How your data is stored
Open Net Worth has no concept of “your account” on a server somewhere — no sign-up, no company database, no sync service. Everything you enter — accounts, transactions, budgets, holdings, even Lucius’s memory of past conversations — lives in one SQLite database file, in a directory on the machine running the app.
Where it lives
By default, everything lives under ~/.open-net-worth/: the database, a small set of file
attachments (receipts, imported statement files, chat uploads), backups, and logs. Point it
elsewhere — a different drive, a NAS mount — with an environment variable. See
Where your files live for the exact layout,
Environment variables to relocate it.
What “self-hosted” means in practice
Your financial data never leaves your machine on its own. No telemetry, no phoning home — no third party sees your transactions, balances, or net worth just because you’re running this software.
Self-hosted doesn’t mean fully offline, though — a few features make outbound calls on purpose:
- Prices and exchange rates — from public market-data providers (Yahoo Finance, CoinGecko), to keep holdings and currency conversions current. These calls send a ticker symbol out, not your account data.
- Chat with Lucius — connect an AI provider and your questions plus the relevant account/ transaction data go to that provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, or whichever you chose), exactly as from any other client of that API. Nothing goes to Open Net Worth’s own developers. Skip connecting a provider and none of this happens — the rest of the app runs with zero AI calls.
- Optional connectors — anything you explicitly enable (email ingestion, Telegram, a bank connector) talks to whatever service it’s for; that’s the point of turning it on. Nothing’s enabled by default.
Backups
The app backs up your data directory daily, automatically — trigger one on demand from Settings too. Because everything lives in one place, a backup, or a full move to a new machine, is just copying that one directory.