Im oldschool and use Gnucash

Not all of those videos are fully AI-generated, at least not entirely. (voices and video itself are real, script is AI-generated) They are still slop content, though.

From what I can tell, most of the voices are real (you can hear changes in microphone types & background noises, reverb, natural stuttering, accent changes, proper tone, etc on many of them) but a lot of the scripts seem AI-generated, along with the actual face in the thumbnail, even when the voice is real.

Most of the videos are being generated by a semi-large media generating organization who just pumps out algorithmically optimized videos. I did see a few, mostly from smaller creators, that were entirely AI-voiced as well, though.

I think most of them were just copying the thumbnail design because it got clicks. Not uncommon on YouTube unfortunately.

For anyone curious, the videos are basically just them scrolling through the websites of each, while reading off a paragraph or two of general information about what each is that has that sort of AI-generated tone and order to it.

The video creation process is literally as simple as:

1. Ask ChatGPT "write me a script for a short video talking about what Actual Budget is vs. Firefly III"
2. Record yourself auto-scrolling slowly through the Actual Budget website, then the same for the Firefly III website
3. Record a voiceover of you just reading word-for-word the script from ChatGPT
4. Slap them on top of each other
5. Clone the thumbnail from the other channels that got the most clicks, just like everyone else is doing, so now all of your videos look the same.

They should make a video called how to be a copy and paste youtuber, but someone else would have to make it first so they can copy it.

i love how "asking your peers" or "going on dedicated forums or communities" to ask questions is the most viable option atm.

So I was using money manager ex for a long time. I'm not sure if it fits the FOSS label.

While it took quite a lot of effort to setup and maintain, it was the only application I could find at the time that could let me model my costs into the future and allow me to identify whether any given large bill might impact my available cash flow negatively. I stopped using it because the it needed an atrocious amount of my time to actively track spending. When I gave up I was in the process of setting up some workflows that might facilitate importing the data from my bank more easily but it needed a complete revision to how I had set up the database and the work to standardise tagging of my bank data made me lose interest.

The three you listed seem like they offer pretty similar functionality to MMEX, maybe with more features? I might give them a look in.

I am not really sure what is going on here, neither do I know the tools and know what you are looking for... But maybe Portfolio Performance?

I've been programming my own little tool that's perfectly customized to my own special needs

I absolutely hate YouTubers who plaster their face all over the thumbnail, especially when they're doing stupid clickbait faces.

I don't have a video for you but I've been using Actual for over a year and really like it. I recommend it. Caveat, I very actively interact with my budget (inputting things manually) and cannot speak for it's account linking features.

Well your first mistake was going to YouTube for information

I tried Actual Budget for a while, but didn't stick with it long term. I also looked at Firefly III, never tried it though.

Eventually I figured out I just want an expense tracker instead of full budgeting and settled for ExpenseOwl

We need platforms where AI content is just banned. We're past the point we need to start systematically excluding all this crap.

Im reasonable happy with Actual Budget. I like that it has desktop apps that can sync woth a server that was easy to set up, I can import various things via .csv, rules to automatically categorise stuff are nice. I dont care about the envelope budgeting or whatever it's called they're on about but it's easy to ignore / turn off.

I think its budgeting features are lackluster, but I have highly enjoyed gnucash for tracking my expenses, incime & where everything goes.

It's all manual more or less, and you do double ledger accounting, so all the money is accounted for somewhere.

I have been self hosting fireflyIII for almost 2 months now, I like it, my wife is an accountant and she likes it. I didn't want to have to pay for an accounting service, and my credit union doesn't have an api that I am aware of to connect to the paid services anyway.

Would recommend 👍

Just FYI, take a look at how YNAB works — which is a paid app, but with a great approach: you track your spending for a while, and then basically always know how much you can spend on various categories of things. Idk what the workflow is in modern budgeting apps, but back in the day YNAB was rather different from the more typical accounting-type software like GNUCash. One of its tenets is that you don't spend money which you don't actually have, i.e. the credit card debt.

Ufff. Yeah, I also hit a slop mountain of videos when searching for Seafile comparisons....

I've been using Actual for a while now, probably close to a year. Before that I was on YNAB, which isn't FOSS but does have a huge library of material for how to make your budget work for you instead of the other way around.

I got off YNAB after they kept raising their subscription fees for seemingly no reason. Actual is not nearly as feature-rich but you can't really argue with the price.

Ive started seeing a lot of these sadly... Luckily they're still somewhat easy to spot.

Another recmendation for Actual. I spend very little time having to interact with it, because after the initial setup, all transactions are now synched from my bank accounts, and 90% are automatically classified into my categories (not by "AI" or something, you just set rules like "payments to Rewe are always groceries").

I remember back in the day using gnucash but I'm sure there are better alternatives on awesome-selfhosted, if you want to go that route. I imagine a raspberry pi or some low power hardware can also run those. They're great because they're not platform dependent. Docker might be a hurdle though

This "culture" of stealing video titles, thumbnails and even entire ideas wholesale has been going for a while on Youtube, unfortunately.

I've got a family member interested in switching to Linux but the finance software is an obstacle. I had a look and landed on gnucash which I thought I would trial myself and then see if if would work for them. I like it!

Maybe not what you're looking for, but there's a program called "Money Wallet" on Android. It's on F-Droid and free software. Maybe my favourite because every time I spend cash I just open it up and I enter what I just spent.

For professional use, I'd recommend GNU Cash, though.

Why do you think it's AI?

There's also text-based tools - not sure if they fit your needs. beancount (with 'fava' has a nice web UI), ledger, hledger. Good thing about text based is: you can easily use git.

Not sure if they go as 'budgeting' software. 'Accounting' might be more accurate.

This is all just Capitalist slop. Has nothing to do with AI or llms, just the kind of society it exists in and the type of psychopath corporations that delivers. We seem to forget that all other tool we use to de-shittify the net, ALL fight capitalist tendencies, but when AI comes along and gives the Capitalist believers a new tool for scamming people, then it is suddenly the tools fault !!

People hate Capitalism, not the tool..

Ok what the actual fuck is happening here

creepy AI voice: Hello. In this video we will. Examine the differences between two popular budget ing sofware.

I'm a lazy bastard and I don't self host for a lot of reasons. I use Actual because it's close to the old YNAB and has a desktop version (AppImage, I know it sucks, I don't care).

It has a list of transactions, and a budget with envelopes. That's all I need and it's fine.

As for the others:

• Firefly wants me to use Docker, I don't have time for that and I don't have a server
• Homebank has a weird dev process on launchpad, no releases, and wants me to disable uBlock Origin, fuck it

And the slop is the reason I don't use YouTube anymore. People seem to enjoy that dead internet because it looks like TV.

Holy hell, your recommendation algorithm is all sorts of fucked. I tried to replicate it but just searching for "FOSS budgeting software comparison" it looks like there's a few legit ones in the mix, but plenty of AI, too.

I'm not going to watch them to check though, since hitting one AI one will probably make them all AI, lol.

I've tried it on PipePipe, and the results are the same. I don't think you'll find it, because there are no comparison videos without AI slop.

AI has gotten so bad that I've resorted to reading the fucking manual. I can't even follow tutorials anymore.

Tried to follow a rust programming tutorial earlier. Couldn't for the life of me figure out why my code wasn't working. Noticed the AI generated avatar for the article and immediately understood. Got so pissed I started reading the docs. Programmed my first rust rest api in the following hour.

I really really want to get off YNAB and Actual is the closest but I just need almost the same features and an open source mobile app and we’re golden

Posts like this make me glad that I have never liked watching videos to learn about different software, and that I have a tendency to just read up on the features/information the dev has made available and then just try whichever platforms look the most interesting.

This has caused me to immediately drop the shinier looking option because the set up was too much of a pain in the ass to do though.

I use Actual and it's very barebones, no BS, does one thing and does it well. Great if that's what you're looking for.

Oh crap, I have uploader-defined thumbnails turned off which would actually make me more susceptible to falling for this AI slop. A guy just can't enjoy quality videos anymore without putting in the effort to filter out the trash.

Firefly III has mobile apps