Personal finance software is usually a trade-off between convenience and control. A hosted service can make account aggregation easy, but it also becomes another place where transaction history, balances and financial metadata live. A spreadsheet gives you control, but not much automation.
Sure is an open-source personal finance application built around the idea that you should be able to run the system yourself. It is a community-maintained continuation of the Maybe Finance codebase, with dashboards for cash flow, net worth and spending, plus budgeting, investment and account-management workflows.
Sure is getting attention for a concrete reason. In a third-party daily GitHub Trending snapshot on November 14, 2026, it was fifth on the daily list and had gained 925 stars in the daily window. Its recent v0.7.6 hotfix release also added more detailed spending comparisons and loan views. A Reddit post about the project appeared six days before this snapshot and drew substantial discussion.
Source: Sure project README. The screenshot uses illustrative account data, not a real user's financial records.
What Sure is, and what it is not
Sure is a full web application rather than a spreadsheet wrapper. It is a community fork of Maybe Finance. The repository uses the GNU Affero General Public License v3 and clarifies that "Maybe" remains a trademark of Maybe Finance, Inc.; "Sure" is the community fork.
Its feature set covers cash flow, net worth, transactions, budgets, investment holdings, loans, bills, imports, backups and an optional AI assistant. The core finance application can be evaluated without enabling a model provider.
The architecture behind the app
Sure is a Ruby on Rails application backed by PostgreSQL and Redis, with background work handled by a worker process. That is a familiar web stack, but it has important operational consequences: the web process is not the whole application. Account sync, scheduled jobs and email work depend on the worker being alive.
The self-hosting guide recommends Docker Compose. Its example deployment includes the application, worker, database and supporting services. The project also documents an optional AI compose file. That adds Pipelock for outbound controls and MCP request/response scanning, with optional local inference through Ollama and Open WebUI.
There is also an external assistant path. A remote agent can call Sure's /mcp endpoint for financial data such as accounts, transactions and balance sheets. This is useful for developers experimenting with personal finance agents, but it also means the MCP token and the agent's permissions deserve the same care as a bank API credential.
Run a local instance with Docker Compose
You need Docker Engine and Docker Compose. The official self-hosting guide provides the complete deployment procedure.
Start by creating a directory and downloading the sample configuration:
mkdir -p ~/docker-apps/sure
cd ~/docker-apps/sure
curl --fail --location --silent --show-error \
--output compose.yml \
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/we-promise/sure/main/compose.example.yml
curl --fail --location --silent --show-error \
--output .env \
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/we-promise/sure/main/.env.example
Generate the required application secret:
openssl rand -hex 64
Put the generated value in .env as SECRET_KEY_BASE, and set a strong POSTGRES_PASSWORD. Do not reuse the example values. The application secret also participates in deriving encryption keys when explicit Active Record encryption keys are not configured.
Then start the application:
docker compose up -d
Open http://localhost:3000 and create the first account. If the instance will be reachable from the internet, configure HTTPS at your reverse proxy and set the documented RAILS_ASSUME_SSL setting accordingly.
One important operational rule: do not casually replace SECRET_KEY_BASE on an existing installation. Sure uses it to protect sessions and, unless you provide separate encryption keys, to derive keys for sensitive stored data. Changing it without following the migration procedure can make previously encrypted values unreadable.
The release that made this worth another look
The v0.7.6 hotfix release, published November 12, 2026, adds a "spending vs normal" view that compares a category's current spending with the user's own history. It also expands loan details with repayment schedules and principal/interest breakdowns, improves bill handling and adds broader backup and restore tooling.
A separate v2026.11.14-alpha release appeared on November 14. It is explicitly an alpha compatibility release and includes debug mobile builds. Do not confuse that tag with the stable channel when deploying a household's primary finance system. The hosting guide recommends choosing the stable image for the latest stable release or pinning a specific version.
The project also deserves credit for documenting backups. The current backup service can include the database, uploaded files, configuration and checksums. If you store uploads in an external object-storage bucket, that bucket needs its own backup or versioning policy.
Who should use it?
Sure is worth evaluating if you:
- Want to inspect and self-host your finance application.
- Are comfortable operating Docker, PostgreSQL and background workers.
- Need a unified view of accounts, budgets, investments and loans.
- Want to experiment with an AI assistant that accesses structured financial data.
- Prefer an open-source application that you can audit and modify.
Bank aggregation depends on supported providers and their regional availability. Do not assume that a provider available in the United States will support an account in India or another country. Check the supported connection methods before importing real financial data.
Sure versus other finance tools
| Tool | Better fit when you want |
|---|---|
| Sure | Full self-hosted finance app with accounts, budgets and investment views |
| Actual Budget | Envelope-style budgeting |
| Firefly III | Self-hosted expense tracking |
| GnuCash | Desktop double-entry accounting |
| YNAB | Hosted budgeting with less infrastructure to operate |
Self-hosting does not automatically make every integration free. Bank-data providers, market-data sources, hosting, backups and model inference may have separate costs or terms.
Before connecting real accounts
Deploy Sure with sample data, test a backup and restore, check provider coverage in your country, and decide whether you need the optional AI features. Keep .env and backup folders private, configure HTTPS and restrict new signups after creating the administrator account.
For a community walkthrough, see the video below. It is a third-party demonstration, not an official Sure tutorial.
Sources and further reading
- Sure repository
- Docker self-hosting guide
- v0.7.6 release notes
- November 14 alpha release
- Reddit discussion
Would you rather self-host your finance data, or keep the operational burden with a managed provider?
AI disclosure: This article was prepared with AI assistance; technical claims and commands were checked against the linked primary sources.
Top comments (0)