Hey, hey, wassup, wassup, wassup?
Hey, hey, hey, how y'all doing?
It's Freedom Tech Weekend.
Sorry, I'm about 15 minutes late.
I am constantly updating my setup.
So now what I'm doing is I have a,
I'm actually using my home server to do all of this.
So I'm streaming from my laptop,
but then all of the stuff that I'm gonna show you
when I share my screen,
I am going to do it on a remote server in my home where I can have the entire environment set up.
And I can keep it contained.
That way I can have a lot of stuff for the streaming and other things supporting on the side going on
while keeping the environment clean for the stream.
So let me check YouTube real quick.
Make sure it's working well.
I don't need these headphones on.
Let me take them off.
Okay, YouTube looks good.
Let's go over to X, make sure X is working.
Checking the audio there.
I got the title right this time.
Sweet.
Okay.
I got the title correct.
I still have not figured out how to do Zapdos stream.
I know, it's ridiculous.
I'm a freedom tech show, and I haven't figured out how to stream on Noster yet.
I feel like I figured it out, but it's not working. I don't know what's up.
So I'll keep figuring that out.
Okay.
Welcome, everyone. Let me pull up the chat here.
I don't remember where I see chat. There it is.
Yo, what's up? We got Uncle Jim in the house. What's up, Jim?
Welcome. Okay. Okay. Looks like we can get started here. We got 10 people watching. Welcome
to all the 10 people watching. This is awesome. Okay. Today on Freedom Tech weekend, I have
so many different Freedom Tech names floating around in my head. Today on Freedom Tech weekend,
we are going to be talking about personal finance, business finance, using a Freedom Tech tool called
Firefly 3. If you have been around the Freedom Tech space and tried to explore how do I do my
own accounting, you've probably come across this project. I don't know if you use it or not, but
I personally have not actually used it yet, but I'm finally at the point where I am so done
paying for monthly and annual subscriptions basically to Intuit. I've been doing it for
way too long and spreadsheets just aren't enough. So I am going to make the plunge in the Firefly
3 and see if I can make it work for me. I know that other places, other organizations that I've
talked to that are more Freedom Tech oriented have been using it. So it seems like it's capable
and we're going to go over it today together and look at it and see if it might be capable for you.
All right, so let me share my screen.
I'm going to jump into it.
Share a window.
Okay, so like I said at the very beginning,
I have changed my setup here to where I'm streaming from my laptop.
I think I've improved the audio.
Last week, the audio got really bad later on,
So I'm going to listen back on this if it gets awful.
I'll do some more tinkering with it to see if I can improve the audio.
But then what I've done is I have a home server, which I highly recommend everybody get a home server.
And I am remoting into that home server, and I'm going to share that window here.
So that way I can have like this clean environment, this sandbox, if you will, where I can put all the things that we're talking about today.
Okay.
So here we are.
We got Firefly 3, and I've got Maple open up on the side
because, you know, as we're chatting, oftentimes questions come up,
and so I can type in questions here and get things figured out.
And Maple is a private AI chat, confidential.
You can get a free account.
Just go to trymaple.ai, get your own free account, and start protecting your chats.
Don't give all your data over to ChatGPT and other big organizations.
We are freedom tech oriented here, and so protect yourself.
All right, so what is Firefly 3?
Firefly 3 is a replacement for Quicken, QuickBooks,
you name it, any other big personal finance tool out there.
There are lots of little personal finance tools.
If you go on the web, go on to any app store,
whether it's on a Mac or on a phone, Android, iOS,
there'll be lots of personal finance apps.
And they all do great things,
but in general, they all do roughly the same thing.
They take transactions in from a bank,
and then they categorize those transactions and then they show you how much you're spending
and which categories you're spending them in so that you can get a look at how your finances are.
That's the basics of it. But there is a huge data privacy implication here that we often just kind
of sweep under the rug because on the websites, like if we go to Intuit, right?
So if we go into its website, let's see how long it takes to scroll before I see some
kind of security thing.
Oh, they're not even like talking about it right in the front.
Secure.
Let's just ask Maple.
How secure and private is QuickBooks?
Okay.
QuickBooks is the gold standard for small and large business accounting, right?
Okay, it's a popular accounting tool.
Data encryption.
QuickBooks uses encryption to protect data both in transit and at rest.
This ensures that even if unauthorized parties intercept data, they won't be able to read it.
Okay, but how do they encrypt it at rest?
Are they encrypting it individually to your company or are they encrypting all of it together?
Let's ask.
I'm going to copy and paste this real quick.
you said this
are they encrypting each user account separately or together with other accounts
my guess is that it is in one big pool because i don't have a private key that i manage
when I use QuickBooks, right?
It's encrypted at the file level.
Each user's data is encrypted separately using...
Okay, so I do have to put a unique encryption key
on my account.
That's awesome.
Encryption keys are stored separately.
Encryption keys are stored in a separate
secure key management system,
which is not accessible.
And then they use...
Okay, well, that is good to know.
So QuickBooks does encrypt.
I do remember when I unlock my QuickBooks file,
I have to type in a private password.
So that is great.
They do have a cloud infrastructure
multi-tenant, meaning that multiple user accounts are hosted on the same servers. However, each
user's data is logically separated and encrypted separately using the methods described above.
This ensures that even if an unauthorized party gains access to the underlying infrastructure,
they will not be able to access or read data from user accounts. Okay, I want to be honest here on
the platform, so I don't want to just like talk crap and not be able to back it up. So it sounds
like even in their QuickBooks Online, which they are pushing everybody to QuickBooks Online now,
It's almost near impossible to download and run a local version.
They do let you.
It's hard to find.
But once you get it, you can download it and run it.
But then they actually charge a lot.
And they charge, in my experience, they charge more for the desktop version than they do for QuickBooks Online.
They're just trying to push everybody to this multi-tenant situation.
So they say that they're encrypting it separately.
One thing that we are not able to verify is we do not know which code they are running on their servers.
They're not using enclaves with open source or verifiable code, so we have no
idea what Intuit is running. When you type in your encryption key, you don't,
you aren't guaranteed that privacy because you don't know they might be
logging that key on their servers somewhere, or for safety reasons, right?
Okay, that's QuickBooks. This is what everybody uses. It's really expensive. If
you want to find out the pricing, you can go there. This is not an advertisement
for QuickBooks. Instead, we are wanting to look at how can I move off of that platform and stop
paying $20, $30, $40, $50 a month, even more than that, hundreds of dollars a month, if you are a
big account, and do something else on your own that gets you 85, 90% of the way there, maybe 95%
of the way there. There's a little bit of extra work you have to do. Obviously, there are trade
offs. And total cost of ownership is a phrase that a lot of people use. It's going to take a
little bit more time doing Firefly, especially in the early days when you set it up. And the UX is
not as slick as a multi-billion dollar company that's building these tools. Okay, so Firefly 3,
it does all the stuff you'd expect. Full transaction management, you can import your data
from any source. They have their own data importer tool. This imports it from banks, CSV files. If
you've been using another tool like YNAB, you need a budget, you can get your data out of YNAB
been imported into here so which which is a big help if you want to you know take what you already
have and get up and running quickly they've got this rule engine like everybody else does and so
it takes your transactions and it can use some kind of smart heuristics to identify the transaction
and categorize it correctly you can have budgets categories you can put tags on your stuff so it's
very flexible um it it obviously behaves like uh any linux app out there that you would expect
They try to give you like all the customization stuff and the UX in my mind kind of follows suit that it's again
It's not as nice, but
They aren't bringing in a lot of money. They just do it optimations
Okay, they also have an API JSON rest API, okay
We are going to before we dive into the demo
I do want to look at, you know, they have documentation tutorials, but I really like going over to the open source, go over to GitHub.
Now, let's look at the license first.
The license is AGPL.
We could have a whole other discussion on another day.
Maybe we could do this for one of our Freedom Tech weekends is a deep dive into licenses for open source software.
So some people have an aversion to any kind of GPL license.
This one is AGPL.
It is what it is.
I don't want to get into the deep weeds of that right now, but this is open source.
You can inspect it.
You can run it on your own.
If you don't like the license, don't make any updates to it.
Don't come out with your own version of accounting software that borrows from this.
So just be aware of that.
But if you're simply using it as an end user, this is a great way that you can inspect the code.
Make sure that when you import data into Firefly, it is not secretly being sent off to some Firefly project owner or some government institution.
You can verify that the data is being handled appropriately for you.
Okay, so they've got a popular GitHub repository here, the repo.
It's got lots of stars, 18,000 stars.
It's been forked over 1,000 times.
They're very active in here, right?
they were just publishing in here last week, over 20,000 commits. I like to kind of glance down and
just see like, what are the dates? Sometimes it's like, oh, they were active yesterday, but they
just updated one readme file and everything else has been stale for over a year. This is not the
case. It's been touched. Lots of parts of it have been touched over the last couple months.
So this is still in active development. The GitHub, I actually think is better from
a understanding what this is is better than um than the website itself and maybe that's because
they're looking here more but they really get into um a better summary of what firefly is what
the purpose is right they've got these screenshots in here that show you the dashboard they call it
a personal financial management tool but as i was playing around with it and using it i'm going to
use it for work as well um for my own my own personal side businesses that i have i've been
using, well I was using QuickBooks for those, but it got too expensive, so then I just moved
over to spreadsheets, which spreadsheets are, spreadsheets kind of are good enough for most
everybody, but I would like something just a little bit more than that, and so I'm going to
move both my personal finances over to Firefly, and then also move some of the small side businesses
that we have over to Firefly, and work on them there, and so here are the feature set, you know,
double entry bookkeeping, which everybody expects. Save towards the goal using piggy banks.
Piggy banks in my quick use are kind of like the envelope system or just any kind of like saving,
not saving account, but like sub accounts. So you're saving up for a specific thing. So maybe
you want to buy a car and you're saving for a down payment on the car, or you want to pay for
pay cash for the car outright. Then you can set up a piggy bank and automatically funnel
money into that every month. So really it's like this virtualization of your bank account,
which is how I like to look at it because I'm more computer software, you know, science,
computer science oriented that I take my bank account and I just have a bunch of cash sitting
in there. But then this tool is what I use to kind of virtualize that. And so really
my bank account is actually divided up into a bunch of little savings buckets,
a bunch of little spending buckets, and I'm just constantly filling up those buckets
with dollars and then as money leaves my bank account it comes into the software
it shows me what I spent and I'm able to manage it there okay you also get things
that you would hope for but not expect they let you do two-factor authentication
so if you're hosting this yourself in the cloud or at home you can do 2f a
into it which is super awesome because it has a lot of sensitive information
about you as well as potential connections to live connections to bank
websites or even if you're just doing it important yourself it's got a lot of
sensitive information a lot that supports pretty much any all the world
currencies I have not looked to see it supports Bitcoin it might and maybe you
can add it in there and then you can run it in docker there are a ton of
different ways to run this thing they've got documentation for that you pretty
pretty much will run anywhere.
Yeah, right here.
You can install it on a server, Docker, Kubernetes,
and then a bunch of different places.
So it's great, and then feel free to contribute
if you want to.
Okay, I'm gonna come over here real quick and ask it,
compare QuickBooks and Quicken to Firefly 3,
the open source finance.
accounting tool. There is a distinction between finance and accounting so I try
to be careful with that. Most people just use them interchangeably because they
don't actually get into the weeds here.
Okay.
It does say Firefly's personal small business finance financial management
tool. Yeah obviously open source, self-hosted, self-hosted, encryption,
access controls can be implemented by the user regular security updates and
patches to the open source community right whereas when it's when you're
using into it proprietary software closed ecosystem you cannot inspect the
servers that it's running on you can inspect the code that's running on those
servers the encryption access controls are managed by into it not by you some
would say that's great they don't want to worry about that others you know
we're freedom type oriented we want to make sure we know who has access to our
data and when you're using a proprietary tool that's hosted by someone else if they are not
running with secure enclaves and giving you some of this this access that you need
you you are just trusting them okay and obviously there are costs and licensing things going on here
so we've got a we've got a good comparison i could dig in deeper if i wanted to i'm not going
to read word for word because there's nothing worse than someone this isn't a new thing now
right you're in a conversation with somebody and rather than them like digesting some information
and then like giving you back like their their filter take with their mind they just copy and
paste like oh i was chatting with ai copy paste here you read this ai response uh it's i i have
grown tired of that real quick and i hope that we move along past that soon i don't like this
phase that we're in right now where people just copy and pasting it feels like let me google that
for you. It's like, let me AI that for you. And then boom, I'm not even going to read it and
summarize it for you and like make it relevant to this conversation. I'm just going to give you
this giant, you know, essay of 30 bullet points. Each one is a paragraph long that you now have
to read. No, I'm not cool with that. Okay. Now, I have not set up Firefly yet on this computer,
Part of the reason why is because they actually have a demo available.
This is a hard thing to do on something like Freedom Tech Weekend
because I don't want to obviously share my own financial situation and my docs myself.
And so I was going to create a bunch of fake data, which I could easily do with Maple,
which I love doing that.
But they have a demo site, and it's actually pretty good.
So we're just going to use the live demo and go over it now.
So I'm going to click on demo.
Okay.
And then I'm just going to sign in.
And jump right into it.
One thing I wanted to point out before I jump into here was the data import tool.
So if you want to do, on their website, they got a bunch of tutorials, which are helpful.
I read through a bunch of these.
So they have tutorials, Firefly 3.
And then if you want to use, if you want to like set up importing of data from your bank account,
because nobody wants to enter transactions manually.
that's like old school way of doing it it's a separate tool called the the data importer
and it uses their api so um you have to run that separately which i don't think will be very hard
to do but just know that you're going to be running two pieces of software and then with
their api now that we can like vibe code the crap out of everything um you could build your own
stuff. So there's a lot of cool things that you could do here. They expose like everything in
their API. I mean, I'm still scrolling here and I'm only 40% of the way down the page. Okay.
So if you are technically minded and you think, well, I've got this really specific setup with
what I do, they have this awesome API. And if you're running yourself, you're not going to be
rate limited. You're not going to have to worry about sometime in the future, the company was
like, hey, we have this open API. Everybody can use it. And then suddenly one day they realized,
well, we need to lock this API down because we want it to be a revenue source for us. So now
they're going to jack up the prices and you get priced out of being able to use your API. This
won't happen with you with Firefly. So you can talk the API on your own, running it yourself.
Okay. There are caveats that make sure that the licensing, it is a GPL V3 on the API itself.
I don't think that would apply to the tool that you're using to talk to the API, but
don't.
I'm not a lawyer.
Do your own research there.
Have a chat with Maple or something like that with AI.
Figure that out for yourself.
But that's a huge win right there, having this cool API that you can access.
Okay, let's get into the demo here.
We have about 15 minutes left on our stream.
We're up to how many viewers here?
I always lose the new side of the account, but
There it is, all right, we got 16 people awesome hello to the 16 people you rock
Firefly 3 is so you get the dashboard here and it just wanted their demos and euros
That's fine. Who cares what the yacht?
Denominator or not denominator the unit of measurement is
So you can see here, this is my checking account.
These are all the latest transactions that I had in my checking account.
I also have this dashboard here showing me.
Okay, here's my checking account balance and my savings account balance.
So the green one is savings.
The blue is checking.
You always want checking going down, right?
And your savings going up.
That'd be awesome.
You don't always want checking going down.
But throughout the month, checking will decrease.
And then as revenue comes in on a weekly, bi-weekly, monthly basis,
However, you have your income, whether you get paid by an employer or you have your own revenue coming in.
I'll show you that.
You get your budget categories here.
So here they've set up budgets for groceries, their car payment, maybe what they spend on fuel as well for the car.
And then this is them eating out.
So you can see what you're doing.
And this shows you here they have, they put how much into the budget here?
Like $300.
for eating out and they have spent or we is supposed to be us we've spent $88 I'm saying
dollars even though it's still not in euros $88 and uh two and eleven are left so still have a
decent amount of money to spend in that budget going out to eat okay here are different categories
where you can look at expense categories so this is different from budget budget is I am going to
limit how much I want to spend on this thing, right? Whereas categories are just showing you,
well, here are all the different places where you spend money. So you can wrap multiple categories
up into a budget item if you want to. And then you have expense accounts. These are even, you
know, these are more different than categories because you can have multiple expense accounts.
So if you do, you know, if you get coffee at two different coffee shops, you might set those up as
different expense accounts, but then you have them going into one category of coffee jobs.
And then you have your income. So this person gets revenue from Google, probably from ad revenue.
Local bank. I don't know what that means, but they got money from their bank. Maybe that's
interest or something. And then JobGiver Inc. I don't know what the heck these are,
but these are your incomes. So replace these with the incomes that you would have.
Okay. There's a net worth tracker in here. This is cool. And this is what I really like about my
budgeting tool that I use is that I can track any other asset accounts that I have. And so not only
am I looking at my month-to-month finances and maybe the short-term savings that I'm doing toward,
you know, a car or something like that, but I can also see the big picture, which is my net worth.
And it's really important to see the big picture because you need to know where you're headed. You
or some harder months, some more lean months.
And that's what your net worth can really give you.
So I'm glad that they have that there.
Okay, so let's go look at some of these things here.
Budgets.
This is where you set up your budgets, right?
So I can create a new one.
They have one for groceries.
They have their bills that they pay every month,
their car budget, and then going out to eat, right?
So let's say I wanted to set up a new budget
for streaming services
because we all know we have way too many of those.
Okay.
Store new budget.
Okay, and then I'm going to budget,
I don't know, let's do 50 bucks
to our streaming service budget.
Okay, so now that's in there.
$50 right there.
subscriptions. These are, how are these different than the budget?
Oh, these are, these are like recurring payments. That's right. Okay. I remember now.
Different terminologies and different tools. These are recurring payments that you have. So you can
say, um, oh yeah, actually the demo remembered me when I was using this earlier. So I set up one
for Netflix to say, Hey, when, um, when you see something called Netflix come in from my bank
import that I do for my credit card statement or my checking statement, whatever it is,
look for something called Netflix and you can set ranges on here. So I said, we all know that
Netflix is constantly upping their prices, right? So I can come in here and say, look for anything
between $10 and $20. Again, ignore the euros, $10 and $20. And so that's what it will use to find
and automatically tag my Netflix payment and expense.
Okay?
So then, like, can I put a budget on this?
Let's see.
Let's go back to budget here and see how do I add stuff to my budget
that automatically filled up now.
Transactions.
There's not enough information to generate this chart,
so I'm not in editing mode for this budget right now.
Let's go back.
so I'm here with the pencil icon the universal icon for edit so funny how we
do these things
okay well you get the idea I don't need to dive into this there's some learning
to do here but there's a way to connect expenses into your budget category and
have it automatically do it piggy banks I mentioned these earlier these are ways
for you to have a goal in the future that you're shooting for. A new camera, a
new phone, a new couch, right? So you can see how much you've saved so far, how far
along you are in your percentage. This is what you're going for and you have left
to save. And I'm sorry this is really small and you can't see it on the stream,
but we're more just talking concepts here, right? Okay, the transactions part of
this is like the main part of any financial tool and accounting tool is
importing your transactions you can create a new transaction on your own
right create new transaction and gives you all of the basic stuff that you
would need okay or you can import them you can use the data import tool and
then you can see all the transactions here you can take actions on them edit
delete copy all that stuff you can see the source comes from this game these
all came from a checking account you can do credit cards really any account you want but
then you can also see categories right here so it's like a mini dashboard within your expenses
you also have your revenue and income super important to see the money coming in and where
it's coming from and then this lets you transfer money between accounts within the tool automation
these are the rules so this is where you can set up more rules to help figure out and tag things
Oh, they have reoccurring transactions here.
All right, well, shoot.
Earlier I said subscriptions are reoccurring transactions.
We'll have to figure out what the difference is there.
You'll have to figure that out yourself.
They have webhooks.
It says it's disabled.
And it's taking me back.
So I probably have to go into the config and enable webhooks.
But that's another powerful thing.
So couple the API with webhooks,
and you can start to do some really smart things here with this tool.
Okay, we're running low on time.
here today so let me just quickly show a high level you have your basic asset
accounts that you can do this helps you when setting up not only your monthly
spending but also that net worth stuff so this is where you start dumping in any
long-term assets you hold you know Bitcoin stocks if you have a 401k an IRA
account like retirement account if you own a home you can put the equity in
your home that you have here and then you have liabilities where if you also
to own a home, you would put your mortgage in here. And so your net worth would take
the value of your home and the value of your mortgage and subtract the mortgage, the amount
left from your home. And that's how you know how much equity you have in your home. Basic
accounting 101. Classification is where you can do categories and tags and groups and
things. There's a lot of customization. And then they have reports. Reports are very important.
You can do a profit and loss.
You can do a balance sheet, budgets, all that stuff.
These are important not only for yourself to see,
but if you have an accountant that you're working with
to do your taxes at the end of the year,
you're probably going to have to send them some stuff
so that they can generate what they need
in order to do your personal taxes
or if they need to make K-1s.
I'm speaking from U.S. tax code,
whatever is the same for your jurisdiction,
but they can generate those documents and send them out.
Maybe someday they won't have to
because we won't have to deal with that anymore.
Okay, export all your data.
Super important.
And then lots of options, settings, things you can do here.
Okay, this is great.
I hope you guys enjoyed this.
I think Firefly is actually a very powerful tool.
Like I said, UX leaves,
it's better than I was expecting,
but it still leaves much to be desired, right?
There's not a lot of hand-holding here.
It's very much dump you on a page,
give you lots of values,
The information hierarchy is, you know, could be rethought.
These things where it's like the delete button is right next to an edit button and they're the same size.
And do I get a warning?
Okay, at least I get a warning.
That's good.
Takes me to another page instead of popping up.
Sorry, I don't want to get into a UX deep dive here.
I don't fault Freedom Tech tools for having difficult UX because they're really focusing on building a tool that's functional for you to use.
If you are a UX person, if you know how to vibe code, if you want to help improve projects, they would love it, right?
So, like, go in and start making minor improvements and submitting pull requests.
Don't overhaul the entire thing and be like, yo, I'm here to fix your project.
But maybe start with something small and say, hey, I added.
Like this would be such a small win right here.
Groceries.
If I want to delete this, don't take me to a separate page.
Right?
Just instead do a little like JavaScript alert that pops up and say, are you sure you want to delete this?
Yes or no.
Cancel.
Go back.
Something like that.
Right?
That would be a small win.
Somebody could do that.
Submit a PR and help improve the UX of this project.
And then over time, as you start to fix some of these little paper cuts, then maybe you've built up enough goodwill with the project that you could tackle something larger and really help improve the UX of this experience.
Okay.
Another way that somebody could improve the UX of this is they could do a hosted version of Firefly 3, but host it in a secure enclave.
And so now they can make it available to other users who don't want to host it themselves.
You can even potentially charge a service for it.
AGPL3, you have to make sure you're working with a license, but if it's in a secret enclave,
then those people could look at your code, inspect your code, and know that you are not
not messing around with their data
inappropriately, right? So
OpenSecret.Cloud is a great way to
run things in the enclave and have like private key encryption for your users and encrypt all their data.
We don't yet have actual Enclave as a service up and running yet,
but you could get a private key per user from here
and then encrypt the data as it goes into your own server that you're running.
So there are a lot of creative ways you can do it.
But thanks for joining the stream today.
Check out Firefly 3.
It's firefly-iii.org.
It is not the number 3, but firefly-iii.org.
You can go check out the tool.
and like I said there are a lot of easy ways to run it if you're not super technically minded
you can probably figure out how to run this using one of their tutorials or one of their
cloud hosting tools um docker I have docker on this home server and I run a bunch of things in
it and um yes I could be really strong in devops but I have chosen to focus on other things and so
docker is really nice because I can just drop it in and get something up and running
okay we are up to 17 people watching thanks everybody for watching today let me end the
screen share here stop screen sharing all right thanks everybody for joining freedom tech weekend
we do this every friday at 15 30 utc tell your friends streaming on x streaming on youtube
and then i'm going to get zap dot stream working one of these days so we can stream on monster as
well. I also make this available afterwards. It's archived on YouTube in a playlist called
Freedom Tech Weekend, and it's on my YouTube. Let's just pull that up here so I'm not sharing
anymore. Go to my YouTube, marks underscore FTW. You can follow me on X Twitter, marks underscore
FTW, and then I'm on Noster, marks at primal.net. But yeah, check it out. And then if you have
ideas for a tool that you want us to explore next week or in a future week, drop me a note
in socials and let me know what you think. Oh, the last place is available. I make this available
on audio as well. So it's a podcast. You can go to podcastindex.org, search for Freedom Tech.
We'll pop up there, look for Freedom Tech Weekend, add it to your podcasting app or
fully podcasting 2.0 supported. So you can stream SAP, you know, boost and SAP, do all that fun
stuff. So thanks everybody. Hope you have a great weekend. Play around with Firefly 3. All right.
Later.
Thank you.