Self-hosted Money, Budgeting & Management: what licence are you actually agreeing to

“Self-hosted” and “open source” are not the same promise, and the lists that recommend these projects rarely separate them. This page sorts 42 money, budgeting & management projects by the licence you are actually agreeing to, as read on 2026-08-20.

19 of 42 are permissive: run them, change them, keep your changes to yourself. 10 are AGPL, where serving a modified copy over a network obliges you to publish those changes, which is the clause that catches people who self-host for a team. 5 are not open source at all, carrying a proprietary or restricted-use licence. The remaining 8 are ordinary copyleft.

Project	Licence	What that means	Stars	Maintenance	Language
HyperSwitch	Apache-2.0	Permissive, no strings	43,509	Active	Rust
Actual	MIT	Permissive, no strings	28,251	Active	TypeScript
BTCPay Server	MIT	Permissive, no strings	7,714	Active	C#
Kill Bill	Apache-2.0	Permissive, no strings	5,694	Active	Java
ezbookkeeping	MIT	Permissive, no strings	5,429	Active	Go
InvoicePlane	MIT	Permissive, no strings	3,110	Active	PHP
Fava	MIT	Permissive, no strings	2,553	Active	Python
FOSSBilling	Apache-2.0	Permissive, no strings	1,679	Active	PHP
ExpenseOwl	MIT	Permissive, no strings	1,480	Slowing	HTML
IHateMoney	BSD-3-Clause	Permissive, no strings	1,388	Active	Python
Bitcart	MIT	Permissive, no strings	975	Active	Python
SolidInvoice	MIT	Permissive, no strings	948	Active	PHP
REI3	MIT	Permissive, no strings	573	Active	JavaScript
Ocular	MIT	Permissive, no strings	553	Active	Vue
Family Accounting Tool	Apache-2.0	Permissive, no strings	364	Active	Scala
DePay	MIT	Permissive, no strings	132	Active	JavaScript
YAFFA	MIT	Permissive, no strings	108	Active	PHP
Econumo	MIT	Permissive, no strings	93	Active	Go
Mybucks.online	MIT	Permissive, no strings	19	Active	JavaScript
Wallos	GPL-3.0	Copyleft, publish your changes	8,374	Active	PHP
OctoBot	GPL-3.0	Copyleft, publish your changes	6,443	Active	Python
Budget Board	GPL-3.0	Copyleft, publish your changes	874	Active	C#
SHKeeper	GPL-3.0	Copyleft, publish your changes	606	Active	Python
VoucherVault	GPL-3.0	Copyleft, publish your changes	508	Active	HTML
MyFin Budget	GPL-3.0	Copyleft, publish your changes	303	Active	TypeScript
GRR	GPL-2.0	Copyleft, publish your changes	109	Active	PHP
Galette	GPL-3.0	Copyleft, publish your changes	70	Active	PHP
Firefly III	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	24,377	Active	PHP
Lago	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	10,368	Active	Go
Sure	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	9,538	Active	Ruby
Ghostfolio	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	9,159	Active	TypeScript
Bigcapital	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	3,847	Active	TypeScript
InvoiceShelf	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	1,800	Active	PHP
OpenBudgeteer	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	971	Slowing	C#
WYGIWYH	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	894	Active	Python
Kresus	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	339	Active	TypeScript
Receipt Wrangler	AGPL-3.0	AGPL, network copyleft	267	Active	Go
Akaunting	BUSL-1.1	Not open source, restricted use	10,076	Active	PHP
Invoice Ninja	Elastic-2.0	Not open source, restricted use	10,010	Active	PHP
monetr	FSL-1.1-MIT	Not open source, restricted use	678	Active	Go
Assets	⊘ Proprietary	Not open source, restricted use	182	Active	TypeScript
Pancake	⊘ Proprietary	Not open source, restricted use	-	Not measured	PHP

What the licence column means

Permissive (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD, ISC): do what you like, keep changes private.
Copyleft (GPL, LGPL, MPL, EPL): changes you distribute must ship their source.
AGPL, network copyleft: the same, and running it for others over a network counts as distribution. This is the one that surprises people who self-host for a team or a side business.
Source-available (SSPL, BUSL, Elastic, Commons Clause): not open source. Reading and self-use are usually fine; offering it as a service is not.
Other / unstated: the dataset lists no licence we could classify. Check the repo before you rely on it.

The Maintenance column is a second, independent check: the age of the most recent commit on the default branch, read from the GitHub API on 2026-08-20. Active is within 180 days, Slowing is 180 to 365, Dormant is over a year, Archived means the maintainer marked the repo read-only, and Not measured means the project is hosted outside GitHub so the check does not apply.

Source data from awesome-selfhosted-data, used under CC BY-SA 3.0. Licence family grouping and maintenance status are computed by this site (from the upstream licence fields and the GitHub API) and are not part of the upstream dataset. Licence classification is a summary, not legal advice: check the project’s own LICENSE file before you rely on it. This page is published under the same licence.