I Replaced YNAB with a Free Terminal App

You may not know it about me, but I was a longtime YNAB user. I really liked how good the app was at letting me track spending, finances, and how much was being spent in one category or another. In fact, using YNAB several years ago is the reason I no longer have an auto loan in the first place! Several years earlier than scheduled, I might add, so you could say that I am a bit of a YNAB success story.

But as the years have passed, I haven’t been a fan of the YNAB subscription cost. Even as someone who originally bought YNAB 4 way back in the day, I don’t care for how we need to continuously pay for this online app, paying north of $100 a year if we pay upfront as well. I’m definitely not a fan of subscription-based services in general either. In fact, that’s why I started using a server in the first place, so this led me on a search for a proper YNAB replacement.

Actual Budget and Liquid Budget

I tried using Actual Budget for a few weeks, and I’ll give credit where credit is due. If you want something that looks and feels a lot like YNAB 1-to-1, this is as good as it gets.

It’s a self-hosted application that you can run on a server, so I chose to give it a good spin on my Mac mini. After enough time with it, however, I wasn’t all that impressed and wanted to try something else entirely.

Liquid Budget came next because it was developed by a former YNAB subscriber who became dissatisfied with the rising costs, wanting to develop a simpler app that cost only a fraction of what YNAB offered.

While this is incredibly impressive as well, it wasn’t all that intuitive in the limited time I gave it a shot. Still, I have to hand it to the dev for allowing such a long trial period to really make sure anyone trying it out was satisfied with it before committing to a (much cheaper than YNAB) subscription.

So in short, I wasn’t all that happy with the two apps. Maybe it was my mindset, or maybe it was something about either app. I don’t really know, but I still needed a different way to track my spending. Maybe I could give one of those random budgeting apps on the Google Play store a shot? Or I could just go back to basics and budget with pen and paper?

The Solution Was Simple

That’s when I stumbled across this video in my YouTube recommendations about a terminal app called hledger.

In short, it’s a free, terminal-based app that I can easily run on Linux and Mac. Installing it was a snap (even with the entire Haskell stack), and it looked powerful and reliable. That’s when I decided, why not? What do I have to lose at this point in my quest to replace YNAB?

From there, I installed it using my standard package manager on Linux and with Homebrew on macOS. From there, however, I did need Haskell packages installed; so that’s what the h must stand for in hledger.

Getting Started with hledger

The only real hurdle I came across at first was the initial setup. I had to run the following command:

hledger add

This was supposed to help me set up my accounts initially, enabling me to enter in my starting balances. The values you would enter for this initial setup might look something like this.

assets:checking
$800
assets:savings
$2500
assets:cash
$73.50

Once you’ve entered in accounts this way, you can enter in “equity,” which deals with entering the negative combination of these balances together. Typically, this is the only time you ever enter in an equity transaction.

equity:opening
-$3373.50

Actually Using hledger for Transactions

The way hledger works, which took me time to really “get,” is that each transaction has to come from somewhere. The inflow and outflow have to be tracked in each transaction. For instance, after the initial setup, I could type hledger add again to record a single transaction like so.

Date: 2026-03-17
Description: Two 6-packs of Guinness for St. Patrick's Day Party
Account 1: expenses:fun:Booze
Amount 1: $25.96
Account 2: assets:checking
Amount 2: -$25.96

This example transaction tells hledger that I spent $25.96 of fun money on beer. This money has to come from somewhere, and that’s the checking account. This is a change from using categories like in YNAB; instead, the first “account” of an outgoing transaction like this is the category itself.

Split transactions are possible as well as long as you keep entering in a positive balance before eventually offsetting with a negative amount that covers the whole thing.

Date: 2026-03-17
Description: Groceries and Beer for St. Patrick's Day Party
Account 1: expenses:food:Groceries
Amount 1: $14.04
Account 2: expenses:fun:Booze
Amount 2: $25.96
Account 3: assets:checking
Amount 3: -$40.00

But what about money coming in? That would look something like this instead:

Date: 2026-03-18
Description: Tax Return
Account 1: assets:checking
Amount 1: $1794.00
Account 2: income:irs
Amount 2: -$1794.00

Income is largely tracked in the exact same way with paychecks. Just change it so that you are describing that it’s pay day, and change account 2 to say something like income:salary.

Date: 2026-04-01
Description: Paycheck 1
Account 1: assets:checking
Amount 1: $2951.00
Account 2: income:salary
Amount 2: -$2951.00

I Screwed Up A Transaction!

Thankfully, hledger is quite forgiving in multiple ways. If you happen to mistype an amount or category, for instance, you can end the transaction by either typing a “.” when prompted or just hitting Ctrl + Z to end the process from starting hledger add. From there, you can start again because your log won’t be updated with the transaction just yet.

If you need to go back and remove a transaction you already entered, that’s possible as well. For instance, let’s say you had buyer’s remorse and wanted to return something, you can open the default hledger file you set up. hledger will start one for you by default, but I started a separate one in a directory I can access on my M1 MacBook and Arch desktop via Syncthing.

vim path/to/main.journal

From there, open your journal file in the text editor of your choice to manually edit the amounts or transactions on your own. It’s quite straightforward to erase balances or update what was recorded in plain text, thankfully.

Commands to See More

If you want a quick log of everything you’ve already entered in, simply type the following:

hledger print

From here, you will see a list of your interests ordered by date. You can scroll up and down using either the up/down arrow keys or the Page Up and Page Down keys. To exit this view, just hit Ctrl + Z or Ctrl + C to terminate the process.

To narrow things down, try using key words related to your categories like so:

hledger print groceries

To quickly see all of your assets without the expense categories clogging up your view, simply type the following:

hledger bal assets

The use of bal does open the door for searching through other categories as well. For instance, if you wanted to see all of your spending in one category only during the current calendar month:

hledger bal expenses:eating-out -p thismonth

To see your accounts in the form of a balance sheet, type the following command:

hledger bs

This command should show your balance sheet with your overall net worth.

To see the overall income versus spending, type this command instead:

hledger is

You will be able to see your income weighed against all of your expenses this way with easy-to-read formatting.

One Last Cool Trick

There are other useful, great commands to enter into the terminal to access and use hledger, but there also exists a UI that can be accessed within the terminal. All you need to do is type the following:

hledger-ui

This will bring up a browseable interface where you can navigate using arrow keys and enter to see your balances. Hitting the a key will enable you to easily add a transaction in the way you have come to expect from hledger.

However, this does bring up a light theme in my experience trying it. To enable the dark theme, type the same command with this flag:

hledger-ui --theme=dark

My Only Real “Drawback”

So far, I’ve come to love hledger after using it for a few weeks now. I didn’t think this would be the case after failing to use other YNAB competitors, but now I can’t imagine managing my money outside of the terminal at this point.

However, I have only one issue, and it’s not really hledger’s fault. Rather, it’s a mindset thing for me. I was used to managing my budget with YNAB in a way that I would manually create categories of how much I wanted to spend in one category or another. While I can categorize transactions in hledger, it only lets me track how much I’ve spent in that category rather than what I have remaining in it.

Still, that doesn’t make it useless for my needs. I can still set a specific amount to spend, but I can simply track it and see if I’ve gone over or got close. For instance, if my girlfriend and I promised to spend $200 on groceries for the entire month, we can see our progress through the month:

hledger bal expenses:groceries -p thismonth

However, I have yet to find a way to set a specific, fixed number to not go over. As a result, it’s not a direct one-to-one replacement for something like YNAB.

Are you a YNAB user? Or do you budget some other way? Or worse yet, do you not budget at all? If you’re thinking of budgeting, are you considering hledger as an option or not? Does the idea of being able to budget and track transactions for free using the terminal sound appealing to you? Maybe you hadn’t heard of Actual Budget or Liquid Budget but decided to try those out after reading this. Whatever it is, feel free to drop a comment below. I’d love to know what you think of this subject.