What Open Net Worth is
Open Net Worth is an agent harness for personal finance: a real multi-currency ledger, budgets and investments, wired so an AI can operate them directly.
Most finance apps that added AI let it describe your data. Here the assistant — Lucius — holds tools that read and write the ledger through the same choke points the UI uses: it records transactions, assigns budget money, reconciles imports, and files vests. You approve what it does; you don’t retype it.
That difference is the whole design:
| Chatbot bolted onto an app | An agent harness | |
|---|---|---|
| What the AI touches | a summary of your data | the ledger itself, through real write tools |
| When it’s wrong | you find out later | a confirm card shows the change before it lands |
| What it can do | answer | act, on a schedule, unattended if you allow it |
It’s built for one person: you. No multi-tenant accounts, no cloud sync, no subscription. You install it on a machine you control (laptop, home server, small cloud VM), and your financial data lives in one SQLite database there. Nobody else’s server ever sees it.
What the agent can actually do
Lucius reaches the app through a registry of tools, not a chat wrapper:
- Reads — net worth, balances, spending by category, positions and cost basis, budget state.
- Writes — record and edit transactions, assign envelope money, import statements, mark vests, manage payees and categories. Every write goes through the same service choke point the UI uses, so it cannot invent a path around your data’s invariants.
- Runs unattended — Automations execute the same turn lifecycle as a chat message, on a schedule.
- Extends — connect external MCP servers to give it tools this project never shipped.
Every tool has a permission level: always_allow, needs_approval (the default), or blocked.
See How Lucius’s permissions work before you raise anything —
always_allow means allow everywhere, including unattended runs.
What it tracks
Three areas are furthest along — where the project’s own hardening effort is concentrated:
- The ledger — accounts and two-leg transactions, in as many currencies as you hold money in, converted into one base currency for reporting. See The ledger and how transactions work.
- Budgeting with envelopes — a zero-based, YNAB-style budget where every dollar gets a job. See Envelopes and budgeting.
- Investments — positions, lots, cost basis, and realized/unrealized gains across equities, crypto, commodities, and property. See Positions, lots, and cost basis.
Net worth, computed across all of the above and converted to your base currency, is the number the whole app is organized around.
How finished is this, honestly
Pre-1.0, built by one person. The three areas above have locked test suites that run on every change, but the project’s bar for “done” is stricter than passing tests: the author has checked the figures against their real accounts and signed them off. Budgeting and investment returns haven’t cleared that bar yet.
In practice: check the numbers against your bank and broker for a while before trusting them like a statement. Treat it as a capable tool you’re supervising, not a finished product. A number you can’t explain is worth reporting — that’s exactly the feedback the project wants.
Areas that ship but aren’t fully hardened yet
Market intelligence, tax reporting, equity compensation (RSUs/vests), FIRE projections, and bank-account connectors all work today — but haven’t been through the same real-money verification as the ledger, budgeting, and core investment tracking. Where a page in this help center touches one of these, it’s marked beta and says what to watch for.
Who this is for
You, if you want your real net worth in one place without handing your bank logins or spending history to a company. You should be comfortable running a terminal command or a Docker command to install it — this isn’t an app-store download. In exchange, you get an assistant that reads your statements, categorizes your spending, and answers questions like “what did I spend on groceries last month” against your real data — the only data it has ever seen.
Where to go next
- New here: Installing Open Net Worth, then Your first run.
- Curious how your money is actually stored: How your data is stored.