PocketLens
free, self-hosted Mint alternative via Plaid
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I built PocketLens because I wanted automatic bank sync without giving my transaction history to a company. Plaid recently started allowing personal developer accounts, and this provides free access to your own financial data. Existing options either require manual csv imports, or route through paid relays: Actual Budget syncs via the SimpleFIN Bridge (a third-party service between you and your data), Firefly III needs an external importer wired to an aggregator. PocketLens connects your own Plaid keys directly and transactions, balances, and brokerage holdings show up (no fee). Plaid is also the same provider Mint and YNAB used.Features: automatic sync and categorization, budgets, net-worth tracking, spending reports, recurring-charge detection. The app has a demo that runs on sample data so you can try everything before setting up.Caveats: This app currently needs Supabase for auth and the data API (roadmap includes an option for converting to plain postgres db). Plaid free developer tier only allows you access to 10 connections (financial instutitions). Plaid can see your transaction data, but the tradeoff is that an alternative option like Monarch or Origin cannot. There is an equivalent iOS app that is not open source yet due to setup issues.
HN · launched Jul 24, 2026 · 5 upvotes (top 89%) · 0 views
Niche: personal finance and budgeting apps · 424 launches, 44 in the last 7 days ▼ -20% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Fintech
- Analytics & BI
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 424 launches in personal finance and budgeting apps →
Could you build this?
Yes It is a standard self-hosted personal finance dashboard connecting to Plaid's developer API to fetch transactions and storing them in SQLite/PostgreSQL.
Discussion
1 comment analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: SyncBank, Actual Budget, Notion, Airtable
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 276 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #271 of 277 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 263 days after the earliest competitor.
- Aggregate Finance, your financial data in a spreadsheet you own · hn · 2026-11-04 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Pocket Wallet · ph · 2026-11-13 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Spendalyst · ph · 2026-10-14 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Perplexity Finance · ph · 2026-04-10 · 164 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Viridel · ph · 2026-09-10 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- FYN · ph · 2026-10-27 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- starkovs.dev · PennyHub · ph · 2026-09-28 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- VestFin · ph · 2026-09-24 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.41
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