Take, for example, Photobucket. In case you've never heard of it, it is the Imgur-equivalent of ages ago. I was using it as a kid to upload images there and link them on various forums. A nice, simple website that just did its job.

So what's my old pal Photobucket doing now?

Well, recently, I was going through my old accounts and started cleaning them up. Deleting what needs to be deleted, restoring passwords to what was no longer working, things like that¹...

And that's how I remembered about Photobucket!

Now, mind you, that was after I'd already found my old Imgur account with hundreds of old (and nostalgic!) screenshots that I then backed up safely. So I was really excited! This Photobucket account must have been... damn... even older! Who knows what remnants of my childhood I'll find there?

And so, I logged in expectantly. Ready to be amazed! Prepared to drop a nostalgia tear! Excited to finally...

Wait, WHAT?!!

You shared them. We protected them.

...

AGAINST WHAT?!! Because it sure as hell isn't against corporate greed! More like:

You shared them. We paywalled them. (And you should thank us!)

So I now have to pay for the images I uploaded on a (previously) free service?!! No way, I'm not doing that! Take my images and keep them on your servers until you go bankrupt! I won't endorse such behavior by giving you money.

I'm no fool!

...

But... I mean it's just $5... Surely my childhood memories must be worth more than that, right? And I guess it's kinda nice they didn't delete them... So, okay, I'll give this some thought and...

$5... PER MONTH?!!

So this unassuming claim:

It's time to relive them for just $5.

from the sweet-sweet Photobucket Inc. was missing just a tiny little detail... a footnote... some legalese, as you might say... That it's a MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTION, MAYBE?!!

THE. BLATANT. GREED!

So they're hoping that I'm curious, I pay for this crap, and then forget about my MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTION? Oh no, no, no. That's almost evil. Paywalling my childhood memories in order to trap me into accidentally subscribing to your useless service? Hoping I'd then cancel it after maybe a few years, when I finally notice an odd expense on my card?

NO.

Just no. I won't stand for this. Childhood memories be damned!

Aw man... I really wonder what's in there... I mean it's just a subscription... I pay the $5, I download my images, I cancel the subscription, and I'm outta there. May God be my witness that it wasn't an easy call, that I fought for my dignity!

Ok, let's do this quickly. I want to minimize the pain.

Enter the card details... click on Pay by Card... wait a bit...

And I'm in!

Finally! Really wondering what's in here! Let's take a... look......

Oh... No...

IS IT FREAKING EMPTY?!!

...

I think I hate myself now. I'm such a fool!!! That's what I get for going along with these predatory tactics... Should've known this would happen. I guess I was using a different, even older Photobucket account as a kid, or something.

...

Wait.

Photobucket. You must have known I don't have any images on my account. AND YOU STILL MADE ME PAY?!! Reclaim your memories my ass.

That's it, I'm done.

I knew I forgot something!

Okay. Now I'm done.

Editor's note

As I was writing and reliving this beautiful experience, I noticed a little footnote on the payments page:

Did I notice this in time to request the refund? Of course I didn't. Those 5 beautiful dollars are forever gone.

But maybe this helps someone... Yay to the movement against corporate greed!... 🍻

Update

This post ended up being pretty popular on Hacker News with lots of fun discussions. Two things worth mentioning:

1. Just to be extra clear, I don't believe Photobucket intentionally deleted all the images I uploaded and then asked for $5/mo just because they hate me. While I do remember uploading things there as a kid, I bet I was using an even older account.

2. It was suggested that I request a chargeback from my card. Apparently debit cards also allow them, didn't know this! I might give it a shot, who knows, maybe I'll end up paying $0 for this story!

...

Ok, no, paying $0 won't happen. Apparently using Vercel to host a personal blog might not be the best idea (even though it's a static site!). I'm nearly reaching the limit of Edge Requests in just 2 hours after the post. According to trustworthy Claude, the site will go down if I surpass it?...

So I'll probably end up doing this²:

No mention of any refunds though, I checked! :P

However, it feels like it's out to get me personally. I think that Safari knew that I don't hold it in high regard, so it decided to kill itself out of spite. But I'm not a forensic expert, so I can't say for sure.

So... Do you want to see its flimsy WebKit corpse?... Of course you do, you vengeful web developer!

The Network and Sources panels are dead.

In the Network tab, you can't see any network request... Or so you'd think! If you start pressing Down, however, you start going through invisible items. And YES, I tried scrolling to the left and resizing the panel. The requests just won't appear, no matter what you try.

If it was only that, I could live with it. But the Sources panel too?!? I can't access any of the files served on the website. So I can't set breakpoints anymore, for example. This renders the DevTools completely useless for my main use cases.

Just reinstall Safari, bro!

No big deal, right?

But no, of course you can't just do that! It's a system app or whatever. MacOS won't let you touch it.

I thought for a bit about my situation. I didn't have system backups, so if I wanted to go back in time, all I could do is reset my laptop to factory settings. But all that headache for just Safari? No way, I'm not doing that.

So I then realized that I have some macOS updates that I've been postponing. Am I lucky or what? At the end of my workday, I started updating to macOS 14.4 Sequoia – a major version bump, as I was still on Sonoma. Hopefully, that'd clean up the Safari-shaped mess by installing the new browser version from scratch.

Narrator: The recording above is from macOS 14.4 Sequoia.

Acceptance

So that's my life, then. All Safari-specific bugs will need to be fixed by someone else on the team. I'll be... the Chrome-Firefox-but-no-Safari guy. No biggie.

I'm being truthful, that's what my thoughts were. I knew deep in my heart that Safari didn't want to be fixed, so why even bother sinking more hours into this. My sixth sense told me this was unsolvable.

But then!

A magical flash of inspiration!

Just reinstall Safari, bro! There's this thing called Safari Technology Preview that gives you an early look at upcoming web technologies on Apple platforms. And you can install it alongside normal Safari!

And it worked! Safari Technology Preview's DevTools work properly. Normal Safari's DevTools? Still broken.

But that's not my problem anymore.

Update: 3 months later

A solution has been found! I now have a functional browser that I can rely on for debugging. Everything is perfect. And the fix turned out to be pretty simple, in fact – I just had to upgrade my MacBook to a new one. And boom, all of a sudden, Safari is working!

I hope this is useful advice to anyone that's encountering this issue!

In my defense, YNAB (You Need A Budget), the budgeting app I was using was... decent. I heard about it on Reddit, where everyone seemed to like it. They were saying that other budgeting apps follow different principles, which the YNABbers considered harmful. YNAB's main principle is "give each dollar a job". If you don't have that dollar yet, then it's not yours to budget. So don't even think about those $25,000 that you're expecting in 2 months. Spend only what you actually have in your bank account – it's wiser.

This rule made sense to me. Apparently, other evil budgeting apps blatantly violate this sacred rule. And since I wanted to go the wise way, I stuck with YNAB. Looking back, the extent of other budgeting apps' devilishness was probably exaggerated. The competition probably just had this "planning" feature that you didn't have to use.

So yeah, that's how I (let Reddit) take financial decisions (for me).

Escaping the matrix

So what changed?

Well, I was randomly surfing the r/YNAB subreddit for success stories and whatnot, and I read a comment that said "Actual does this better" or something. The comment didn't make sense. I thought it was a grammar error. But it had some replies that seemed to know what OP was talking about.

So I did the only logical thing – I googled r/YNAB actual. And there it was! There was apparently an open-source budgeting app called Actual Budget. Completely free. Feature-rich. And the Reddit hivemind seemed to like this one too!

But wait... Reddit likes both YNAB and Actual Budget?... Do I... Do I have to use my judgement to decide if it's worth making the switch? 😱

Oh well, I was bored anyways. Show me what you've got, Mr. Actual!

I've struck gold!

Actual Budget is "$150.11/year cheaper" than YNAB. So it's worse, right?

...

No! I'd say it's actually better!

To begin with, YNABbers might have been wondering where that $150.11/year price tag is coming from. On YNAB's website, the stated price is $109/year. So did I get scammed out of $41.11 or something?

Yes and no.

No, because I didn't send this money to a Nigerian prince. Yes, because I live in Europe.

For context, YNAB has this nifty feature that lets you connect your bank accounts directly to your budget, so you don't have to manually input each and every single transaction... if you're from the 🇺🇸 US! Europeans are stuck to using the ancient Zen technique of manual data input¹.

But wait! YNAB is so big that there are entire businesses specializing in solving its flaws! Presenting... Synci!

For the low-low price of €38/year you can connect 2 accounts to your budget. Do you have 3 accounts you'd like to sync? Then maybe you'd enjoy the Advanced subscription, for just €58/year! They've also got a €96/year subscription for all the Pros out there with up to 10 accounts.

€38/year is roughly $41.11 at the time of this writing. So there it is – $150.11/year², roughly a month's worth of groceries where I live³.

Of course, Synci integrating with 2300+ European banks is no small feat. You either have to write 2300+ connectors to the different bank APIs or work with one (or more) third parties specialized in doing that. Either way, that sounds costly. So there's no way Actual Budget can do all that for free, right?

The answer to the rhetorical question is indeed affirmative.

Actual Budget let's you use 3 APIs directly for syncing bank transactions: GoCardless (European banks), SimpleFIN Bridge (North American banks), and Pluggy.ai (Brazilian banks). The people at GoCardless are generous enough that they let you sync transactions 50 times per month for free. I do most of my payments through my Revolut bank account. This means that I could sync my transactions daily and I'd still be well within the free tier. Europe is redeemed! 🇪🇺 🇪🇺 🇪🇺

Actual Budget 1 - 0 YNAB. And that's a big 1 – worth $41.11/year!

C'mon YNAB, do something...

Surely YNAB must be doing something right... Right? Something that Actual Budget just didn't have the smarts to do... Something that the 183 YNAB employees cooked for 21 years that just can't be matched by 17 main contributors⁴ to a lowly open-source project.

YNAB has a mobile app. And Actual Budget has... no mobile app.

This is true. However, there's a but. A big but. A really big one! You can host Actual on a server, as a website. A website that you can of course access from any device, be it laptop shaped or glass brick shaped.

But I'll be honest, when I was thinking what about praise to give to YNAB, its mobile app didn't come to mind. Not because it's bad, but because I haven't really been using it. I got in the habit of doing my budget daily, managing the previous day's transactions each morning. So no reason for me to use the app, really. I think I even uninstalled it while I was still using YNAB, because its notifications were annoying me.

But, of course, everyone is different. So, personal experience aside, this feels like the biggest gap that Actual Budget has.

I did however notice another missing feature: Actual Budget doesn't let you set targets for categories. Let's say that you have an annual $150.11 subscription to an online service. Actual isn't able to tell you that you need to save $12.51 monthly in order to afford this payment in one year's time. YNAB will kindly do this mathematical division for you – making it immediately obvious that this is your most expensive monthly subscription.

There are some good news on this front, however. First off, you can easily copy all categories' targets from one month to another. This gets you like 70% of the way there. Secondly, this won't remain missing for long. There's an experimental feature in Actual called Budget Templates that lets you do exactly this (and way more!), which will hopefully get out of the "you might encounter irrecoverable errors if you enable these settings" phase soon.

So I'll update the score to a respectable Actual Budget 1 - 0.2 YNAB. Good job, YNAB!

A geek's paradise

YNAB seeks to be as approachable as possible. They've created almost 1000 videos on their YouTube channel about their tool and budgeting in general. This attitude is reflected in their UI, too. Yes, YNAB has a slight learning curve, but it does its best to strike a balance between functionality and ease of use – just like all great products do. Before trying Actual, YNAB's interface felt to me like the only way a budgeting app could be laid out. It felt simple and effective.

Actual Budget? Well, that's another story! Their functionality vs. ease of use calculus lands squarely on the functionality side of the coin. And that's AMAZING, in my Certified Geek^™️ opinion.

Take their Rules feature, for example. Essentially, these are actions that are automatically applied to all matching transactions. Here's how one might look like:

With this rule, a transaction from Dominion Power that's approximately $120.00 is automatically split equally into two categories: Power and Roommate's debt. Isn't that something?

You can get veeery explicit with these rules. Just look at the UI. So, first off, you have Stage of rule. You can set this rule to run before or after all other rules. I don't have a use case for this yet, but the control's existence proves just how much functionality is packed in. Then you set one or more conditions, with AND or OR between them. You can check things like the account, category, notes, amount. For the amount, you can compare it to a value and check if it is, is approx (!!!), is greater than, and so on. And then, of course, you've then got the actions, where you can do pretty much anything you want.

YNAB has no equivalent. So what can I say, Actual Budget... rules? :P

Another amazing Actual feature is Reports. They are essentially widgets that you can fully customize to your own liking. You can add however many you want and they can track whatever you want. I haven't really dove into this, but here's one example I found in a Reddit post:

YNAB can't match Actual Budget here either. YNAB lets you see 4 graphs about your transactions: Spending Breakdown, Spending Trends, Net Worth, and Income v Expense. But that's about it...

Did I also mention that Actual works offline?

Needless to say, Actual Budget is packed to the brim with features. And it's still in active development, with new versions released monthly.

The end

... for YNAB!

Ok, not really. You can still use it. Frankly, I don't know why you'd use it anymore, but you definitely can – I've checked and YNAB is still up:

As for Actual Budget, if this post made you curious, you can check out their online budget demo. And, of course, you can download it here.

So there it is, my overly enthusiastic review of a budgeting app! What can I say, Actual Budget really puts the (WH)Y in YNAB.