Motivation

If you were starting a small business today, what would you use for Accounting? What would your use to store the bank details of your your employees and vendors? Google Sheets? Excel? How will you make sure that a cell in Google Sheets or Excel or Docs doesn't accidentally get edited?

The fact is that even though our phones and laptops are quite powerful, certainly powerful enough to run accounting software for your small business, these kind of services are available behind a paywall: Tally, QuickBooks, etc.

What our phones and laptops have become are basically devices for consumption of massive entertainment material that's out there. Productivity software are available mostly for subscription behind a paywall even though your devices are powerful enough to do the computations that are done in servers thousands of miles away from you. Because of the free market this happened probably because software companies realized that they could earn more money by offering their software for subscription than by selling it completely. But don't get me wrong. Both solutions: selling software and selling subscription have their pros and cons. The primary benefit of subscription based software is maintenance. Your vendor will take care of backup and bug fixes and upgrades. However, it's not that it is impossible for the customer to maintain the software themselves. In fact, it is most likely that because software is primarily offered as subscription, the ecosystem for customers to maintain the software they buy isn't as well developed.

Our primary interest is in creating software that is offered without subscription. Perhaps with just a one time purchase fee. Perhaps the software is free or even open source and the charge is only for the service: installation and such. We do realize that some software is better offered as subscription rather than installation though. For example, a simple TODO app can be something installable on your system that is either free or available with a one time fee. If the user wants a TODO app that supports collaborative editing and things like that then, it will most likely have to be a subscription based software because features like collaborative editing require a server and a server requires monthly payment and maintenance (backup, etc.). Our say is that users should have the choice, either to buy the software or the subscription.

It probably seemed in my discussion above that maintaining a software that's bought is harder than software that's subscribed. It is true because you're not the one maintaining the software that you subscribed. But there do exist excellent tools for backup and upgrade of software installed in your computer as well. Imagine a TODO app that's installed. Say it is an open source software. Because of tools like Docker, it is not hard for you to install and/or upgrade your software. Docker runs your software in isolation and takes care of installing all dependencies it needs without overriding existing packages because of its excellent mechanism for isolation. Say your TODO app stores the TODOs in a yaml file. That is very easy to back-up. Just use Git and Github. Why need a postgresql database for a simple, single-user app?

At our guesthouse in Sarangkot ↗, we use Beancount for accounting. Beancount is an open-source, plain-text accounting software. We use it with its web interface called Fava. Since it is plain-text accounting, it's very easy to version control thus backup. Because of version control support, it also automatically includes support for detecting accidental edits. Because it is an open-source software, we also got this for free. Since it is an plain text accounting, it also works with AI without friction. For example, nowadays, we do not do the beancount accounting ourselves, instead we have Claude Code read the WhatsApp Journal group using playright mcp server then have it make beancount postings and create a Github PR. Then we review the PR. Basically we got away without writing a MCP server for accounting which we would have needed if we used some accounting where postings are DB operations. This is a great thing. Someone made beancount (and fava) open source so we could have the fun. Software like this is our inspiration. Working to make the powers of technology more accessible is our motivation.