Self-Host Actual Budget on a VPS: Your Private YNAB Alternative

The envelope budgeting method is straightforward: allocate every incoming dollar to a named category (rent, food, savings, emergency fund) before spending it. When a category runs out, you either stop spending or consciously move money from another envelope. YNAB popularised this approach in a polished app — but it costs $99/year, stores your financial data on its servers, and can't be audited. Actual Budget replicates the method (including the coveted 'roll with the punches' flexibility) with full source code on GitHub under the MIT licence. Self-hosting it on a VPS means your transactions, balances and budget history never leave your infrastructure — and the annual cost is whatever a small VPS costs.

Actual ships as a single Docker image — no database server, no message broker, no configuration files. One container, one volume, one port. On your Ubuntu 22.04 VPS, run: docker run -d --restart=always -p 5006:5006 -v actual-budget:/data --name actual-budget actualbudget/actual-server. The server is ready in under two seconds on port 5006. Open http://<your-vps-ip>:5006 in a browser, click 'Create new budget', and you are budgeting. The entire SQLite database is stored in the actual-budget Docker volume — back it up with a single docker run --rm -v actual-budget:/data alpine tar -czf - /data. The folder mounted on /data holds two subfolders, server-files and user-files: that is where the server’s entire state lives. For a lasting deployment, prefer a docker-compose.yml file (the official documentation points to the one in the repository, packages/sync-server/docker-compose.yml) and start it with docker compose up --detach.

Actual is one of the lightest services to host. On the machine side: a VPS with 1 GB of RAM running Ubuntu 22.04 is plenty, the application using around 80 MB at rest (check this on your own instance with docker stats). On the network side: a domain name, a DNS record pointing to the VPS, and ports 80 and 443 open for the reverse proxy; port 5006 can stay closed to the public once Caddy is in place. As for the server’s own figures: the default port is 5006, the data folder is /data (variable ACTUAL_DATA_DIR), and file uploads are capped by default at 20 MB for sync and 50 MB for encrypted sync. A very old or large budget can exceed these thresholds; a sync reset then compresses the history. For bank sync, add an account with your chosen provider, its API keys and, for Enable Banking, a Production application whose redirect URL uses HTTPS.

To access your budget from outside the VPS — on mobile or from another country — you need HTTPS. The simplest path is Caddy. Install it on the same VPS and add a one-line Caddyfile: budget.yourdomain.com { reverse_proxy localhost:5006 }. Caddy handles the Let's Encrypt certificate automatically. Once the domain resolves, open https://budget.yourdomain.com on your phone, tap the browser's 'Add to Home Screen' button, and Actual becomes a full PWA icon on your home screen. All sync traffic between your devices and the server goes through this TLS channel. This is not just a convenience. Actual needs a secure context to enable SharedArrayBuffer, which its SQLite engine uses: without HTTPS, the app refuses to start in the browser. The official documentation lists three causes for this block: no HTTPS, Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy and Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy headers set incorrectly, or a browser that is too old. With the default actual-server, both headers are already sent; if you go through Nginx, do not duplicate them (see troubleshooting below). Bank sync adds a second reason: the redirect URL registered with the provider must use https.

Actual’s official documentation lists Enable Banking among its sync providers, for European banks, and calls it an experimental feature: it may have bugs, missing functionality, incomplete documentation, and may be removed in a future release. It may also be absent from the latest stable release; the page advises enabling experimental features and using the nightly images for the most recent implementation. User feedback is gathered in GitHub issue no. 7799 (opened in May 2026, labelled “experimental feature”, still open when we reviewed it). It contains no list of guaranteed banks: it is up to you to check, in Actual’s wizard, that your country and bank appear, then to test on a single account before relying on it. Also remember that the provider’s keys live on your server: a properly hardened VPS and protected backups are part of the setup.

All data lives in the actual-budget Docker volume. A daily cron backup is one command: docker run --rm -v actual-budget:/data -v /backups:/out alpine tar czf /out/actual-budget-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz /data. Restore by reversing the tar into a fresh volume before starting the container. Actual also has a built-in export: from Settings, in the Data section, click “Export data”. This creates a portable ZIP of your entire budget that you can import on any other Actual instance. Two clarifications. First, this volume also holds your bank-sync credentials: the documentation says they are stored on the server, outside end-to-end encryption, so anyone with access to the database can read them. Treat the archive as a secret: restricted permissions, an encrypted copy kept off the VPS. Second, after a restore, the documentation recommends a sync reset (Settings → Advanced → Reset Sync), done from the device holding the most recent changes, so the backup does not sync back to its old state. Test a full restore on a throwaway instance at least once: a backup that has never been restored remains a hypothesis.

Actual’s end-to-end encryption is optional. To enable it, open the budget, go to the settings, Encryption section, click “enable encryption” and choose a password: a key derived from that password encrypts your data before it leaves the device. A few points to know before clicking. It is irreversible: you cannot turn it off, and going back to an unencrypted file means a backup and restore. If you lose the password, the documentation is clear: your encrypted data is unrecoverable, unless you keep a local copy, with which you can reset the key. Each new device must enter the password once, and it should differ from the server password. Enabling it requires a sync reset, and encryption costs a slight slowdown during sync. Finally, it covers only the budget data: bank-sync keys stay on the server side, and the device’s local data is not encrypted, hence the value of disk encryption.

Updating means replacing the image, not the data. With Docker Compose: docker compose pull && docker compose up -d. With this guide’s docker run command, the documentation describes three steps: docker stop, then docker container rm on the container, then the same docker run relaunched with --pull=always. As long as the actual-budget volume is kept, the budget survives the container’s replacement. Before each update, make the backup from the previous section; this matters most if you use a nightly image to try bank sync, as the documentation recommends backing up before trying that branch. One known trap: when going back from a nightly image to a stable tag, you may hit “This budget cannot be loaded with this version of the app”; the restore page then points to a manual SQLite migration, which is best not improvised on the only copy of your data. After the update, open the app and check the last synced transaction and an account balance.