wnab / Wedge Needs A Budget

What it is

wnab (“Wedge Needs A Budget”) was a fork of Actual Budget — an open-source, local-first budgeting engine — rebuilt into a YNAB-style envelope budgeting app with a coaching layer on top. The plan: reuse Actual’s loot-core engine, which runs SQLite in the browser via WebAssembly so the whole thing stays static and serverless, and author the missing piece — the onboarding, nudges, and behavioral design that teach the mindset of zero-based budgeting.

What worked

The engine bet was right. Forking @actual-app/web meant the hard parts — double-entry ledger, import matching, multi-account reconciliation — already existed and ran offline in the browser. Keeping the engine seam separate from the view layer let me track upstream for the mechanics while diverging on the experience.

What broke

Zero-based envelope budgeting is mechanically sound and, in daily use, exhausting. Every dollar assigned, every category reconciled, every month re-budgeted — the ritual cost outweighed the insight it returned. A budgeting tool that feels like micromanaging stops getting opened, and a budgeting tool you don’t open is worse than none.

Lessons

• Match the ceremony to the payoff. The envelope method demands constant upkeep for a kind of control I didn’t actually need day to day. Its successor, WNAC, replaced envelopes with a single “flex number” and a debt-payoff dial — the same insight at a fraction of the ritual.
• Reuse the engine, own the experience. Forking Actual’s engine was the right call and saved months. The mistake was inheriting its budgeting philosophy along with its code.
• The motivation hook has to survive contact with daily use. Ownership got me to build it; the daily ritual is what it lived or died on. It died on the ritual.

Status

Retired. Archived intact — the data round-trips and the engine still runs. Its successor is WNAC: clean data and AI insight without the envelope ceremony.