boot and restarts on crash, with no terminal window to keep open:

  onw autostart install
  

  (From a source checkout, make autostart runs setup first, then the same thing.) This installs a per-user launchd LaunchAgent on macOS, or a per-user systemd unit (plus loginctl enable-linger, so it starts even before you log in) on Linux — no sudo needed on either. onw autostart status shows whether it's running; onw autostart stop stops it and removes the service. Logs land in ~/.open-net-worth/logs/autostart.{out,err}.log.

  The service runs the same interpreter onw runs on, so it is identical for a uv install and a checkout's .venv; it also carries your shell's PATH (launchd and systemd give a fresh process a minimal one) and any of HOST, PORT, ONW_ROOT, DATA_DIR, CACHE_DIR, LOGS_DIR that were set when you installed it.

  macOS (~/Library/LaunchAgents/ai.opennetworth.app.plist):

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
  <plist version="1.0"><dict>
    <key>Label</key><string>ai.opennetworth.app</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
      <string>/path/to/python3</string>
      <string>-m</string><string>backend.cli</string><string>start</string>
    </array>
    <key>WorkingDirectory</key><string>/Users/you/.open-net-worth</string>
    <key>RunAtLoad</key><true/>
    <key>KeepAlive</key><true/>
  </dict></plist>
  

  Linux (~/.config/systemd/user/open-net-worth.service):

  [Unit]
  Description=Open Net Worth
  After=network.target
  
  [Service]
  WorkingDirectory=/home/you/.open-net-worth
  ExecStart=/path/to/python3 -m backend.cli start
  Restart=on-failure
  
  [Install]
  WantedBy=default.target
  

  See backend/cli/autostart.py for the exact commands (launchctl bootstrap / systemctl --user enable --now).

• Updating. The desktop app updates itself (see the ); re-running its installer also works. A server: for a uv install; for Docker, download the new release's (it pins the image version) or set , then (a checkout: ). Your data is outside all of them, and migrations run at the next start.

Configuration

Everything needed to run the app is an optional environment variable — see .env.example for the full list (working folder, host/port, CORS).

Everything needed to make it useful is configured inside the running app and stored there: the AI provider and model under Settings, and banks, brokers, email, Telegram, web search and price sources under Connectors. You never hand-edit a config file for those.

Set ONW_ROOT only to pin the working folder from outside the app: a container, or a second instance on the same machine (which also needs its own PORT).

Your data

One working folder (default ~/.open-net-worth/): a single SQLite database plus a small set of file-backed stores, alongside cache/, logs/ and backups/. It never leaves your machine except for calls you configured yourself.

Settings → Data gives you a one-click full backup .zip, automatic daily backups, and restore-from-backup — a checkpoint is saved first, so a restore is itself undoable.

Running it beyond localhost

Open Net Worth is built for one operator on a machine you control. Treat it like a self-hosted password manager, not a public web app.

• The local machine is trusted by default. With AUTH_TRUST_LOOPBACK=true (the default), any process on the same machine can call the API without a password — so the person sitting at the machine never has to log in. Set it to false on a shared machine.
• A password only gates non-localhost requests. It is not, by itself, what stands between your data and the network.
• Behind a reverse proxy, loopback trust stops working as intended. A same-host proxy (nginx, Caddy, a tunnel) makes every remote request arrive from 127.0.0.1, so it is trusted. Set AUTH_TRUST_LOOPBACK=false before putting this behind one.
• Before exposing it anywhere — a LAN, a tunnel, a public domain — set a strong password (Settings → Security), turn off loopback trust, and put it behind HTTPS. The app does not terminate TLS itself.

Found a vulnerability? See SECURITY.md — please do not open a public issue.

Documentation

• docs.opennetworth.ai — the full user guide. The same docs are built into the app, searchable, under /help.
• docs/DATA_MODEL.md — stores, fields, and how the money math works.
• CLAUDE.md — the codebase map, if you are reading code rather than using the app.
• CONTRIBUTING.md — dev setup, the dependency rule, test policy.

Stack

• Backend — Python 3.12, FastAPI, SQLAlchemy + Alembic (SQLite by default, Postgres supported)
• Frontend — React 19, TypeScript, Vite
• AI — Anthropic Claude by default, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint; your key
• Prices — Yahoo Finance, CoinGecko

License

AGPL-3.0 — see LICENSE. Third-party dependency licenses are in NOTICE.