What "Local-First" Means To Us

When we say Big Picture Money is local-first, we mean your data lives on your computer. Your machine is the source of truth, and all major features work correctly offline. We do have network-connected features planned (see our roadmap), but they are optional.

Why local-first personal finance software?

We believe personal finance software is deeply personal and private. The data stored in this application is your entire financial life. It is a high-value target for nefarious actors such as advertisers and agencies who want to track you and build a profile of who you are.

Our local-first principles mean these features are paramount to us:

• Source of truth. Your machine holds the books; you control your data. Optional remote services can mirror or assist, but they never own your data.
• Software Ownership. You can keep your software if something happens to us: we slow down, change pricing, or disappear. We do not hold your data hostage so that you continue to comply with whatever crazy terms of service we come up with in the future (not that we plan on any.)
• Trust boundary. Fewer parties hold the full dataset. What leaves your device does so because you chose to use that service, or deliberately exported the data.
• Performance. And not to be discounted, because the data is stored locally on your machine, there are very few times when you need to sit and wait for a spinner in the application. Big Picture Money is very fast.

The test for good local-first software is simple: if the company vanished tomorrow, would you still be able to use your software? We make sure Big Picture Money always passes that test.

Why local-first matters

SaaS is "Software as-a Service" -- the busines model of almost all web-based software.

SaaS became the default for almost every category of software. It is very profitable for businesses: an excellent business model for long-term, repeatable, predictable revenue. From a business perspective it makes wonderful sense.

For end-users, however, SaaS is a terrible deal. You own and control nothing. And dozens of companies are taking their $9.99 or more out of your pocket every single month. It is hard to keep track of all the subscriptions. You wind up paying for software you no longer use. And you are locked-in to that specific application with no choice but to continue paying their constant tax to keep running the software.

Subscription fatigue is real.

By making Big Picture Money local-first we hope to ease that fatigue. You control your data, and you control when you update. If you are happy with the way the software works, you never have to purchase an upgrade, it will continue working forever.

We want to swing the SaaS pendulum for personal finance software back toward the desktop.

Tradeoffs we accept

Local-first is not a panacea; it has definite downsides and costs. But we feel those tradeoffs make sense for the personal finance category. Some of the downsides of local-first software are:

Multi-device use is harder. Someone has to solve sync, conflicts, and what happens when a laptop dies. Cloud apps handle that complexity for users, unless something catastrophic happens to that vendor, your data doesn't get deleted. When we implement our Cloud Services feature later in the year, we will need to deal with these integrity issues. And we compound that problem with our privacy requirements: when we implement the sync feature, we will do so in such a way that there is no possible way we can read your data while it rests on our servers. This makes the feature more challenging to design, which is why we are waiting a bit to implement it.

Backups and data integrity become your job. You own your data. But with that ownership comes responsibility. If something happens to your machine, your data is gone. If you forget your passphrase, your data is gone. We don't think this is a huge responsibility -- people have been managing files on their computers for over half a century. Over the years, we have come up with dozens of ways to backup and recover files on users machines. We believe this is a responsibility you can handle. But do make sure you handle it.

Ongoing commitment

Big Picture Money is committed to staying local-first even when we add more online and connected services. Your ledger will always live primarily and first as an encrypted file on your computer. We will build cloud features, sync, and collaboration eventually, but even then, it will always be local data first. Your PC or laptop is the source of truth. Even when we build a mobile app to view your data from your phone, the data it pulls and syncs from will be from your machine.

If you want money software built that way, see how privacy and local data work in the product, or join the beta.