[HN Gopher] Actual is going open-source
___________________________________________________________________
Actual is going open-source
Author : pbowyer
Score : 564 points
Date : 2022-04-29 15:39 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (actualbudget.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (actualbudget.com)
| brap wrote:
| I've used YNAB before and really liked it, this seems
| conceptually similar. Did anyone use both and would like to share
| their experience?
|
| My main problem with YNAB was that entering transactions manually
| all the time was time consuming, and I wasn't able to stay
| consistent for more than a few months at a time (in my country
| there was no way to import automatically).
| l8nite wrote:
| I left YNAB when they pulled the bait & switch on pricing with
| their oldest customers last year. I've been looking for
| something to replace it for awhile now, so I'm going to try
| this out.
| xbryanx wrote:
| Check out Lunch Money[1] - Which feels more polished and
| supported to me.
|
| 1 - https://lunchmoney.app/
| kashura wrote:
| YNAB drastically changed their pricing (double for
| "grandfathered" customers), but even more importantly American
| Express import has been broken for about 6 months now. That was
| the final straw.
| bestcoder69 wrote:
| We upgraded to SaaS YNAB and suffered through it for years,
| before dropping it in our house for the same reason. Syncing
| was broken for a really really long time. We finally reported
| it, and it was working the next time we checked.
|
| So, their monitoring (if it exists) is not doing its job
| whatsoever, and they're relying on customer reports to find
| out about months-long outages. Not to mention the smaller
| sync outages that would happen constantly.
|
| We tried to understand the way they want us to deal with
| credit cards about a dozen times. Never had any interest in
| learning it and still don't (because I don't treat a CC
| transaction any different from a cash transaction w/r/t
| budgeting), but the new YNAB forced it on us.
|
| Nothing I'm saying is new. It's just wild to me how bad their
| Second System tanked their software & reputation.
| dwild wrote:
| > Syncing was broken for a really really long time. We
| finally reported it, and it was working the next time we
| checked.
|
| Well they use Plaid, they aren't really responsible for
| syncing. Most competitor will also use Plaid and have the
| same issue sadly. Mine also stopped synced recently as my
| bank updated their website. It took a few weeks before it
| came back.
|
| > So, their monitoring (if it exists) is not doing its job
| whatsoever,
|
| Actually Plaid monitoring is quite good (for each bank you
| get the percent of failed queries), but how fast they
| react, well that's another ball game and I guess it depends
| on the amounts of users affected and the amount of works
| required to fix it.
|
| I was considering working on my own opensource alternative
| to YNAB and that's why I looked a bit into Plaid. Now that
| Actual is open source, maybe I won't...
|
| > I don't treat a CC transaction any different from a cash
| transaction
|
| Well they aren't different either... I treat both my cash
| and debit card transactions the same way I treat my credit
| cards transactions. I add them in their respective accounts
| and that's it (I only started adding them manually when my
| bank updated their website, it has gone better than I
| thought and decided to stay that way for now, never felt
| comfortable knowing Plaid had my banks credentials).
|
| Maybe what you were confused with was the amounts shown on
| the Budget side? The credit cards categories act a tiny bit
| different than the actual categories. I know you said you
| had no interest in learning, but if you change your mind, I
| could try explaining how it works.
|
| I guess an issue with credit cards is that it feel like
| it's actual money, but it's not. That doesn't goes well
| with zero based budgeting which depends on the fact that
| you already have the funds to pay for all your spending.
| You work with past money, not future one.
| rmesters wrote:
| Shameless plug: OP mentioned Plaid as a way to sync bank
| accounts, but if anyone wants to use a Plaid alternative in
| Europe, check out Nordigen (it's free).
|
| Full disclosure: I'm one of the founders.
| dwild wrote:
| How can you afford to make it free?
| michaelsalim wrote:
| Awesome how James handled this!
|
| Unrelated, I'm looking for something that can help me create
| finance projections. Eg: How's my account going to look like in
| the next 3 months if I go for a holiday.
|
| Any suggestions for that?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| bern4444 wrote:
| There are a lot of tools like Actual (YNAB, Monarch, Mint, Aspire
| google sheet etc). All are focused on budgets and mostly managing
| cash accounts.
|
| I've always wanted an equivalent but for investments. I know you
| can sync investment accounts to some of these, but that only
| reports the balance generally.
|
| I'd love to have the equivalent for investment accounts that
| answer these questions:
|
| What is my sector exposure?
|
| How much, across multiple accounts and brokerages, of Apple (or
| any stock/etf/mutual fund) do I own as a total percentage?
|
| How much money are in retirement accounts vs non retirement
| accounts?
|
| What is my IRR (rate of return) in aggregate and per account?
|
| And of course things like projections, safe withdrawal rates,
| analysis in the form of charts and graphs like what Actual and
| the rest offer.
|
| etc
| bolapara wrote:
| Check out Laksmhi:
|
| https://github.com/sarvjeets/lakshmi
| lhl wrote:
| The best open source app I've found that does much of this is:
| https://www.portfolio-performance.info/en/
| whoopdeepoo wrote:
| Personal capital? Sigfig?
| friendly_deer wrote:
| personal capital is great. Yeah, I get a call from a rep
| asking for a meeting 1x/year. I politely decline and don't
| hear again from them til next year...not a big deal for a
| great 100% hands off dashboard.
| bern4444 wrote:
| I've heard of personal capital - though I've read lots of
| reviews that say they always try and upsell you to their paid
| management platforms.
|
| Will take a look at sigfig!
| troupe wrote:
| They do, but the way they fund the development is to check
| with people using their platform and ask if they want
| financial advisement services. It is probably one of the
| better business models out there that still gives you
| something valuable for free.
| adamarice wrote:
| I've been working on building this since January. We should
| have the first version up in a few weeks. Here's the landing
| page: https://www.haystack.finance
| bern4444 wrote:
| I don't know if this is a business you're trying to build or
| a project you're working on but I'd be interested in helping
| if you need.
|
| I was working on something like this as a side project but my
| motivation for it fluctuates.
| adamarice wrote:
| Awesome, yeah send me an email at
| adam.arthur.rice@gmail.com. Would be great to chat.
| troupe wrote:
| You might take a look at Personal Capital. Their free service
| will answer many of those questions for you and they have a
| decent retirement simulator to understand what your chances are
| of having enough money for the rest of your life.
| molsongolden wrote:
| Maybe is roughly working on this for all of your assets.
|
| Not much on their website yet but there's a high-level roadmap,
| discord, and newsletter. They're in testing with beta customers
| atm. Josh also built Baremetrics which does a great job of
| slicing and rearranging business data streams into useful
| insights.
|
| https://maybe.co/
| adamhp wrote:
| Check out https://projectionlab.com/
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| If you're interested in exploring full-time work around this,
| I'm on the Monarch team, and would love to chat. Most of us our
| personal finance geeks on some level and we've loved working on
| this together. Our investment sync is pretty primitive right
| now but we have a pretty big batch of work in the next few
| months around planning/goals/advice (which would include
| investments, debt paydown, etc).
|
| You can find me on LinkedIn through my About link (or just
| apply on the website, we keep a close eye on applicants
| especially if they're interested in personal finance).
| aloknnikhil wrote:
| Try https://ghostfol.io/portfolio (there's an option to self-
| host too)
| mbesto wrote:
| I really like Kubera for all of this: https://www.kubera.com/
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| Sad to see this. We were big fans of Actual.
|
| We're working on a product in this space. While there is a ton of
| demand for products like this (the incumbents, like Mint, aren't
| really evolving or providing the privacy people want), it's not
| easy to grow. We ended up raising venture capital to bridge the
| gap, but once we did, things started to come together. In fact,
| we ended up having a few people who were trying to build an app
| solo join the team (because they're so passionate about the
| space, and had build great products, but couldn't get a lot of
| traction).
| nerdjon wrote:
| I am curious, what do people use for budgeting?
|
| Mint seems like the most feature rich, but not only do I not want
| to support their parent company because of their Tax lobbying...
| but I don't trust them from a privacy standpoint (Considering its
| free).
|
| YNAB and Monarch both seem like really good options. But I have
| not looked into them much yet.
|
| I currently use Copilot (iOS only... really just iPhone, no iPad
| app). I have found it really nice but the lack of a web or iPad
| app makes doing some tasks more of a pain.
|
| I am curious if anyone has found any that work well for couples
| that don't have joint finances but do obviously share some
| expenses. My partner and me struggle with figuring this out and
| inevitably loose track of certain small things. Rent and standard
| expenses are easy. But going out, groceries, etc. those are the
| complicated ones.
|
| I know there is an app you can use that you can mark transactions
| as shared, but I don't want to use that for privacy reasons. I
| would love if there was an app that had some functionality like
| that built in without making it so we have one account that just
| has all of our accounts in it.
| cstoner wrote:
| I've been using YNAB since March 2014. I started doing manual
| entry with YNAB4 and was an early adopter of YNAB5.
|
| I manage my own personal budget as well a joint budget for
| myself and my fiance.
|
| Here's my takeaway:
|
| * The YNAB model to budgeting is how I want all future
| budgeting tools I use to work. They call the framework "The
| Four Rules" (https://www.youneedabudget.com/the-four-rules/)
| and they are a very pragmatic way to think about budgeting.
|
| * Specifically, I like to be able to have my budget cover
| multiple months into the future. I have fairly bursty and
| somewhat unpredictable income. I like to have a reserve of 6
| months of expenses covered just to make sure that I can handle
| any ebb and flow of my income.
|
| * I have successfully convinced my partner to use YNAB and they
| find it valuable. It really is super useful software that is
| pretty straight forward to use and that makes budgeting very
| quick and easy.
|
| * Sharing budgets with a partner doesn't really work the way
| you'd want it to. You would need to share a single set of
| credentials, and there isn't really any fine grained access
| controls.
|
| * YNAB has been raising their prices lately, and I think it's
| reasonable to assume that they are going to be raising them
| again in the future. I am not convinced that I, personally, am
| getting value out of the things they say they are improving.
| While I have a lot of my financial history with them, I'm
| definitely investigating competitors to see if they would fit
| my needs. So far, none have but I'm going to keep looking
| because honestly I'm not sure YNAB is worth $100/yr ($200/yr
| between my partner and I is fucking crazy).
|
| Overall, would I recommend YNAB? Yeah, probably. I would bet
| that if you haven't been budgeting before and started using
| YNAB at the current price that you would probably make at least
| $100 worth of better financial decisions in the first year. But
| there's a huge asterisk next to the price.
|
| I remember paying $30 for YNAB4 and being happy with it. They
| introduced the SaaS version that would sync to import your
| transactions at $50/yr and I remember thinking that was kinda
| pricy. You could always import the transactions from your bank
| by downloading the Quicken files, but I understand they need a
| subscription model to sustain an actual business around the
| product.
|
| I am not convinced that the recent price hikes have been
| justified by an increase in the value of the product.
| nerdjon wrote:
| The price is where I am finding myself hesitant to switch
| unless I find something that has a life changing feature
| (like features for couples).
|
| Copilot had a price hike to $9 a month (or $70 a year I
| believe) but grandfathered everyone who had a subscription
| for $3 a month "for life" (as long as you have an active
| subscription).
|
| I do keep hearing great things about YNAB and I don't mind
| paying for it, but if they are being that aggressive on
| raising pricing that is concerning.
| bern4444 wrote:
| I use YNAB, I tried Monarch and I found it less intuitive. I
| truly think YNAB is the best player in the budgeting personal
| finance space.
|
| I wish they did more (see my other comment about investing)
| bredren wrote:
| Has anyone found a product that does a good job at consuming
| and unwinding transactions from an Apple Card?
|
| If I understand correctly, AC can't be connected by Plaid, and
| You have to do manual export and upload of transaction data.
|
| If you use this for most of your expenses the payments from
| your checking account to pay off the card each month should
| also be recognized as such.
|
| I've tried managing this using Waveapps some and besides not
| liking that company, it didn't handle this very well.
|
| Specific to this thread, how well does Actual handle this? It
| would be cool to self host this stuff.
| nerdjon wrote:
| I think Mint announced a few weeks ago native support.
|
| Unfortunately Copilot is the same where you have to do a
| manual export, which means you only see it at the end of the
| month. Making it not super useful for tracking your budget as
| the month goes on.
|
| This has unfortunately lead to my Apple Card rarely being
| used. Which sucks.
|
| I keep hoping that there is some sort of native data sharing
| built into iOS so I don't have to log into apple through
| something like Plaid
| bredren wrote:
| Thanks for the reply.
|
| I searched around and found no mention of this, but then
| found it on Intuit's Mint product blog:
| https://mint.intuit.com/blog/updates/you-can-now-connect-
| you...
|
| Presumably, there are more integrations coming but no
| information from Apple on this. Seems too good to be true
| that Apple would offer an API to customers that could be
| hooked up to a self-hosted Actual instance.
|
| Kind of a bummer that they only have Mint support right
| now, seems quite at odds with Apple's Privacy goals.
| kareemm wrote:
| Used YNAB4 + 5 for several years and it never really took. I
| use Tiller.com now - puts all your data into a Google Sheet or
| Cloud Excel sheet.
|
| It has a bunch of extensions that you can use for budgeting,
| emailing daily transactions, reporting, optimizing debt payoffs
| using various different methods, etc.
|
| Plus it's just a spreadsheet, so sorting/filtering etc just
| work. And it's as fast as having a large Google Sheet. So
| pretty darn fast.
| SeriousM wrote:
| For the curious: https://www.tillerhq.com/ is the right url
| ashirviskas wrote:
| >But going out, groceries, etc. those are the complicated ones.
|
| Which is why I don't actually track those day-to-day. I'm using
| revolut and it gives me a pretty decent estimate of spent per
| category per month, give or take 15%.
|
| Then I use a slightly modified google sheets budgeting template
| (it's right there) and just put all the numbers there. Quite
| convenient and you can see all the data + add custom formulas
| if you want to.
| ChrisClark wrote:
| Lunchmoney.app has a collaboration feature, but the description
| isn't clear enough to see if it's what you're looking for.
| [deleted]
| drc500free wrote:
| I used to use Mint, moved to Truebill a couple years ago. It's
| easier to split out and budget discretionary spending and track
| it over the month. They also do a good job of automatically
| identifying bills and other repeat charges for review.
| gunsch wrote:
| I've enjoyed YNAB a lot for budgeting and been using it for the
| last 3 years now. Works very well with my spreadsheet brain.
|
| It's got solid APIs if you want to do your own add-ons or
| integrations too. As an example, a friend of mine who's on the
| FIRE track has integrated his own layer on top of YNAB for
| tracking "paid off for life" categories, including budgeting
| for expected inflation, and allocated against retirement
| account balances.
| adrianmsmith wrote:
| The blog post says 810 paid subscribers, and the price was
| $4/month so that's $3.2k/month.
|
| I mean that's not bad, that sounds like they'd nearly made it.
| Maybe they'd need 2-3x that to live off (depending where they
| live). But if they got that far I sort of feel they might have
| been able to make it. Then they wouldn't need any other job, they
| could just live off the product. And then any additional revenue
| growth would be profit.
|
| I mean they were a lot closer to it being able to sustain them
| than a business with e.g. $0/month revenue, or e.g. 3 users at
| $10/month (I've worked for a few such projects without
| product/market..)
| twobitshifter wrote:
| There's a chance they just needed to raise the price. I wonder
| how people land on something like $4. At that price your demand
| for something like this is not price sensitive. $5 and you have
| 20% growth, $8 and you've doubled. To the users it's just a few
| bucks.
| dwild wrote:
| The thing is, YNAB increased pricing recently and that didn't
| went well, it caused a pretty negative outlash... Actual was
| actually a pretty good alternative that was pushed by many
| people on Reddit, they got quite a bit of free advertising
| through that. Yearly YNAB is only 8.25$ a month and support
| syncing through Plaid (which add a few dollars per month for
| sure to the cost and it also add quite a bit of negative
| feedback sadly). So yeah he could increase the price for
| sure, but not by much, and his current customers wouldn't
| appreciate it that much considering they jumped ship to avoid
| a price increase in the first place.
| caseyross wrote:
| Moreover, everything on the website implies that Actual was a
| high-end, exactingly designed product for discerning, well-
| off people. But it was priced like general-audience commodity
| SaaS. My guess is that most subscribers would have been more
| than willing to pay, say, 20 dollars a month instead of 4,
| particularly for something that has "saving you lots of
| money" as a core value proposition.
| all2 wrote:
| It's open source... We could try. :D
| balaji1 wrote:
| would it have been possible to sell the code and business? the
| author doesn't mention that he explored that option. This seems
| very sellable. And like you said, $3.2k/month could go long way
| in other countries. So it would have been cool to find a
| buyer/partner who could be aligned with the vision and values
| of the author.
| weaksauce wrote:
| they mentioned that they need to hire 2 people. so that's a
| pretty low gross for that. and the expense of running the
| servers and all that is not included there so net was probably
| wildly insufficient for that kind of newhire. I'd think
| spending some money on marketing would have been more prudent.
| rexreed wrote:
| I still have yet to find something that works as well as
| Microsoft Money. I have to run it on VMWare Fusion on a Mac to
| make it work. Moneydance is the next closest thing. Something
| that has real support for investments and tax reporting.
| Everything else is too... simple.
| ICodeSometimes wrote:
| Interesting. I wonder why James didn't attempt to sell it at the
| very least?
|
| 36K ARR means you could have rather quickly found a buyer for
| 60k+ and gotten rid of the thing for a small but not in-
| significant payday. Also i wonder if the users are truly happy
| with being told they have to migrate to their own server as i'd
| assume they're the type who'd rather pay $4 a month instead of
| having to deal with the hassle.
|
| In any case, it's quite a courageous move and seems very well-
| intentioned.
| nnoitra wrote:
| 36K is peanuts. That's 3K a month.
| tomatowurst wrote:
| i guess you make millions a month, i will still take 3k a
| month MRR.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| 3k MRR, but with a huge amount of extra stress on top of
| your full time job. It's not necessarily worth it, and the
| type of thing that leads to massive burnout.
| jonas21 wrote:
| You have no control over what the buyer would do with it. They
| might decide to slurp up all of the user financial data flowing
| through the server, for example. Or they might leak the data
| due to incompetence. Even in the best of circumstances, the
| buyer would probably have a plan for increasing revenue, which
| might mean raising prices, introducing ads, or any number of
| things that James might not like.
|
| Finally, it sounds like he wants to continue working on the
| product, just at his own pace, and without the stress of
| running a business. This would not be an option if he sold.
| [deleted]
| quadrangle wrote:
| As someone focused on sticking to FLO software, I've been using
| Skrooge for accounting. It's just local, but it works well. How
| does Actual compare?
| codegeek wrote:
| "I completely underestimated how much work it takes to build a
| business. There's so much overhead. I'm always figuring out why a
| build failed, taxes, how to triage issues, responding to support,
| designing UIs, responding to Apple's complaints, and more.
| There's so much that goes on behind the scenes. There's no way a
| single person can possible do this alone, especially as a side
| project."
|
| This is the part that resonates a lot with me even though I have
| been able to build a small business that is reasonably successful
| with a small team but it takes a toll. It is a frikin slog and
| there are days when you feel like jumping off a cliff. Also the
| cost of doing something so small can add up when you can have a
| cushy tech job making 200K relatively easy. To do your own thing
| requires a very different mindset and incredibly hard.
|
| There is a HUGE difference between building a quick side project
| for fun VS turning it into a real business (no matter how small).
| I have full sympathy for the owner and totally understand where
| they are coming from. No judgement and I wish them all the best.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Agree. It resonates a lot
|
| Building your own business is as much about business plans as
| it is to building the product as it is making sure there's
| enough toilet paper in the bathroom. And all of those are
| important
| la6472 wrote:
| 810 paid subscribers and he could not secure funding to sustain
| the business ??
| granshaw wrote:
| Real curious what his pricing was like, do you know?
| carstenhag wrote:
| In the blog post it says 4,99 per month.
| amelius wrote:
| Why not ask someone for help, though?
| dwild wrote:
| Based on the post, he was on his 4th year, and his current
| number of monthly paid subscriber was 810 for 4$ a month
| (thus less than 40k$ a year)...
|
| I got a feeling that he just didn't see an opening toward
| making this viable against YNAB. An important fact is that
| YNAB increased their pricing recently, which caused quite a
| bit of stir up and an exodus to competitors. Everything was
| in his favor, cheaper than YNAB, people were freely
| advertising his app. As he mentioned he started to try to
| implement Plaid, I guess he did the math and found out that
| he would get too close to YNAB price (for sure it's going to
| be a few dollars a month)...
| nnoitra wrote:
| so make 200K relatively easy?
| [deleted]
| johnwheeler wrote:
| Well, it's the type of business. Personal finance is super-hard
| to break into. It requires trust and budget. Trust requires
| users and word of mouth so its chicken and egg. you're not
| going to compete as a one man show with intuit on budgets or
| trust.
|
| i get the vision - build something so good and usable, and they
| will come. The good thing about Quickbooks though is that it's
| trustworthy in the social proof sense. That trumps a lot of
| ease of use (though it is also easy to use)
| matwood wrote:
| > Also the cost of doing something so small can add up when you
| can have a cushy tech job making 200K relatively easy.
|
| You've hit it on the head. The fastest way to wealth is not a
| startup (though VCs want everyone to look the other way that
| most fail), but to get a job at a FAANG or FAANG adjacent
| company.
|
| A friend just switched jobs and he made a hit list of companies
| based on his analysis of expected RSU appreciation.
| mellosouls wrote:
| _you can have a cushy tech job making 200K relatively easy_
|
| Some of these claims seem to come from people living on a
| different planet to me. Yes you can make that, but only if you
| are in a _tiny_ (and normally very privileged) set.
|
| The way it's breezily posted on this forum at times shows
| perhaps just a _leeetle_ disconnect with the mainstream tech
| world
| daenz wrote:
| My read on that is that it is total comp, so it includes
| bonuses/RSUs/options. If you're not negotiating for those
| things, what are you doing. Though $200k base salary is not a
| crazy salary for a staff/principle/high-level engineer.
|
| I don't think people realize how corrosive to mental health a
| $200k engineering job can be though. I was making very close
| to that as a base salary, and the amount of responsibilities
| I had, that all directly contributed to the success of the
| organization and the engineering team, was frankly
| staggering. I was always available, even when I wasn't "on
| call." I was always putting out very important fires. It
| never ended.
| gabereiser wrote:
| The mental health aspect I think is often overlooked. When
| young engineers are eager to climb the ladder into
| senior/principal/distinguished positions (this was me, btw)
| they often overlook what it does to your mental health. The
| beginning seems great. Big problems, big solutions,
| everyone knows what's their role in it and how to get it
| done. Over the years that view will fade. The certainty of
| success replaced by tooling up, research, supporting
| articles, still engineering hard stuff, fielding workshops
| by the business to help educate and rehash the vision to
| this next set of recent college grads. The complexity of
| the job increases as the responsibility increases.
|
| My brother is also an engineer and instead of going after
| titles and management he decided to stay as an engineer for
| as long as he could. He's extremely happy working on things
| without having direct reports. There's a sweet spot for
| everyone here. Some like more freedom and time to recharge
| (this is me) and some can balance the demands of the work
| with the demands to explore work (my brother). Then there
| are others who dive so far head first into work they burn
| themselves out.
|
| Please, take the time to find your balance. Not only will
| you be happier, people around you will be too.
| daenz wrote:
| I tried to re-negotiate a 4 day work week, but they
| weren't having it, so ended up walking. I know it is
| privileged to say, but sometimes no amount of money is
| worth giving up things that are important to you. For me,
| I was giving up my time and ignoring a project that I
| think is very important. When I came to my senses about
| how the money isn't worth giving that up, they had to
| yield, or I had to leave.
| bombcar wrote:
| I'd like to do four days a week at 70% pay.
|
| No can do.
|
| Ok I quit, but I can consult 3 days a week at 200% pay.
|
| Sounds good.
| conductr wrote:
| This is pretty universal to all industries. You just don't
| get paid well for the work you do in X hours. You get paid
| well became you're expected to put in a high amount of
| effort that isn't measured in time or stress, except by
| you.
|
| Mo' money, mo' problems
| samhw wrote:
| Also, speaking personally as someone doing PS180k when I
| know my market salary is at most two thirds of that: I
| don't really spend the money, because I never want to be
| pinioned to my job, or to even _feel like_ I 'm locked
| into my job because I'd e.g. have to move out of my house
| if I quit. That limits you quite a bit, unless you're
| preternaturally confident in your jobseeking ability.
| conductr wrote:
| I do the same. I'm naturally frugal but have loosened up
| some as earnings increases but I don't spend or leverage
| like my peers. They are prisoners to their jobs and I can
| (and have) said "enough" and walked away when jobs get
| too toxic. I don't generally have a problem working long
| hard hours but I unplug at times where interruptions will
| not be fielded and I've been present during complete shit
| show management stuff that I just morally will not be
| associated with. It's immensely helpful to my mental
| health knowing I can walk off anytime things go sideways.
|
| I even negotiate my compensation in a manner that I'm not
| beholden like those with stock, options or anything where
| vesting periods are involved. It's typically event based
| and more short term. But, I don't work in a field where
| I'm turning down early Facebook equity or something like
| that.
| samhw wrote:
| Yeah, that sounds very similar to me. I'm the opposite in
| terms of spending - I'll naturally default to spending my
| income, rather than defaulting to not spending - but that
| only holds up to about PS100k, at which point it goes
| beyond my capacity to (in a natural way) spend it all.
| But I share the concern about being a prisoner to one's
| job. That's my main concern. I don't understand how so
| many people are willing to put themselves in a position -
| partly in terms of spending habits but primarily in terms
| of fixed commitments like rent and women - where they
| could not live their current life without their job,
| where losing or forgoing it would mean ruination, by the
| standards of the life they choose for themselves. That's
| just beyond my comprehension. For me a job is a very
| contingent thing.
| rglullis wrote:
| Again, what part of the world are you on?
|
| Even in Berlin, with all the talks about it becoming a top
| destination for tech people, I'm yet to hear any 6-figures
| offer. Even the blockchain companies that were flush with
| cash were paying 90-95kEUR to their top people, maybe a
| 10-20% performance bonus. Mind you, we are talking about
| Germany where the tax is ~42% of your income at this
| bracket if you are single.
|
| When I was freelancing, pay was higher, but my best year
| hit around 130kEUR net income, and that only because I
| deferred a lot of it and got an accountant that advised me
| to put as much as possible into a private pension fund to
| have a bigger tax deduction. If I wanted to have that cash
| in hand, I would've ended up with maybe 80kEUR?
|
| Yes, cost of living is lower (though rapidly rising, and it
| is not a post-pandemic thing) and there is plenty of social
| welfare benefits. Especially after having kids, I wouldn't
| go to the US for a $200k/year job. But to think that this
| kind of compensation is par for the course shows a huge
| disconnect from the reality in the rest of world.
| beberlei wrote:
| To clarify, 42% of every euro earned above 57919EUR.
| Weighted average tax rate is still "just" 27% when
| earning 100.000EUR
| tormeh wrote:
| Depends if you count the cost of statutory health
| insurance as a de-facto tax, in which case it's closer to
| 40% again. There's a bit more nuance to this (there's a
| contribution cap), but if you ever read that taxes in
| Germany are lower than 40% odds are the speaker is
| leaving out health insurance.
|
| Aside: The neat thing with the statutory health insurance
| is of course that they have to pay for your treatment, no
| matter how fucked up your situation is or how little
| money you have - but if you're healthy and well-paid it's
| poor value.
| blumomo wrote:
| In Germany you may want to consider that the employer
| pays another approx. 20% on top of your salary, by law.
| So if your salary is EUR 100k, your employer actually
| pays 120k to keep you on board. Money that your employer
| could otherwise add to your payout as he's paying all off
| it anyway _for_ you, right?
|
| Now with 42% income tax of a 100k salary, there's a net
| of 58k arriving at your bank account over a year.
|
| Given that your employer pays 120k, you have actually
| "lost" 62k (not just 42k) to the government and
| insurances. With that maths, the _net_ tax (incl.
| insurances) is actually close to 52%. That is a whopping
| net +10% taxes from the math in the parent post.
| derhagen wrote:
| > "Now with 42% income tax of a 100k salary, there's a
| net of 58k arriving at your bank account over a year."
|
| Oh boy, that's one of those misconceptions I'm really
| sick of. "The tax is so high, I pay almost half of my
| salary to the greedy state". No, you certainly don't! And
| if everyone please spent 5 minutes to understand the
| difference between the _effective tax rate_ and the
| _marginal tax rate_ , we'd finally get rid of that
| pointless discussion. With a 100k salary, there is ~75k
| net arriving at you bank account, if you're married. If
| you take care of children, it's even more.
|
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einkommensteuer_(Deutschlan
| d)#...
|
| I live in Norway and pay an 34% effective tax. The
| highest in the world at my salary level. I don't
| complain, because tax money is used for an excellent
| education system, including the best libraries I've ever
| been to, and not least for my own ~50kEUR PhD salary that
| every single PhD student in town receives. Meanwhile my
| high school in Germany didn't even have soap dispensers
| in the bathrooms because highly skilled hacker news
| readers don't bother to learn the basics of their tax
| system before they go and vote for corrupt privatization
| parties that promise lower taxes and cut back public
| investments.
|
| > "Money that your employer could otherwise add to your
| payout..." Also, please don't mix up taxes, insurance and
| pension. If you'd prefer to pay for medical expenses
| yourself, do the math. You don't want that, especially
| when you have a family.
| y4mi wrote:
| I am pretty sure they're saying $200k _before_ taxes. It
| 's equivalent wage in Germany would be 150kEUR, as the
| employer has to pay about 21% on top of the salary for
| social securities.
|
| I agree that these numbers always sound outlandish (I'm
| from Germany too), but they do seem to be true. Do keep
| in mind that while the wage gap is bad here, its several
| times worse in the USA.
| rglullis wrote:
| I know it is pre-tax. I also know that there are benefits
| in Europe that simply do not exist in the US - minimum of
| 25 days of _actual_ vacation and not that "you may
| travel for a few days, but you are still on-call" thing
| that people in the US call "holidays", Elternzeit, etc...
|
| But still, no one would claim that is easy to get a
| 90kEUR salary in Germany, or that "if you are not asking
| that much then what are you doing". For 150, you have to
| be _way_ above average or you have to running your own
| business.
| shankr wrote:
| No 200K doesn't include say things like 401K contribution
| or health contribution from employer's side. So if you
| are going to top German salary with employer
| contribution, you need to do the same with USA salary.
| [deleted]
| sciurus wrote:
| I've personally worked with people who I know made
| 6-figures of total comp in Germany. Checking the
| relatively-new https://techpays.eu/, there are plenty of
| 6-figure entries for Germany. I'm not saying this means
| it's the norm, just that it's achievable for people whose
| posts make it to the front page of Hacker News.
|
| You mentioned taxes. When people talk about comp in the
| US, we aren't taking out taxes. Effective tax rate
| (federal+state+fica) for a single individual making $200k
| of salary+bonus is ~30% here. That would turn $200k into
| $140k take home.
| shankr wrote:
| I think the parent above you is talking without taking
| out taxes. For 90K, you would pay (taxes+health insurance
| + pension+unemployment benefit) ~42%. So at the end, what
| you see in your account ~52K/year. This is as a single
| person. For family/kids, you can make little bit more.
| lkrubner wrote:
| Europe is a very different system. Suppose I work
| freelance in New York City, so I make $20,000 a month.
|
| $8,000 -- city, state, and federal taxes take 40%
|
| $3,500 -- rent
|
| $1,500 -- health insurance
|
| $4,000 -- care for my elderly mom
|
| total: $17,000
|
| In other words, it is easy to make $20,000 a month in New
| York City and feel like you are barely surviving. I'm
| grateful I don't have children, as it allows me to take
| care of my mom. If I did have kids, then some very
| painful choices would have to be made about care for my
| mom.
|
| Europe is simply a different system.
| the_gastropod wrote:
| If this a realistic representation of your situation, I
| have a tiny piece of unsolicited advice: open a
| retirement account like a SEP IRA. You can contribute up
| to 25% of your salary in there, and avoid those steep
| NY/NYC taxes. That can save you a truckload of money.
|
| And I know NYC rent is steep. I lived there as of 6
| months ago, and spent a hell of a lot less on rent, and
| had an apartment no reasonable person would describe as
| "barely survivable"--it was a beautiful place in Downtown
| Brooklyn. Rents have increased a bit, as they have
| everywhere, this past year. But $3,500/month is.. more
| than ~1/3 of NYC residents take home a month total.
| mypalmike wrote:
| Unless you are assuming worst case (ACA legal max out of
| pocket) you are vastly overpaying for health insurance.
| Average in NY is under $500.
|
| https://www.ehealthinsurance.com/new-york-health-
| insurance
|
| Also, you might look into state funded elderly care
| support. Saved my family thousands a month for my dad in
| assisted living in FL.
| maccard wrote:
| Most of Europe sees you with the same tax rates of
| roughly 40%, if not higher. Even after rent, tax, and
| health insurance, your leftover pay is more than a mid to
| senior engineer will _gross_ before tax and rent in most
| major European cities. The real outlier there is the care
| cost. if you didn't have that, you would have 7/month
| left over (and even after that, you have $36k/year) -
| that's more than a mid level engineer will gross in the
| UK.
| daenz wrote:
| Why are European engineers paid so low?
| maccard wrote:
| Despite a generally higher cost of living in Europe,
| salaries across the board are lower. A PS100k salary in
| the UK puts you in the 96th percentile for example. It's
| not just engineers, it's everyone.
| daenz wrote:
| This is probably a controversial thing to say, but based
| on your and other comments in this thread, it seems like
| the social safety nets aren't worth the lower salaries.
| Or are they? It seems like non-Americans in this thread
| are unhappy that their ceilings are lower.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| It seems expected to me that the welfare state is not
| going to be worth it for the top quintile? That's kind of
| how redistribution of wealth works?
| daenz wrote:
| >Despite a generally higher cost of living in Europe,
| salaries across the board are lower.
|
| I was more responding to that idea: everything is more
| expensive, and everyone is making a lot less (not just
| the top quintile). Seems like a bad trade, but that's
| just my $0.02
| mjochim wrote:
| Except everything isn't more expensive. For example rent.
| Also, everyone can go see a doctor and pay nothing (not
| just the top quintile). All of this is if course
| simplified, but just to add another pair of cents.
| maccard wrote:
| And groceries. I was _shocked_ at how expensive buying
| fresh food was in the US, and funnily enough, the most
| desired food was imported from the EU and was far more
| expensive. Here's a great comparison - aged parmesan
| cheese from the supermarket [0] [1] is $11/lb here, or
| $17+tax in the US. This is the same for a huge amount of
| ingredients too; cheeses, meats + veg. I helped a friend
| do his grocery shopping in a trader joes, by my best
| guess it was twice the price of my shop in Sainsbury's (a
| middle-of-the-road supermarket)
|
| [0]
| https://www.traderjoes.com/home/products/pdp/parmigiano-
| regg... [1] https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-
| ui/product/sainsburys-parmi...
| maccard wrote:
| And many of us who exist in the top quintile are
| perfectly happy with that, knowing that we are net
| contributors to a better place to live for others.
| daenz wrote:
| Do you think they should be forced to stay? Suppose it
| was easy for all of those high performers (who wanted to
| leave) to move to the USA. You would lose out on that
| extra tax revenue, and it would undermine the
| redistribution scheme.
| rglullis wrote:
| The Welfare State is meant to be a stabilizing force to
| avoid social unrest and to guarantee that the elites can
| enjoy their power/status but _at least_ not destroy the
| fabric of society completely. The Welfare State is not
| meant to be "worth it". You can not think of it as
| something that has a ROI, because it is not an
| investment. It is insurance.
|
| With that said: my net salary may be less than half of my
| American counterpart, but my quality of life is certainly
| better here. At the moment, I would be more interested in
| getting "German" salaries but to be able to live in
| Southern Europe than to get US-salaries in Germany.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| But it's precisely the welfare state that brought my
| former country to the brink, when a massive influx of
| refugees put so much strain on public services, that
| lifelong citizens were having to wait months for critical
| care and stirring up (understandable) angry, nationalist
| sentiment. And there are many such examples across Europe
| at different times.
|
| The other thing the safety net doesn't seem to provide is
| happiness, much to the chagrin of American democratic
| socialists. Overtime, unchecked depression results in the
| crumbling of society as well.
| rglullis wrote:
| Milton Friedman said "You can have Welfare State, _or_
| you can have Open Borders. You can not have both ".
|
| What you are describing is one of my many objections to
| the EU.
| maccard wrote:
| I'm an engineer living in the UK who likely _could_ move
| to the US and take a larger salary, but actively choose
| not to pursue that option. As I've said many times on
| this site, it's likely that after paying rent for an
| apartment in SF, health insurance, and all my living
| costs, my pay after that would be more than the gross pay
| of an engineer in most parts of the UK, I still decide
| not to move for a few reasons.
|
| The first question I ask is what would I do with the
| extra money. I don't _want_ to retire at 40 to pursue my
| dreams, I like what I'm doing and the pace that I'm doing
| it at. If I had the choice, I would choose to be where I
| am doing what I am doing. Why would I move somewhere else
| for 10 years to make money only to come back and do what
| I'm doing right now? [0]. I have friends, family, a life
| here. I don't want to uproot all of that (I have no kids
| and have already moved country, I don't want to do it
| again unless it would improve my quality of life). My
| partner would likely need to find something to do, as
| it's unlikely she would find a company willing to sponsor
| a visa for her line of work. Health care being tied to my
| place of employment is a total nightmare - I can only
| imagine what happens if I'm in a car accident and I end
| up at the wrong hospital, or treated by an anaesthetist
| that is out of network. It's also not just me, the
| injustice of it boils my blood, and I don't really want
| to contribute to that system.
|
| I own a car, but it spends 5 days a week parked outside
| my door, and is only used for "adventuring". The idea of
| movin somewhere to live in a large house that I have to
| drive for groceries, drive to the doctors, drive to the
| bar after work etc, is not appealing to me.
|
| The annual leave situation is commonly far superior in
| Europe - my current job has 40 days PTO per year, and I
| take them all. My previous job, the American employees
| had unlimited PTO, and I don't think my boss ever took
| anything longer than a long weekend in the 3 years I
| worked there. It also seemed many of them were banking on
| a "European trip of a lifetime" with their families,
| which I can do on the train from where I live (also I
| live in one of those bucket list countries to boot).
|
| > It seems like non-Americans in this thread are unhappy
| that their ceilings are lower.
|
| Grass is always greener. The Americans in this thread are
| complaining that it's so much more expensive to live in
| the US and are unhappy that it costs so much. Of course
| it seems the "ideal" situation is work for an American
| company, on an American salary and live in the UK, but
| having worked with Americans for the last decade, that
| has it's tradeoffs too - my workday starts at 10am and
| ends at 7pm (whereas my partner works 9-5). The "culture"
| of American work spills across, etc.
|
| [0] https://www.becomingminimalist.com/recognizing-
| happiness/ - it's not a perfect comparison, but the point
| stands!
| lmc wrote:
| Employer social security contributions is a big one. In
| the USA it's around 5-10% of a worker's salary. In Spain
| it's around 40%.
|
| The gross salary a worker sees is _after_ these, so not
| representative of what it actually costs to hire them.
| shankr wrote:
| yeah as another tech worker in Berlin, reading these
| salaries on consistent basis is kinda depressing. The
| 70-80K is like a starting tech salaries in larger part of
| US. Here in Berlin you have to toll for multiple years
| and then before you know you have hit the 90-100K
| ceiling.
|
| Just compare Berlin with any big American US city,
| Berliner's PPP is still quite low. This is after the
| salary "boom" in Berlin.
| klausa wrote:
| COVID and companies being more open to hire remotely has
| partially fixed that, I know of multiple people making
| 130kE+ in Berlin now, working remotely, with full
| benefits of being an employee of a German GmbH.
|
| I can give you some details via DM if you want.
| shankr wrote:
| yeah I won't say no :) Thank you!
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Straight out of University, I started in the $70-80k
| range in the US almost 20 years ago outside of SV (but
| still an expensive area).
| golergka wrote:
| > Again, what part of the world are you on?
|
| Doesn't matter. There's plenty of remote (as in
| worldwide) offers with these figures now.
|
| Source: heavily interviewed last July while living in
| Moscow, Russia. Got several offers in that ballpark,
| accepted one from "Who's hiring" HN thread. Not a
| rockstar, just a regular developer.
| rglullis wrote:
| Congrats!
|
| But unless your story can come with _many_ other
| examples, it should not be counted as representative of
| any "average" situation from the market at large.
| Dayshine wrote:
| You realise people work jobs as vital and stressful as that
| for a quarter of the money right?
|
| And that most people in the workforce don't get significant
| bonuses, and no shares.
|
| Software engineering is an absurd bubble.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| Maybe the problem is not that tech is overpaid.
|
| Maybe the problem is that those other guys as vital and
| stressful are not being paid enough?
| cwalv wrote:
| > Maybe the problem is that those other guys as vital and
| stressful are not being paid enough?
|
| One possible reason for this is that in software the
| "means of production" is much more accessible, so it's
| easier for a group of developerss to go it alone than it
| is in many other professions. When tech salaries are
| compared to "small business owners" in general, it
| doesn't seem so out of whack.
| daenz wrote:
| I'm not going to say people don't also have stressful and
| difficult jobs while making less. But I will say that I
| was paid what I was paid because the employer and I
| negotiated, and determined that my salary was mutually
| financially beneficial.
| e-clinton wrote:
| Software engineering is a bubble like sports is a bubble
| julienb_sea wrote:
| Tech salaries are a direct result of basic supply/demand.
| The available supply of workers and the demand for a job
| are, to a certain extent, independent from how "vital and
| stressful" the job is.
|
| The only bubble that might pop is an America first hiring
| mindset which constricts the supply. If this were to
| change I would expect tech salaries in America to go
| lower. Then again, this is not that hard to do, most
| large tech companies already have major offshore dev
| teams. There are clearly reasons why companies don't move
| more of their spend offshore.
| runako wrote:
| $200k is increasingly a mid-career engineering salary in many
| parts of the US. Some quick examples taken from companies
| reported on levels.fyi, where pay around $200k was reported
| for people working outside the most expensive US cities plus
| Austin:
|
| - Lowe's (Charlotte):
| https://www.levels.fyi/company/Lowe-s/salaries/Software-
| Engi...
|
| - Equifax (Atlanta):
| https://www.levels.fyi/company/Equifax/salaries/Software-
| Eng...
|
| - ExxonMobil (Houston): https://www.levels.fyi/company/ExxonM
| obil/salaries/Software-...
|
| - T-Mobile (Dallas):
| https://www.levels.fyi/company/T-Mobile/salaries/Software-
| En...
|
| TL;DR; look around and ask for more if you don't see $200k
| near you and you would like to earn more. I'm biased, but I
| think it's also worth noting that $200k in Dallas leaves a
| person with a lot more money left over after basic expenses
| than it does in SF.
| Goronmon wrote:
| That ExxonMobile link has 3 of 20 salaries being an amount
| above $122k and only 1 at $200k. So, even in your cherry-
| picked examples one of the companies only has a single
| person making this "mid-career salary".
| runako wrote:
| 0 - These examples were chosen specifically to avoid
| software & Internet companies, to show that "real"
| companies that operate in "normal" parts of the country
| also pay in the $200k range. (These companies are also
| likely to have less representation on levels.fyi because
| people who spend any time on levels quickly start
| wondering why they aren't working for a tech company.)
| "Cherry-picking" would be highlighting all the FAAMNG
| workers who are remote and/or working in satellite
| offices. Google engineers in midtown Atlanta are paid
| well above any of these, but I specifically did not
| include those jobs because those in fact are elite.
|
| 1 - levels.fyi will not have a record of all the folks
| working at a given company.
|
| 2 - Somebody is indeed the highest-paid engineer at every
| firm, so that data point is relevant. (It could be you!)
|
| 3 - Fine, swap out ExxonMobil for Chevron in Houston and
| then realize they hire from the same talent pool and
| likely are in the same total comp range:
| https://www.levels.fyi/company/Chevron/salaries/Software-
| Eng...
|
| 4 - Take JP Morgan in Houston as a bonus:
| https://www.levels.fyi/company/JPMorgan-
| Chase/salaries/Softw...
|
| 5 - Yes, some tech people make a lot less than others. It
| is also true that $200k is still rapidly becoming a mid-
| career salary in major US cities beyond the expensive
| coasts. (No, you are not mid-career at age 28.)
| TechTeam12 wrote:
| 5. What constitutes mid-career? Why do you disqualify
| someone who is 28?
| runako wrote:
| Great question!
|
| Mid-career means somewhere near the middle of your
| career. If you expect to work from age ~23 to ~65, the
| middle is around age 44. (Edit: if you start work at age
| 18, the middle is still over age 41.) Age 28 is much
| closer to the beginning of your career than the middle.
| Even if you retire at 50, the middle of your career is
| still in your mid-30s.
| rglullis wrote:
| I am inclined to agree with you, but tech has two
| peculiar distinctions:
|
| First, tech changes so fast that we end up having many
| "mini-careers" instead of a long one.
|
| Second, ageism is still a thing: unless your work is so
| noteworthy that companies hire you for the PR (or to
| avoid that a competitor hires you for similar reasons),
| companies think there is not that much of a difference
| between someone with 5-7 years of experience vs 12-15.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Assume working life from 22 -> 65. Call it 45yrs.
| Therefore:
|
| Early: 22-36
|
| Mid: 37-52
|
| Late: 53-68
|
| You're definitely not mid career in your 20s. I'm in my
| 20s and I think that's dumb.
| usayimunderpaid wrote:
| As a technical lead (one level above senior software
| developer in my current company), I make EUR96k in Germany.
| I had an interview with Klarna, and they offered me EUR85k
| (they actually started with 75 and went up to 85), and the
| interviewer nearly laughed at me when I asked for EUR110k.
|
| Different continent, different problems? :)
| jypepin wrote:
| salaries in europe are much lower - but to be fair, I
| lived much better in amsterdam with 100k euro than SF
| with 150k
| shankr wrote:
| For me it was Shopify laughing at me for asking for 90K
| with 7 years of experience.
|
| EDIT: Shopify not Spotify
| runako wrote:
| https://techpays.com looks really interesting for
| European compensation transparency. Tech folks should get
| paid a lot more, especially those outside the US.
| trunnell wrote:
| If 200K sounds high to you, check out the salaries posted on
| Levels FYI [1]
|
| The Bay Area might have the world's highest paying market for
| software engineers.
|
| [1] https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Facebook,Netflix&t
| rac...
| [deleted]
| codegeek wrote:
| I hear you. I meant in the context of people who can get that
| 200K job instead of indie hacking. I don't know the founder
| of "actual" personally but I just checked his twitter profile
| and he works in design systems at Stripe. I would guess he is
| not too far off from that number (all in).
| Dig1t wrote:
| I grew up in the US, my parents are very blue collar, neither
| of them went to college, and they worked hard to give me and
| my sibling a decent childhood. I went to the cheapest college
| I could (a local university you've never heard of) to get a
| BS in Computer Science.
|
| I worked my ass off, grinding on interview studying, working
| internships and jumping companies whenever I could get a
| better offer. I'm about to turn 30 and I made 430k (200k of
| which is salary) in 2021 working at a big company in the US.
|
| I would not consider my background to be particularly
| privileged and I don't consider myself to be all that smart,
| but I managed to get here just by working hard and never
| getting comfortable. Yes, if you get comfortable in the first
| tech job you land and just sit around enjoying your life,
| then you probably won't naturally end up in a place making
| lots of money.
|
| Obviously being privileged and getting everything handed to
| you makes landing a nice cushy job much easier, but there are
| still plenty of paths to these high paying jobs if you're
| willing to work hard.
|
| Also, as mentioned by another person in this thread, this
| totally does take a toll on your mental health and you
| absolutely have to sacrifice things. I gave up a lot of
| things that would have given me a better quality of life, but
| those were choices I was willing to make.
| rglullis wrote:
| You were born and raised in the US. That by itself is
| already a huge privilege.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| also most cs people who are smart tend to think they are
| average because they are surrounded by other very smart
| people. I hate that mindset of "oh if you work hard, you
| too can get a FAANG job making 400k"
| arsfeld wrote:
| I don't think the privilege is just about being handled
| things easily, it's also about being able to reach such
| positions, no matter what the upbringing you had.
|
| A lot of people are going to work as hard or harder than
| you, but because they chose a different career or because
| they don't have your set of skills, they'll never reach
| what you got and that is a huge privilege.
| Dig1t wrote:
| Oh yes, you are totally right, and I'm not saying I don't
| have any privileges because I obviously was given a ton
| of them. You're right, I wasn't born a poor farmer's
| child in Africa or something, I'm speaking relatively.
|
| If we're just talking about people who already know they
| want to work in tech and have some access to a technical
| education, then I think a path to these jobs is
| absolutely open to pretty much everyone if they are
| willing to work hard and sacrifice things. Of course it
| is easier for some people than others, it's not fair.
| cwalv wrote:
| > I don't think the privilege is just about being handled
| things easily
|
| It seems like there are many cases like this where people
| have different perspectives because they have different
| understandings of certain word. E.g. "privilege": to some
| this doesn't have any implications around fairness, like
| "you pass the exam and you can get your driver's license;
| then you have the privilege to drive." To others "you're
| privileged" has an implicit "which isn't fair, and
| shouldn't be so* attached.
| soneca wrote:
| I agree with you, but I appreciate that people on HN talk
| like this because then I am presented to this world of
| privileges. It shows to me that this world exists and I might
| benefit from it. That happened to me.
|
| Instead of anchoring myself to what Brazilian companies pay
| for developers, I focused on getting a remote job at a US
| company. One that would anchor themselves among their peers
| around SV, LA, NY. Now I earn about 12x more than when I
| started as a junior when I started 5 years ago. I earn about
| 3x more than if I was lucky to get the best paying job for my
| experience level here in my city.
|
| This 3x salary increase is very related to knowing that this
| privileged world existed, which is mainly HN's fault in my
| case.
|
| Bear in mind that I am not earning close to USD200k (but six
| digits). I learned around here that FAANG salaries exists,
| but then I decided that those are not for me. But that's a
| conscious decision. A much better position of not even
| knowing this exists.
| xtracto wrote:
| Whitexican problems we call it here in Mexico: I'm in a
| similar position. 6 digit USD salary while living in
| Mexico. My problem is that I've been wanting to setup a
| business: real life like a gym, a store or similar.
|
| The issue is that there's no way I'll get as much money as
| what I'm earning now... and I know building the business
| will require insurmountable efforts.
|
| So I'm reduced to keep working in IT, wait until my good
| luck ends and hopefully be able to retire around 45
| jeromegv wrote:
| You are not "reduced" to do that. You are making that
| choice, that's all. Nobody is forcing you. If you badly
| wanted to create a business, you'd just go ahead and do
| it.
| LesZedCB wrote:
| > > will require insurmountable efforts
|
| regardless of whether or not you believe it's just
| "making that choice," completely discrediting somebody's
| claim the effort is insurmountable _to them_ makes you a
| breaker of Rule 1
| bombcar wrote:
| Or find an extremely trusted local who also wants to
| start a business and bankroll them.
|
| The extremely trusted is the hard part.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Yes you can make that, but only if you are in a tiny (and
| normally very privileged) set
|
| If we're talking about people talented enough to actually
| build and ship their own apps independently, a $200K or more
| compensation package should be easy to come by remotely or in
| any medium size city.
|
| For the truly _average_ developer, $200K is definitely not
| the norm according to any compensation data I 've seen.
| rglullis wrote:
| I've built and shipped my own apps independently. I have
| almost 20 years of professional experience in Web, some
| Machine Learning and Data Science. I also led teams
| distributed around the world. I also got into blockchain
| development in 2019 and now I am working on a slow-but-
| steadily-growing open source project [0] to make payments
| with crypto easier. I'm living in the hot "tech center of
| Europe" (Berlin) and I'm yet to see (much less receive) any
| offer above 90kEUR/year.
|
| Let's make a deal: I will give you my CV and we can work
| through it to see what I need to improve. If you get me an
| $200k/year offer that lets me work remotely, I will give
| you 15% of it for as long as I work there.
|
| [0]: https://hub20.io
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > I'm living in the hot "tech center of Europe" (Berlin)
| and I'm yet to see (much less receive) any offer above
| 90kEUR/year.
|
| European compensation is lower. Sorry, I shouldn't be
| generalizing to United States like I did.
|
| That said, in Berlin your options for high comp are
| largely limited to the big tech companies. You can get
| some hints here: https://techpays.eu/europe/germany#
| (sort by total compensation).
|
| My suggestion, if you really want to get those high value
| offers, is to identify the best paying names on that list
| and start applying now. Stripe, Shopify, Twitter, other
| big tech US remote companies primarily. Work with their
| recruiters to optimize your CV and update your study
| skills. Use the interviews as practice and feedback,
| because it will be better than just about any advice we
| can give you online.
|
| Whatever you do, don't pay some rando from HN huge
| amounts of money for help. All of the information about
| interviewing at big tech companies is out there for free.
| Plenty of prep material to study from.
| rglullis wrote:
| I said that I would pay conditionally on getting the job,
| not for the help. ;)
|
| And it was on purpose. I know that HN is US-centric, but
| I lived on both sides of the ocean and as time passes I
| am getting more sensitive to this limited (dare I say
| _privileged_?) view from otherwise very smart and
| educated people.
|
| My proposal was more of a provocation to see if you could
| really back up the statement that "it should be easy for
| good people to make that much money remotely or medium-
| sized city".
|
| > information about interviewing at big tech companies
|
| That's the other thing that bugs me a lot: Big Tech. If
| these salaries are only attainable at FAANG companies,
| then the road of getting 200k+ offers is no longer just
| about being "above average", but also to be okay in
| selling your soul by working in places that long stopped
| worrying about the welfare of its consumers.
| daenz wrote:
| Sounds like a startup idea...
| balls187 wrote:
| I'll take that deal.
|
| Caveat, 200k would have to include bonuses, and not just
| base salary.
| rglullis wrote:
| And I'll add the following:
|
| - it can not be a FAANG company, or any other company who
| makes their money by unethically exploiting consumerism,
| and/or advertising that abuses user privacy. These are
| non-negotiables. I want to sleep at night without
| thinking about how many people get screwed over for my
| benefit.
|
| - things like "flexible schedule" and "work-life balance"
| need to be more than just wishful thinking. I have two
| small kids that are always going to be my priority.
|
| If you are up for it, let me know your email and I will
| send you my CV.
| balls187 wrote:
| Willing to relocate to the US?
|
| balasuar @ gmail dot com
| rglullis wrote:
| No, I am not. We are talking about remote work here.
| balls187 wrote:
| Fair enough.
|
| > Also the cost of doing something so small can add up
| when you can have a cushy tech job making 200K relatively
| easy.
|
| The point being relatively easy if you fit a specific
| criteria (don't need flexibility, want to work long
| hours, have a above average CV, can live near a major
| tech hub, have no problem working for FAANG etc).
| rglullis wrote:
| My proposal was a direct response to PragmaticPulp, who
| said "a $200K or more compensation package should be easy
| to come by _remotely_ or in any medium size city. "
|
| And this is why I made the proposal, it was a challenge
| to this notion that it is _easy_. I stand by the idea
| that is not, and I am willing to pay to be proven wrong.
| noobermin wrote:
| Best not to make a job proposal over a Hacker News
| comment.
| rglullis wrote:
| Why? I'm reading over the proposal I made and I can not
| find anything bad about it.
|
| Worst case, they can't find a job and nothing changes.
| Best case, I'd be getting a job where I could work from
| anywhere in the world and that would pay me 30% more than
| what I was getting previously.
| junon wrote:
| > If we're talking about people talented enough to actually
| build and ship their own apps independently, a $200K or
| more compensation package should be easy to come by
| remotely or in any medium size city.
|
| I've been able to build and ship my own apps for almost a
| decade now and have never received an offer close to that,
| even in SF. Maybe things have changed in the last 5 years,
| but whenever I see the 200k figure I always have to scoff.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| The software engineer hiring market is very trimodal:
|
| There are companies that hire at average salaries.
| Usually targeting Radford database @ 50% _or_ whatever
| numbers they think they can get away with paying.
|
| The next cluster of companies pay _well_ but not at FAANG
| levels. They pay somewhere around 80-90th percentile of
| salary data. They collect all of the best employees who
| either can 't, won't, or don't want to get FAANG jobs.
|
| Then the long tail of FAANG salaries occupies something
| like the 95th-99th percentile of salaries. These are the
| numbers you see on the levels.fyi homepage.
|
| HN tends to over-emphasize the FAANG level salaries, but
| there are a lot of companies in the middle bucket that
| pay much better than average. You might have to network
| and work to find them, though. Staying at average or
| below-average companies too long can actually make your
| resume less attractive over time, so you have to put in
| some work to break out of the rut and into the higher
| paying companies.
| daenz wrote:
| Sounds like the missing piece is the interviewing and
| negotiation skills. The money is there, you just have to
| convince them that it is in their best interests to give
| it to you.
| junon wrote:
| That was certainly not the problem.
| motoxpro wrote:
| If that wasn't the problem, sounds like you didn't have
| the right skills.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Please take a look at levels.fyi if you don't believe
| there are $200K offers available (caveat: I can only
| speak for US+Canada).
|
| I'm an above-average-skill but ADHD / below-average-work-
| ethic software dev in Canada who just finished interviews
| and my highest offer was $150K USD. I only prepped
| algorithms for 1-2 months but have a feeling if I spent 4
| months prepping, I'd be able to break into the mid to
| high 200K USD range. And this is well below what a lot of
| people are making in the U.S. according to levels.fyi and
| teamblind.com
|
| I don't say this to make you feel bad, and I even agree
| that the average is of course lower (glassdoor says the
| U.S. average for software engineers is ~$108K USD though
| I suspect older data-points bring it down from the real
| figure).
|
| But I think >70% of U.S.-based software engineers with >5
| years of experience are capable of breaking into 200K USD
| if they spent 3-6 months preparing (depending on their
| degree of natural talent and abilities to learn, problem-
| solve, and retain information).
|
| Of course, chasing TC is also not a fun treadmill to be
| on, so if you're comfortable, you should do what makes
| you happy :)
|
| The point of this is to say that these numbers are very,
| very real, and even attainable for the majority of devs
| who set their sights on them, and it's kind of silly to
| scoff at them as you put it. The only important skills
| required are ambition, dedication, perseverance, and good
| research skills (which are among the most critical skills
| for software engineers anyway) to be able to navigate
| negotiations and the market.
| balls187 wrote:
| I'd phrase it slightly different--talented enough to build
| a small company that generates real revenue, vs building
| and shipping apps.
| risyachka wrote:
| It's not that simple. Even if you are a great developer,
| but not from first-world country, you can forget about 200k
| unless you literally bust your ass for years and years in
| order to get US visa.
| Goronmon wrote:
| _For the truly average developer, $200K is definitely not
| the norm according to any compensation data I 've seen._
|
| One issue in this community is its members being unable to
| understand what "average developer" actually means.
| lkrubner wrote:
| A lot of people on Hacker News are in the USA, so we see a
| lot of USA salaries posted here. Obviously you'll make a bit
| less in Europe, that is a different system, salaries are
| lower but social services are higher. And outside of the
| West, I think we all understand that salaries are lower. We
| could adopt the habit of stating which country we are in,
| with every comment that we post. Would that help?
| trafnar wrote:
| I'm guessing this comes from the California / Bay Area
| perspective where 200k salaries are not rare (but a "just ok"
| house costs $2.5 million)
| [deleted]
| noobermin wrote:
| The keyword I'm assuming is "relatively," I'm hoping it's not
| absolutely an easy job because that would just be wasted
| money, which I don't put as being above some people's
| intelligence but still.
| alexandargyurov wrote:
| I have to fill out every transaction manually? No Open Banking
| integration? :/
| skrobul wrote:
| There are few importers available which have been opensourced
| (look at the Actual's github org), I have only tried one during
| migration from greedy YNAB.
|
| There is also an API which works quite well. I am using it to
| import transactions from Revolut. So no Open Banking yet, but
| afaik it's painful to get in the UK anyways
| xd1936 wrote:
| > You could even hook up your own bank syncing -- Plaid support
| a free development plan that covers an individual user. In
| fact, you'll see Plaid support in the syncing server because I
| already started building this out.
|
| Not yet, but it sounds like a top priority.
| klik99 wrote:
| THIS is how you sunset a product, good on him for making a tough
| choice and doing it the right way
| PStamatiou wrote:
| Would be curious if you'd be open to talking about some of the
| history in terms of user growth, revenue and costs. Just curious
| about how these types of projects go.
| yurishimo wrote:
| If the final user numbers are accurate, revenue was a bit over
| $3k a month. Not even enough to really pay the founder if
| living in the US. Assuming $200/mo for servers, backups, and
| help desk software, that doesn't leave much after taxes for
| take home pay.
|
| As someone who just discovered this software, I am now really
| curious to give it a try!
| jlongster wrote:
| Yep that's right.
|
| I launched around 3 years ago, and it was brutally slow. I
| think it took a year to hit 100 subscribers.
|
| Another year to hit 300.
|
| This past fall, YNAB increased their prices which gave me
| decent jump from around 500 to 800 subscribers which is where
| I'm at today.
|
| I did everything wrong when it comes to marketing and getting
| subscribers. I focused on the tech and never invested in
| content, building hype, etc. Well, I take that back --
| sometimes I did, but only 10% instead of 70% like I should
| have been doing.
| xbryanx wrote:
| This is awesome feedback and I appreciate your honesty. I
| will help so many remember what matters in their next
| ventures.
| [deleted]
| difflens wrote:
| Can I just say that I appreciate the transparency about
| your numbers here! As a bootstrapped SAAS builder here,
| this gives me perspective
| codegeek wrote:
| As a bootstrapped solo founder myself (even though I have
| somehow built a small team after 7 years), I totally get
| what you are saying. Be proud of what you did and most
| don't even get to do what you did. It is so hard to do
| things alone and especially when you realize it is mostly
| about Marketing and Sales (and not the product only).
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I'm a firm believer that the only way to stand out in the
| B2C world is to have a VC backed marketing budget. You
| can't bootstrap a positive CAC in a reasonable timeframe
| without going bankrupt as a solo founder.
| 650 wrote:
| An excel spreadsheet to track reoccuring expenses and income with
| additions made for upcoming expenses, etc. hyperpersonalized for
| you has been the best for me, have tried a few budget apps.
| Micromanaging food expenses should be something that you decide
| on the spot rather than seeing 600$ on food this month oh-no.
|
| Caveat: Software Engineer salary with large discretionary income
| conductr wrote:
| Me plus wife and a toddler and I wish I could keep under $600 a
| WEEK
|
| We eat out regularly and just going to a fast casual spot is
| like $40-50 for sandwiches
| corderop wrote:
| Sometimes I feel that society forces us to be economically
| successful in all aspects of life. I'm in the first steps of my
| career, and even though I just want to learn new things and do
| exciting projects, the first thought that come to my mind when I
| have an idea to develop is: "How could this be profitable?"
|
| > One thing I'm really excited about open-source is I no longer
| have to deal with any of the business or deployment stuff. I can
| focus on being a project manager.
|
| I think that having this feeling it's the best achievement you
| can get from this.
| poleguy wrote:
| I still use YNAB4 regularly. I have a paid copy from before they
| moved to an online model. I'm running it on ubuntu in wine. It
| still works fine.
|
| I had never heard of Actual till today. It looks like it would
| cover my use case. I'm not sure why I would have switched,
| though, as YNAB4 still works for me and has no recurring charge
| and is fully local.
| [deleted]
| sirtimbly wrote:
| Sad that this app didn't achieve the scale of subscriptions it
| deserved. A good reminder that awesome tech isn't usually enough.
| Do you regret not taking capital to fund marketing and support
| full time? Or put another way, any other ideas of where you could
| have spent someone else's money to give you a boost into higher
| subscription numbers?
| jlongster wrote:
| Yes I totally regret it. There are ethical VCs that would be
| willing to invest a small amount and I should have done that.
| Bootstrapping isn't all it's cracked up to be; there are a lot
| better and smarter ways to kickstart a project.
| renewiltord wrote:
| You can still raise if you want to and have a growth user
| growth story. Though completely understandable if you feel
| burned out on the product.
|
| If you want to stick to it, I would lean the open-sourcedness
| of it into a connector data-source import advantage.
|
| Your product looks slick, man. It's probably small
| consolation, but you've got a talent for good product design.
| cyral wrote:
| This open source finance product recently raised 8.5M:
| https://openbb.co/ I believe it from some organization that
| focuses on OSS
| adrianmsmith wrote:
| Could you still pursue that route? Presumably it's never too
| late, especially as you've got a product already, and have
| demonstrated traction.
| jlongster wrote:
| I've thought about it! I'm a little burned out though on
| the business stuff. I'd like for this just to be a cool
| product now.
| tomatowurst wrote:
| but if you can't generate enough revenues to justify
| valuations you wouldn't go anywhere either. i guess it is
| better to find that out after raising millions and paying
| yourself a fat salary
| sirtimbly wrote:
| It's in an established and competitive market. There's
| money flowing into companies doing this same thing. An
| investor throwing (some) capital at marketing and growth
| for this totally functional (and beautiful) product could
| have made sense.
| cpitman wrote:
| I wish people wouldn't use "we open sourced it" as a synonym for
| "this product is dead". Especially for a SaaS company, there is a
| totally valid business strategy in open sourcing your codebase
| but continuing to provide a paid SaaS offering for users that are
| not interested in self-hosting.
|
| It causes confusion every time a company open sources their
| software. Always have to wonder, "Is it dead and they are yeeting
| it over the fence?"
| tshaddox wrote:
| To be fair, the email they sent to their newsletter list is
| more succinct and clear about their services shutting down:
|
| >>>
|
| This will be the last email you ever receive from Actual. You
| are receiving this because you are a subscriber or have used
| Actual in the past.
|
| Actual is moving to an open-source model and will be 100% free.
|
| This means our subscription syncing service will be shutting
| down in the future. We have instructions for setting up your
| own server, letting you completely own your data and have
| syncing for free.
|
| Read more details about how this effects you in the full blog
| post: https://actualbudget.com/open-source
| ramshorns wrote:
| Even that part is kind of misleading. Making the software
| open source doesn't _mean_ that the subscription service has
| to shut down; those are two different decisions.
|
| But maybe we don't have to be too critical. I tend to read
| "[project you've never heard of] is going open-source" as
| "here's a new project you might want to check out", but even
| if they really mean that the project is mostly shutting down,
| open sourcing it is a good thing to do.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Any examples of companies that opened previously closed source
| that continued to offer that product?
| tshaddox wrote:
| The web framework Remix was closed source and available only
| to license purchasers for about a year, until they announced
| their seed funding in October of last year:
| https://remix.run/blog/seed-funding-for-remix#open-source
| cpitman wrote:
| I work for Red Hat, we do it all the time. We often acquire
| closed source companies and then release the software as
| open-source, while continuing to offer it.
|
| I believe the most recent example was Stackrox, open sourced
| March 31st. The "productized" version is Red Hat Advanced
| Cluster Security. https://www.stackrox.io/blog/open-source-
| stackrox-is-now-ava...
| blooalien wrote:
| Blender 3D might be one of the more well-known success
| stories in that regard. Godot game engine also perhaps? Gotta
| be more'n a few others as well, I'm sure. Those are just two
| that instantly come to mind for me (being a couple of my
| favorites that were both closed source at one time in their
| history and have gone on to massive and continual success
| since their open sourcing).
| zwily wrote:
| The Canvas LMS: https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms
| Trasmatta wrote:
| Canvas was open source from the start. Schools have always
| been able to run their own instance, but most just pay
| Instructure to do it.
| indigochill wrote:
| I don't necessarily interpret it as a synonym, more that these
| are two events that naturally coincide. IMO it's better to
| decide to open source a product when it dies than to annihilate
| it. If nothing else, people may be able to learn something from
| the source.
| cpitman wrote:
| I agree, better to open source a product then to just let it
| die off. I just wish companies were honest in their headline
| ("this product didn't work out, here's the source") instead
| of trying to spin it.
| spyremeown wrote:
| Not gonna lie, this is kinda awesome. Thanks a lot, will take a
| look at the code later.
| ubiquitous-dev wrote:
| Hey James, we're really sorry to hear about you closing down the
| business from a revenue standpoint! It sounds like it was the
| right choice for you though. Thanks for the contribution back to
| the community, as well as for prettier! We are building a
| platform to support local-first application development, and have
| appreciated your various articles / interviews / blog posts about
| the topic! Best of luck in the future, and thanks again.
| panick21_ wrote:
| I work for a company that does this kind of product for banks. We
| spend a huge amount of time integrating our solution into
| traditional banks contexts. There for sure is a lot of overhead.
| But being inside banks also gives you better data access.
| Robin_Message wrote:
| If it's running locally (or in a cloud the user choses to trust),
| it doesn't need to be a CRDT any more to get the same security
| properties, which would ironically mean it is now easier to
| develop.
|
| (Granted CRDTs might enable other features although OT is
| generally considered simpler)
| finchisko wrote:
| I feel your frustration about business not going as envisioned.
| My current failure rate is two failed attempts to build
| profitable busines. Actually the second project is similar to
| yours. Invoice app for small entrepreneurs. Till today I'm the
| only user of the app. To reduce costs, I made it run completely
| without server support, all data is stored in local storage and
| hosted on netlify for free (no own domain). https://moja--
| fakturazdarma.netlify.app/. It was nice challenge for me to make
| it work completely without any backend (generation of pdfs using
| pdfmake, generating qrcodes and lzma compression ...) I still use
| it for main own invoicing and use to in my resume as work
| reference, but with zero money income.
| tinytuna wrote:
| I'd suggest first having an English version of the site and
| maybe paying for a domain (looks more professional and
| trustworthy) and you could post it in Product Hunt to have more
| people discovering it.
| finchisko wrote:
| Thanks. Sure, I had own domain for a year, made promotion on
| Facebook. This product was not developed with other countries
| in mind. Idea was to do pilot in my own country and then
| scale up. Every country has different invoicing rules, so it
| cannot be just translated to English and put on US market.
| But since it didn't attract any single customer, I just gave
| up as my previous experience was that adding features when
| there is no traction for MVP just prolong your suffering.
| joshpadnick wrote:
| Could you share more about the challenges you hit working with
| CRDTs?
| aeharding wrote:
| Great to see it going open source! I hope Actual can keep
| development going with the community support.
|
| Similarly, a local-first (PouchDB) budgeting app I built[1] went
| open source[2][3] a few years ago. It's worked out well, I love
| seeing what everyone does with it in their forks. Unlike Actual
| however, I maintain a paid subscription service while being open
| source.
|
| It's worked out quite well. Luckily it's not a huge time
| commitment as a side project, probably due to no native apps.
| I've also shifted from active development to maintenance, with
| sporadic updates every now and then. For example, I recently
| moved everything from Gitlab to Github[4] and upgraded a bunch of
| dependencies under the hood to get everything compiling on Apple
| Silicon. (For example, I now run AngularJS tests with Jest,
| hehe.)
|
| [1] https://financier.io/
|
| [2] https://github.com/financier-io/
|
| [3] https://blog.financier.io/financier-is-now-open-source-
| bdfe9...
|
| [4] https://blog.financier.io/weve-moved-to-github-4617239b9fa3
| gtirloni wrote:
| _> Great to see it going open source_
|
| It's actually shutting down.
| jlongster wrote:
| What's shutting down is the public syncing server. That
| server is literally just a message store: it takes CRDT
| changes and puts them in a big table. And it servers them
| back out.
|
| Now that the server is public, it's incredibly easy for you
| to run your own. It's such a simple server (no postgres etc
| requirement) that this model is actually way better.
| ec109685 wrote:
| CRDT's and the like seem like the perfect thing to build an
| app, but you make a good point about it requiring something
| so custom compared to a thin client that makes web service
| requests for data on each screen / page view.
| cormacrelf wrote:
| > you make a good point about it requiring something so
| custom
|
| The comment you're replying to didn't say this at all,
| the developer did. In theory it's also wrong. The server
| can be application agnostic. It shouldn't care whether
| the CRDT update is from a budget app or an RSS reader or
| whatever else, because the sync job for the server is
| exactly the same. You should also be able to encrypt the
| content, and therefore set up generic shared CRDT servers
| instead of requiring people to run their own.
|
| It only requires more work now because nobody has built
| that yet.
| muhehe wrote:
| I've never heard of this, but it looks nice. Anyone can compare
| with firefly-iii?
| slwoslownsn wrote:
| It's far less flexible of a system than firefly-iii.
|
| That said it actually (lol) functions well with any amount of
| historical data. Firefly-iii slows to a crawl with just a few
| years of data.
|
| Actual handles nearly a decade worth of data (imported from
| YNAB4) with ease.
| sirtimbly wrote:
| I've used both. firefly-iii is a fairly good, easy to maintain
| and host, web app. It's not as good design or UX as Actual -
| especially since firefly-iii has no mobile experience to speak
| of. Acutal had great mobile apps. firefly's budgeting interface
| is a bit of a UX mess.
| tegansnyder wrote:
| I'm looking for a solution in this space that lets you plot the
| waterfall effect. What I'd like this solution to do is the
| following:
|
| 1. Enter all my bills that require full payment each month 2.
| Enter my bills that can be variably paid (ex. credit cards,
| medical bills, etc) 3. Enter my monthly income 4. Enter my
| budgeted personal/home expenses (food, gas/transport, etc)
|
| Then the solution should be able to model a few different paths
| to maximizing my savings and plot out a waterfall that says if I
| payoff X over 6 months and pay the minimum on Y then here is what
| my savings would look like.
|
| I'd like to be able to see what my projected payoff dates for
| different bills are and what my projected savings look like if I
| was to follow the model.
| thepra wrote:
| Yep, making clients apps is kind of hell, that's why I chose PWAs
| for my web app collAnon, "installable" on iPhones, Androids and
| Desktops
| encoderer wrote:
| I did the SaaS-side-business thing for about 6 years. Early on I
| decided the SaaS was going to be my next career move and I would
| stay at my employer until I could quit employment altogether. A
| new job means you have to earn your place on a new team and how
| could I do that successfully with one eye on my SaaS at all
| times?
|
| When James joined stripe I was surprised both that stripe was
| agreeable to side projects and that James was courageous enough
| to try to do both. Open sourcing here just looks like more
| courage.
|
| Good luck James and congrats on what you've built here!
| brushfoot wrote:
| As someone else with a SaaS side business of around the same
| age, it gets painful around then: You have to make tough
| decisions and the early fun is gone. Plus keeping up with new
| and existing customers can make it feel like you're not really
| steering the ship anymore but being tossed around by the storm.
|
| I understand James's desire to step back, though MIT is an
| interesting choice since now anyone can do anything with it,
| including selling it.
|
| What did you end up doing with your SaaS business?
| encoderer wrote:
| Went full time in 2020! Immediately took an 80% pay cut, but
| I spend 0 hours in bullshit meetings and no longer have to
| play the corporate employment game.
| zippergz wrote:
| That's awesome. Congrats!
| brushfoot wrote:
| Was hoping for that answer. Good for you! I've been
| weighing when to take the plunge myself. I can't support my
| family with what mine is making on the side right now (10%
| of my day job salary), though I know if I were full time on
| it I'd be seeing more return. Just feels like a high dive
| into a small pool and I'm trying to suss out the right
| moment. Any tips/lessons learned?
| encoderer wrote:
| Double down on anything that has worked to attract new
| customers. Ask yourself if there was a gun to your head
| and you HAD to 10x in a year what would you do. Get to a
| point where it covers your lifestyle and make the leap.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| > In June, all existing subscriptions will be cancelled. Specific
| dates coming soon.
|
| On one hand, good for being this transparent about it. I'm sure
| none of these decisions are easy. On the other hand... June is...
| 6 weeks away? I don't know the size or tech skills of the
| userbase - perhaps this is a decent time frame? It seems overly
| aggressive going in to 'shut off' mode so quickly. But...
| dragging it out longer may not help that many more people.
|
| Probably no simple decisions that don't inconvenience people in
| the short term, regardless of which way you go.
| jlongster wrote:
| If the community want to wait, I'm happy to push back the date.
|
| I actually thought it felt less greedy to not wait too long,
| because doing it in the far future just means people are paying
| for unsupported software. Happy to keep it running though for
| as long as people want.
| jtbayly wrote:
| I'm not using your software, but as somebody who has had to
| switch personal finance apps multiple times, I'd personally
| want to be able to use it through the end of the year. It's
| easier to just start a new program at a new year.
| slightknack wrote:
| I love Actual, one of the best local-first apps I've used. I'm
| excited that it's been open sourced, but I also understand that
| this release is a bit bittersweet. Awesome work James, best of
| luck in your future endeavors :)
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