DEV Community: Thomas Kaul

Hacktoberfest 2025 with Ghostfolio

Thomas Kaul — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 06:37:10 +0000

Ghostfolio is joining Hacktoberfest for the fourth time and we are looking forward to meeting new open-source contributors along the way. Every year in October, Hacktoberfest celebrates open source by highlighting projects, maintainers, and contributors from around the globe. Open source maintainers dedicate extra time to support new contributors while guiding them through their first pull requests on GitHub.

Meet Ghostfolio: a modern Dashboard for Personal Finance

Ghostfolio is a web application that makes it easy to manage your personal finances. It aggregates your assets and helps you make informed decisions to balance your portfolio or plan future investments.

The software is fully written in TypeScript and organized as an Nx workspace, utilizing the latest framework releases. The backend is based on NestJS in combination with PostgreSQL as a database together with Prisma and Redis for caching. The frontend is developed with Angular.

With over 200 contributors, the OSS project is used daily by a growing global community. Ghostfolio counts more than 6’500 stars on GitHub and 1’600’000+ pulls on Docker Hub, standing out for its simple and user-friendly experience.

How you can make an impact

Every contribution makes a difference. Whether it is implementing new features, resolving bugs, refactoring code, enhancing documentation, adding unit tests, or translating content into another language, you can actively shape our project.

New to our codebase? No worries! We have labeled a few issues with hacktoberfest that are ideal for newcomers.

The official Hacktoberfest website provides some valuable resources for beginners to start contributing in open source.

Connect with us

If you have further questions or ideas, please join our Slack community or get in touch on X @ghostfolio_.

We look forward to collaborating.
Thomas from Ghostfolio

Hacktoberfest 2024 with Ghostfolio

Thomas Kaul — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 14:51:17 +0000

At Ghostfolio, we are very excited to join Hacktoberfest for the third time and look forward to connecting with new, enthusiastic open-source contributors. Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of all things open-source: projects, their maintainers, and the entire community of contributors. Every October, open source maintainers around the globe dedicate extra time to support new contributors while guiding them through their first pull requests on GitHub.

Introducing Ghostfolio: Personal Finance Dashboard

Ghostfolio is a modern web application for managing personal finances. It aggregates your assets and helps you make informed decisions to balance your portfolio or plan future investments.

The OSS project counting more than 100 contributors is used daily by its growing global community. With over 4’000 stars on GitHub and 800’000+ pulls on Docker Hub, Ghostfolio has gained widespread recognition for its user-friendly experience and simplicity.

How you can make an impact

Every contribution can make a difference. Whether it involves implementing new features, resolving bugs, refactoring code, enhancing documentation, adding unit tests, or translating content into another language, you can actively shape our project.

Not familiar with our codebase yet? No problem! We have labeled a few issues with hacktoberfest that are well suited for newcomers.

The official Hacktoberfest website provides some valuable resources for beginners to start contributing in open source.

Connect with us

If you have further questions or ideas, please join our Slack community or get in touch on X @ghostfolio_.

We look forward to collaborating.
Thomas from Ghostfolio

Hacktoberfest 2023 Debriefing

Thomas Kaul — Sun, 05 Nov 2023 16:35:27 +0000

As Hacktoberfest has come to an end, it’s time to look back and share our learnings. Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source software (OSS) projects, their maintainers, and the entire community of contributors. Each October, open source maintainers from all over the world give extra attention to new contributors while guiding them through their first pull requests on GitHub. This year the event celebrated its 10th anniversary. At Ghostfolio, we have participated in the event for the second time this year.

In this debriefing, we’ll take a closer look at our journey during Hacktoberfest, exploring the facts and figures, key takeaways, and the impact on Ghostfolio.

Hacktoberfest with Ghostfolio

Ghostfolio is a modern web application for managing personal finances. The software aggregates your assets and empowers informed decision-making to help you balance your portfolio or plan for future investments.

Our experience at Ghostfolio during Hacktoberfest 2023 has been truly remarkable. Despite the absence of T-shirt rewards this year, our expectations were exceeded in every way. We had the privilege of collaborating with 20 talented developers from around the world, each bringing their unique skills and backgrounds to our fintech project.

All these contributions made during Hacktoberfest have a significant impact on Ghostfolio. As many as 100 new features and improvements have been merged to enhance the user experience and software platform management.

The lessons learned through this global collaboration highlight the collective spirit of the open source community, even without traditional incentives. It serves as a driving force for Ghostfolio to evolve into an exceptional piece of open source wealth management software. Hacktoberfest 2023 has been an amazing and enlightening journey for everyone involved.

Key Takeaways

We’ve gathered some valuable takeaways from our experience to consider for upcoming years. These insights can help us and fellow open source projects make the most of Hacktoberfest:

Prepare early: Prospective contributors often begin looking for tasks as early as the end of September. Preparing your project, organizing issues, and setting clear goals in advance can help you attract and engage more participants.
Meet formal requirements: Ensure that your project aligns with Hacktoberfest’s formal requirements and rules. Properly tag issues, provide clear guidelines for contributions, and make sure your project is accessible to newcomers.
Allocate sufficient time: Being responsive and providing support to participants is crucial. Allocate enough time to answer questions, review and merge pull requests, and offer guidance to first-time contributors. This level of support can significantly enhance the experience for both contributors and maintainers.
Provide clarity in descriptions: When creating issues for Hacktoberfest, be as clear as possible in your descriptions. Including screenshots, links to code examples, and detailed instructions can make it easier for contributors to understand and complete the task successfully.
Isolate tasks: Ideally, focus on tasks that are approachable for beginners, as the setup and frameworks used can already be quite challenging. This way, you can attract a wider range of contributors.
Embrace learning: Understand that not every attempt will result in a successful contribution. It’s okay if a contributor’s pull request doesn’t make it into the project. Encourage a learning mindset and provide constructive feedback, helping contributors grow and improve over time.

By following these takeaways, we can ensure a rewarding experience for everyone taking part in future Hacktoberfest events.

Thank you

Our experience with Hacktoberfest truly showcases the magic of open source. The sense of community, mentorship, and our shared dedication to software development is what motivates us at Ghostfolio. As we look forward to future collaborations to make personal finance and investing more accessible, we simply want to thank everyone involved.

Keep coding and sharing your learnings!
Thomas from Ghostfolio

Hacktoberfest 2023 with Ghostfolio

Thomas Kaul — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 17:35:33 +0000

At Ghostfolio, we are very excited to participate in Hacktoberfest for the second time, looking forward to connecting with new and enthusiastic open-source contributors. Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open-source projects, their maintainers, and the entire community of contributors. Each October, open source maintainers from all over the world give extra attention to new contributors while guiding them through their first pull requests on GitHub. This year the event celebrates its 10th anniversary.

About Ghostfolio

Ghostfolio is written in TypeScript and organized as an Nx workspace, utilizing the latest framework releases. The backend is based on NestJS in combination with PostgreSQL as a database together with Prisma and Redis for caching. The frontend is built with Angular.

The software is used daily by a thriving global community. With over 2’600 stars on GitHub and 300’000+ pulls on Docker Hub, Ghostfolio has gained widespread recognition for its user-friendly experience and simplicity.

How to contribute?

Each contribution can make a meaningful impact. Whether it involves implementing new features, resolving bugs, refactoring code, enhancing documentation, adding unit tests, or translating content into another language, you can actively shape our project.

Are you not yet familiar with our code base? That is not a problem. We have applied the label hacktoberfest to a few issues that are well suited for newcomers.

The official Hacktoberfest website provides some valuable resources for beginners to start contributing in open source.

Get support

If you have further questions or ideas, please join our Slack community or get in touch on X @ghostfolio_.

We look forward to hearing from you.
Thomas from Ghostfolio

Announcing Ghostfolio 2.0

Thomas Kaul — Sat, 09 Sep 2023 08:13:28 +0000

Since late 2020, when Ghostfolio took shape, the main goal has remained the same: to simplify investment tracking while prioritizing user privacy and enable investors to make informed decisions. Our journey so far has been incredible, with over 300 releases since the first major release, close to 300’000 pulls on Docker Hub, and collaboration with 50+ contributors from around the globe. Ghostfolio was recently featured on Hacker News, where it ranked on the front page and briefly hit the #1 spot. Shortly after, the project’s repository was trending on GitHub. These achievements emphasize the growing recognition for our project and the path we are on.

Now, we are thrilled to present Ghostfolio 2.0, another milestone in our journey to empower investors.

Introducing Ghostfolio 2.0

Ghostfolio 2.0 is the evolution of our open source wealth management software, elevating both user and developer experiences. We have extended data import capabilities, added comprehensive analytics, increased stability, and utilized the latest technology to deliver these improvements. Here is a closer look at a selection of the improvements you can expect from this release, alongside uncounted smaller additions and enhancements.

Extended Data Import Capabilities

Importing account activities is an important aspect of any portfolio management software. With Ghostfolio 2.0, we have extended our data import functionality, ensuring a seamless experience for users. Our system supports multiple formats to make the experience more seamless. Additionally, there is an API, providing you with even greater flexibility and control over how you import transactions.

Comprehensive Analytics

Understanding your wealth is key. The latest release offers more comprehensive analytics to categorize your securities, providing invaluable insights into your investment portfolio for making informed decisions and optimizing diversification.

Reliable Stability

Ensuring the stability of software is crucial, and a platform for managing your wealth is no exception. The increased robustness of our architecture means that you can count on Ghostfolio to be there when you need it most, no matter the market conditions.

Cutting-Edge Technology Stack

Ghostfolio 2.0 leverages the latest tech stack to deliver a superior user and developer experience. We have upgraded to Angular 16, Nest.js 10, Prisma 5, and Nx 16, ensuring that the software is at the forefront of innovation. This upgrade allows us to provide you with the best possible user experience, making investment tracking more intuitive than ever before.

Thriving Ghostfolio Community

In open source software (OSS) projects like Ghostfolio, the community is the driving force behind its success. Without the incredible support of our users and contributors, it would not have been possible. As we celebrate the launch of Ghostfolio 2.0, we are delighted to showcase the growth of the Ghostfolio community:

Ghostfolio has accumulated 2500+ stars on GitHub, highlighting the appreciation and adoption of our platform by the community.
Our Slack community has expanded to over 350 members, creating a space for like-minded investors to connect, share insights, and collaborate.
On X (formerly Twitter), over 300 investors and personal finance enthusiasts follow Ghostfolio, keen to stay updated on the latest developments.

This is just the beginning. Ghostfolio is dedicated to ongoing improvement and helping grow a vibrant community of investors. We invite you to join us on this exciting journey.

Join our Slack community: Connect with fellow investors, share your insights, and stay updated on the latest news by joining our Slack community. It is a dynamic space where you can learn, collaborate, and grow together with us.

Follow us on X: For release updates and market insights, follow Ghostfolio on X. It is the perfect place to stay informed and connect with our team.

Give us a Star: If you have found value in Ghostfolio or appreciate our commitment to simplifying investment tracking, please consider giving us a star on GitHub. Your support helps us reach a wider audience and make a difference in the world of wealth management.

Become a contributor: If you are a developer passionate about open source projects and personal finance, we welcome your contributions. Join our developer community, collaborate with like-minded people, and help shape the future of Ghostfolio.

Ghostfolio 2.0 represents a major step forward in our mission to empower investors, and we could not be more excited about the future of the project. Together, we can build an outstanding tool that makes our lives easier. Thank you for being a part of the Ghostfolio community.

Thomas from Ghostfolio

Ghostfolio reaches 1’000 Stars on GitHub

Thomas Kaul — Mon, 01 May 2023 06:53:28 +0000

Ghostfolio, the open-source personal finance management software, has hit a major milestone by reaching 1’000 stars on GitHub. This blog post reflects on Ghostfolio’s recent achievements, highlighting its open-source community collaboration, platform expansions, and future developments.

Open Source community collaboration

Since its launch in 2021, the project with the clean and intuitive graphical user interface has accumulated over 100’000 pulls from Docker Hub and received contributions from 38 developers and counting. These efforts have resulted in a robust and user-friendly platform that empowers busy people to take control of their personal finances. In addition, Ghostfolio has attracted over 250 members from around the world to its Slack community, where they can connect and share ideas about investing.

The adoption of Ghostfolio highlights the power of open-source software and the value of community-driven development, which has definitely exceeded all our expectations. The open-source code allows anyone to contribute to its development, review its progress, and suggest further improvements.

Platform integrations and internationalization

Thanks to the work and dedication of the community, Ghostfolio has expanded onto platforms like Umbrel and Unraid.

These self-hosting platforms allow users to run applications on their own hardware rather than rely on a SaaS offering. As a result, Ghostfolio has become accessible to an even wider range of users who would like to take control of their wealth management.

Additionally, the application has been translated into Dutch, French, German, Italian and Spanish for investors who prefer to use Ghostfolio in their native language.

What’s next for Ghostfolio?

As the project continues to evolve, we can expect to see even more exciting developments and innovations around Ghostfolio which guides users through the process of tracking their assets, such as stocks, ETFs, or cryptocurrencies. Especially in the areas of data import and portfolio analysis.

We are honored to be a part of this vibrant and growing community, and we look forward to collaborating and learning together. If you are a web developer and interested in personal finance, please join our Slack channel or connect with @ghostfolio_ on Twitter. We are happy to discuss ideas and get you involved.

Thank you for all your feedback and support.

Here’s to many more stars!
Thomas from Ghostfolio

Hacktoberfest 2022

Thomas Kaul — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 18:23:50 +0000

We are very excited to join Hacktoberfest for the first time with Ghostfolio and meet new and ambitious open-source contributors. Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open-source projects, their maintainers, and the entire community of contributors. Each October, open source maintainers from all over the world give extra attention to new contributors while guiding them through their first pull requests on GitHub.

About Ghostfolio

Ghostfolio is a modern web application to manage your personal finance. The software presents the current assets in real time and supports the decision making of future investments. Whether rebalancing the asset classes (stocks, ETFs, cryptocurrencies, etc.) of your portfolio or financing an apartment, Ghostfolio offers solid, data-driven decision support.

Ghostfolio is written in TypeScript and organized as an Nx workspace. The backend is based on NestJS using PostgreSQL as a database together with Prisma and Redis for caching. The frontend is built with Angular.

How to contribute?

Every contribution matters. This can be implementing new features, fixing bugs, refactoring the code, improving the documentation, adding more unit tests, or translating into another language.

Are you not yet familiar with our code base? That is not a problem. We have applied the label hacktoberfest to a few issues and ideas that are well suited for newcomers.

The official Hacktoberfest website provides some valuable resources for beginners to start contributing in open source.

Get support

If you have further questions or ideas, please join our growing Slack community or get in touch on Twitter @ghostfolio_.

We look forward to hearing from you.
Thomas from Ghostfolio

500 Stars on GitHub

Thomas Kaul — Sun, 21 Aug 2022 15:53:38 +0000

Ghostfolio, the web-based personal finance management software, is celebrating 500 stars on GitHub. This is a major milestone for this open source project and a good time for another recap.

Growing Community

The Ghostfolio community is growing on various platforms and has recently passed 100 members on Slack as well as 100 followers on Twitter. If you have not joined yet, this is a good time to make sure you do not miss out on any future updates.

Message Queue: Asynchronous Processing

Overall stability and robustness has increased significantly since the introduction of a message queue. The workers of this robust queue system process jobs, namely gathering historical market data, asynchronously in the background to not bother the main service.

Ready for Web 3.0

The recent integration of Internet Identity, a blockchain authentication system, makes Ghostfolio ready for Web3. This third iteration of the World Wide Web is the vision of a new and better Internet based on decentralized blockchains to give power back to the users. Internet Identity created by the Dfinity Foundation enables you to sign in securely and anonymously to Ghostfolio without an email address, username, or a password. All you need is your device with built-in biometric authentication.

Break-even Point

Despite the complicated economic situation at this time, the goal set at the beginning of the year to build a sustainable business and reach break-even with the SaaS offering (Ghostfolio Premium) has been achieved. We will continue to leverage the revenue to further improve the fully managed cloud offering for our paying customers. A new goal we have set for ourselves is to become profitable.

Outlook

Besides all the positive accomplishments during the last months, there is still a lot of room for improvement. It would be great to onboard more contributors who are actively involved in software engineering to realize the full potential of open source software. If you are a web developer and interested in personal finance, please get in touch by email via hi@ghostfol.io or on Twitter @ghostfolio_. We are happy to discuss ideas.

We would like to say thank you for all your feedback and support since the beginning of this project.

Off to the next 500 stars!
Thomas from Ghostfolio

Ghostfolio meets Internet Identity

Thomas Kaul — Sun, 24 Jul 2022 08:29:21 +0000

Ghostfolio, the web-based personal finance management software, supports passwordless authentication as of now thanks to the integration of Internet Identity. This blockchain authentication system enables you to sign in securely and anonymously to Ghostfolio. With this latest update, Ghostfolio is ready for Web3.

Track your portfolio without being tracked

To avoid the security issues that arise with password authentication on the traditional web, the Internet Computer blockchain by dfinity has introduced a new cryptographic authentication system. It is called Internet Identity and is as convenient to use as Web2 OAuth ("Open Authorization") providers like Google Sign-In or Facebook Login.

How to use Internet Identity?

Internet Identity is based on the WebAuthn protocol and uses secure cryptographic authentication. It provides three options to authenticate yourself:

The built-in biometric authentication methods of your smartphone or laptop (fingerprint sensor, Face ID, Touch ID)
The password or pin to unlock your computer or mobile phone
A security key plugged into the USB port of your computer

When you authenticate with Internet Identity, the service only gets a dedicated pseudonym rather than sensitive user data like the email address or phone number. This preserves your anonymity and prevents you being tracked on the Internet.

The key benefits in a nutshell

Authenticate yourself securely without the need of an email address, username, or a password: all you need is your device to log in.
Built-in recovery mechanisms to ensure you are not locked out of any service that requires the Internet Identity.
Log in to various Internet services without being tracked by big tech companies.

If you would like to provide feedback or get involved in further development of Ghostfolio, please get in touch on Twitter @ghostfolio_.

I look forward to hearing from you.
Thomas from Ghostfolio

Ghostfolio – First months in Open Source

Thomas Kaul — Sun, 16 Jan 2022 10:32:13 +0000

In this article I would like to recap the first months running the open source project Ghostfolio, a web-based personal finance management software.

From 1 to 100 stars on GitHub

When I decided to publish the project as open source software (OSS), I did not know what exactly to expect. In the worst case, nobody would care. And in the best case, the repository would be overrun with contributions. The truth is probably somewhere in between.

In the beginning, it felt quite weird to develop in public where anyone can observe the progress. Stupid mistakes remain visible forever. But this feeling, fortunately, quickly settled. I believe the benefits like all the learning clearly outweigh the drawbacks when you just do it.

At the end of 2021, Ghostfolio reached an important milestone: 100 stars on GitHub.

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This is really exciting with almost no marketing. I am a technical founder, so I prefer writing code over anything else. But there is so much more to make this project happen: writing documentation, maintaining bug reports and feature requests, supporting users and managing the community, keeping the SaaS running, etc.

Reaching 100 stars will not only attract very early adopters, but also the early adopters. At the same time, the demands and expectations are also increasing.

What is new?

During the last months, Ghostfolio has transformed from a one man project into a prospering wealth management application with 9 contributors and counting. User feedback has directly shaped the direction of the product development.

These are some selected key features:

Simplified self-hosting with an official Ghostfolio docker image on Docker Hub
Improved import for activities (transactions and dividend)
Enriched market data for ETFs (region and industries)

What is coming?

Here is a brief overview of what I am planning in 2022.

The goal remains to offer a simple and solid software to manage personal finances. Thus, the main focus is on the core functionality.

My personal goal is to reach break-even with the Saas offering (Ghostfolio Premium) and regularly report about the progress and my learnings on this exciting journey.

I have already started to build a community of users. In the future, I would like to involve more contributors to further extend the functionality of Ghostfolio (e.g. with new reports). Get in touch with me by email or on Twitter if you are interested, I’m happy to discuss ideas.

I would like to say thank you for all your feedback and support during the last months.

Have a great start into the new year and happy investing
Thomas from Ghostfolio

Hello Ghostfolio 👋 — Personal Finance Management Software

Thomas Kaul — Sun, 12 Sep 2021 17:54:18 +0000

In this article I would like to introduce my new open source project: Ghostfolio, a web-based personal finance management software.

What problem does Ghostfolio solve?

Due to rising inflation and negative interest rates, I have been looking for some time at how I can invest my assets in the most diversified way possible. Specifically, I follow a buy and hold strategy with investments in different asset classes spread across different platforms. Therefore, I was looking for an app that would holistically aggregate my portfolio. During my research on the internet and in app stores, I have tried several solutions, but none of them has convinced me completely: too complicated, too cluttered, not optimized for smartphones or not comprehensive enough.

The vision

It is particularly important to me that I get an overview of all my assets in real time. Previously, I only had the prepared figures available once a year, when I had completed my annual tax declaration. In addition to the cash balance in the savings account, the overall picture also includes country-specific traits such as the voluntary pension plan (pillar 3a) in Switzerland.

In the meantime, I have talked to many colleagues who have been investing for a longer time. Quite a few have created complex spreadsheets from the same considerations. I think that should be better in 2021.

Ghostfolio is supposed to be a simple wealth management software. It presents the current assets at any time and supports the decision making of future investments. Whether rebalancing the portfolio in asset classes (stocks, cryptocurrencies, ETFs, etc.) or financing an apartment, Ghostfolio offers solid, data-driven decision support.

As I value privacy, data protection is an integral part of Ghostfolio. As open source software (OSS), Ghostfolio can be used completely anonymously, without the greedy eyes of big banks or big tech.

From idea to implementation

With this background I have started the ambitious project and programmed with small steps a software that I could quickly use for myself. As a stack, I chose modern web technologies that are personally of particular interest or that I would like to learn and deepen. These include Docker, Nx for the management of the monorepo, NestJS for the backend and PostgreSQL as a database. The code of the frontend and backend is written in TypeScript.

Since I have shortly reached my limits with some calculations, I have looked into different possibilities to get valuable support. Hoping that other people could also benefit from the solution and contribute with improvements if interested, I have released the existing code as open source software. Very soon, some developers contributed to Ghostfolio with great enhancements.

How can I support the project?

Are you also obsessed with a maximally diversified investment strategy? I'm happy for everyone who tries Ghostfolio. Are you convinced of its potential? Any support for Ghostfolio is welcome. Be it with a star on GitHub, feedback, bug reports, feature requests and of course contributions!

Please find find my contact details here.

I look forward to hearing from you.
Thomas from Ghostfolio