What Sure Is: A $1 Million Finance App, Free and Open Source
Sure is a self-hosted personal finance app, and its backstory is the reason it exists at all. It is a community fork of Maybe Finance, a project whose team spent most of 2021 and 2022 building a full-featured personal finance and wealth management app. That app even included an Ask an Advisor feature that connected users with a real CFP or CFA as part of the subscription. The business end of things did not work out, and the team stopped developing the app in mid-2023. After spending nearly $1 million on development, on employees, contractors, data providers and infrastructure, they open-sourced it so users could self-host it for free. They did launch a hosted version briefly, but that did not work out either, at least not as a sustainable consumer business. So now here we are, in the README's own words: a community-maintained fork keeping the codebase alive to see where it can go next. It has 11,432 stars.
What You See: Cash Flow, Net Worth and Spending in One Place
Open Sure and the dashboard puts the whole picture in front of you: cash flow, net worth, spending and outflows, side by side. That is the whole point of a personal finance app, and Sure does it without a subscription, because you host it yourself and your data stays on your own server. It is not only a web app either. Sure runs in the browser, as a macOS desktop app and as a mobile app, and it also exposes API clients and LLM agents, so the same numbers are reachable wherever you work. If some of your income comes from freelance work, an AI Invoice Generator writes the invoice, and Sure tracks the money once it lands. If you sell things on the side, a Markup Calculator works out the selling price from your costs before the sale ever reaches your dashboard. The app is about seeing where money comes from and where it goes, and those two tools cover the money coming in.
The AI Assistant: Ask It Where Your Money Went
Sure ships with a built-in AI assistant that answers questions about your own finances, like where you could cut back on spending, using your own numbers rather than generic advice. The important detail is that it uses your own AI provider. The one-click deploy options make that explicit: a Simple AI setup backed by OpenAI, where you supply the token, or an External AI setup that pairs the assistant with an external gateway. Your data stays in your own deployment, and the AI runs on the provider you choose. That is a different deal from a hosted finance app, where your transactions sit on someone else's server and the AI is whatever the vendor picked. Here the assistant is a feature of your own instance, not a reason to hand your finances to a third party.
Self-Hosting It: Docker, One-Click Deploys and Demo Data
Sure is a fully working app that you self-host with Docker, and the README points first-time hosts at the Docker guide rather than the developer setup. If you would rather not touch a server, there are one-click deploys on Render, in three flavors with and without AI, plus Run on PikaPods and Deploy on Hostim. Developers who want to contribute run it locally instead: Ruby, PostgreSQL and Redis, then bin/setup and bin/dev, with an optional rake demo_data:default to load demo data. The demo login is user@example.com with the password Password1!, so you can click through a populated dashboard before you commit to hosting it yourself. That demo-first approach is the fastest way to answer the only question that matters: does this show you your money clearly enough to use every day.
Why a Fork, and Why It Matters
A fork only survives if a community keeps it alive, and Sure is honest about what that takes. The repo is a community fork of the archived Maybe Finance project, distributed under the AGPLv3 license, and you are free to fork it yourself under the same license. The README asks one thing of forks: keep the original AGPLv3 license, state clearly that your fork is based on Maybe Finance but is not affiliated with or endorsed by Maybe Finance Inc., and do not use the Maybe name or logo, because Maybe is a trademark of Maybe Finance Inc. Sure, as a name, is not. The project also runs a public performance dashboard showing slow requests on the demo site with stack traces, and invites contributions that help with performance. That openness is the point. A $1 million app that a business could not sustain is now a community project, and its future depends on the people using it.
