Instead YouTube gives me literally nothing but AI spam. :/

I scrolled down a bit more and got this: https://i.postimg.cc/fJcPhG45/Screenshot-20251118-150802.png

Scrolled down some more and this: https://i.postimg.cc/v1khnhRp/Screenshot-20251118-151325.png

I kept scrolling until I ran out of relevant results. Not a single video was legit. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much AI slop in one search term and by the gods there is a lot of crap on YouTube.

Anyone have a good comparison video? I’m just wanting a decent comparison of Actual, Firefly III and possibly HomeBank. Feel free to also give me your 2 cents on whatever you use :)

  • ZkhqrD5o@lemmy.world
    2·
    6 hours ago

    Maybe not what you’re looking for, but there’s a program called “Money Wallet” on Android. It’s on F-Droid and free software. Maybe my favourite because every time I spend cash I just open it up and I enter what I just spent.

    For professional use, I’d recommend GNU Cash, though.

  • SlurpingPus@lemmy.world
    4·
    29 minutes ago

    Just FYI, take a look at how YNAB works — which is a paid app, but with a great approach: you track your spending for a while, and then basically always know how much you can spend on various categories of things. Idk what the workflow is in modern budgeting apps, but back in the day YNAB was rather different from the more typical accounting-type software like GNUCash. One of its tenets is that you don’t spend money which you don’t actually have, i.e. the credit card debt.

    • sunbeam60@feddit.uk
      3·
      28 minutes ago

      Actual Budget is a straight FOSS clone of YNAB. It’s very, very good IMHO, but their big selling feature was bank import with PSD2 APIs across the EU and they’ve backed away from that as you need to be a commercial provider to use APIs directly and their dependency on GoCardless is getting nerfed.

      • SlurpingPus@lemmy.world
        1·
        9 minutes ago

        Thanks, but as a non-quite-EU person I’d like you to know I understood your comment fine until a bit after the second comma in the second sentence, following which my grokking declined sharply to just the surface level when met with a bunch of peculiar terms forming a mighty wall of obstruction to my comprehending.

  • HotChickenFeet@sopuli.xyz
    4·
    16 hours ago

    I think its budgeting features are lackluster, but I have highly enjoyed gnucash for tracking my expenses, incime & where everything goes.

    It’s all manual more or less, and you do double ledger accounting, so all the money is accounted for somewhere.

  • Sips'@slrpnk.net
    4·
    16 hours ago

    Ive started seeing a lot of these sadly… Luckily they’re still somewhat easy to spot.

  • jlow (he / him)@discuss.tchncs.de
    4·
    16 hours ago

    Im reasonable happy with Actual Budget. I like that it has desktop apps that can sync woth a server that was easy to set up, I can import various things via .csv, rules to automatically categorise stuff are nice. I dont care about the envelope budgeting or whatever it’s called they’re on about but it’s easy to ignore / turn off.

  • apprehensively_human@lemmy.caEnglish
    4·
    18 hours ago

    I’ve been using Actual for a while now, probably close to a year. Before that I was on YNAB, which isn’t FOSS but does have a huge library of material for how to make your budget work for you instead of the other way around.

    I got off YNAB after they kept raising their subscription fees for seemingly no reason. Actual is not nearly as feature-rich but you can’t really argue with the price.

  • iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works
    31·
    1 day ago

    I don’t have a video for you but I’ve been using Actual for over a year and really like it. I recommend it. Caveat, I very actively interact with my budget (inputting things manually) and cannot speak for it’s account linking features.

    • Coolcoder360@lemmy.world
      10·
      1 day ago

      I use actual as well.

      The docker compose works really well, basically set it up once and then it works, even with running updates by pulling new container versions.

      I used the account importing to start but now input everything manually and don’t do live sync.

      Never heard of the other options so didn’t know about them to compare before setting up actual. I do like the methodology of actual, where it has you only budget money that actually exists in your account, that feels very sane to me.

      • chillpanzee@lemmy.mlEnglish
        6·
        1 day ago

        I just installed Firefly yesterday, and I can say that the docker compose setup was easy. I’ve got no real opinions yet, just wanted to mention this for OP in case he reads your experience as it being easier. I imagine they’re both easy.

        I’m curious, when you say you stopped importing, does that mean you were getting info from your banks, and stopped doing that? Why did you stop? My next step was to set up the automated importer for Firefly.

        • Coolcoder360@lemmy.world
          1·
          10 hours ago

          I never set up the actual bank sync, I think what I did was basically a CSV export and then import, rather than the bank sync.

          But it’s been about a year so not remembering exactly how the import was.

  • Sims@lemmy.ml
    55·
    14 hours ago

    This is all just Capitalist slop. Has nothing to do with AI or llms, just the kind of society it exists in and the type of psychopath corporations that delivers. We seem to forget that all other tool we use to de-shittify the net, ALL fight capitalist tendencies, but when AI comes along and gives the Capitalist believers a new tool for scamming people, then it is suddenly the tools fault !!

    People hate Capitalism, not the tool…

    • moonshadow@slrpnk.net
      4·
      10 hours ago

      I remember people making this same argument but for social media, doesn’t make any more sense now than it did then. Corpos are the ones in control of that tool, using it helps them so much more than it does you. If you don’t want to support the ideology that developed it, you really need to just not engage.

  • teri@discuss.tchncs.de
    1·
    19 hours ago

    There’s also text-based tools - not sure if they fit your needs. beancount (with ‘fava’ has a nice web UI), ledger, hledger. Good thing about text based is: you can easily use git.

    Not sure if they go as ‘budgeting’ software. ‘Accounting’ might be more accurate.

  • exu@feditown.comEnglish
    9·
    1 day ago

    I tried Actual Budget for a while, but didn’t stick with it long term. I also looked at Firefly III, never tried it though.

    Eventually I figured out I just want an expense tracker instead of full budgeting and settled for ExpenseOwl

    • Thorned_Rose@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      24·
      1 day ago

      Multiple videos that have the same style of thumbnail (AI generated face excepted). Multiple videos with a very similar thumbnail and exact same wording. They’re all within the past year, mostly within the past 6 months (this software has existed for many years, why all of a sudden do multiple channels want to do vs or review videos of them). They’re all short videos and its just not possible to give a proper breakdown of feature or a review of budgeting software in that amount of time. The few videos I tested used AI voices and all had a similar start (I didn’t waste my time watching the whole video). The faces on the videos look AI generated or modified…

      • PartyPatella@lemmy.ml
        4·
        17 hours ago

        Thanks for elaborating! I am in no way great at spotting such slop videos, but I did notice some of the stuff you mentioned.

        In some of the videos, they have a little “self-cam” in the corner - is that artificial too?

        Regarding artificial voicing, I did test a few videos - the phrasing, punctuation and sound effects were similar. Is that how you figure it is artificial?

        And what gives away the faces are generated? Most videos even have comments - everything is fake?!

        Thanks in advance. If I came across only one of the videos - and did not see all thumbnails in a search for instance - I must shamefully admit that I probably would not have spotted it.

  • smiletolerantly@awful.systems
    7·
    1 day ago

    Another recmendation for Actual. I spend very little time having to interact with it, because after the initial setup, all transactions are now synched from my bank accounts, and 90% are automatically classified into my categories (not by “AI” or something, you just set rules like “payments to Rewe are always groceries”).