Quickstart for ActualBudget

Actual Budget helps you manage personal finances using the well-established envelope budgeting method, where every dollar is assigned to a category ("budgeted") before it's spent. It's local-first: your financial data lives on your own server rather than a third party's cloud, and syncs across your own devices without a subscription. The app has no separate username, access is controlled by a single server-wide password, set and changed through a simple bootstrap process on first boot. It runs as a single lightweight container with all data stored in a mounted volume, making it easy to back up and restore. It's a self-hosted alternative to commercial budgeting apps like YNAB, for users who want full ownership of their financial data.

Deploy ActualBudget on Elestio

1. Open the ActualBudget deployment page and sign in, or create an account.
2. Choose a cloud provider, a region and a data center. Pick the region closest to your users for the lowest latency.
3. Choose an instance size. Elestio only lists the sizes that can run ActualBudget properly (at least 2 vCPU and 4 GB of RAM).
4. Choose your support plan and the maintenance window for system and software updates (times are in UTC).
5. Click Create Service. ActualBudget is deployed and ready in a few minutes, and you receive an email with the access details.

The full walkthrough with screenshots is in the installation guide.

Access ActualBudget

Open your service in the Elestio dashboard and go to the Overview tab. Click Display Admin UI to reveal the URL, username and password of your ActualBudget instance.

If the password field is blank, ActualBudget does not ship with a pre-created admin user: open the admin URL to start its setup. Software without a web interface, such as databases, is reached with the credentials and port listed in the same tab. See Admin UI and credentials.

Next steps

• Custom domain and SSL: point your own domain to ActualBudget (guide).
• Backups: new services follow a 3-2-1 backup strategy by default (backups).
• Updates: manage the ActualBudget version and update policy (software versions and updates).
• Learn ActualBudget: read the official ActualBudget documentation.