I connected my self-hosted Actual Budget to my AI assistant — here's what it's actually like to use
I run Actual Budget on a cheap box, and a while back I gave my personal AI assistant (Hermes, also self-hosted) read-only access to it. Not because it sounded cool — because I got tired of opening the app just to answer a two-second question.
Here's what that actually looks like day to day.
"How much did I spend on groceries last week?"
No opening the app, no clicking into the category, no doing mental math across a few transactions. Just a real number, pulled straight from my actual data, in a few seconds.
"Am I on track with my dining out budget this month?"
Since Actual uses envelope budgeting, this is the question I actually care about most — not "how much did I spend" in isolation, but "how much room do I have left." Getting a straight answer to that, mid-conversation, without switching apps, is genuinely the thing that changed how often I check in on my spending. I check in more, not less, because it's frictionless now.
"What was my biggest category last month?"
Useful for the monthly "where did it all go" moment everyone doing envelope budgeting has eventually. Instead of scrolling through categories manually, I just ask.
The part that matters most to me, though: it's read-only. Hermes can see my numbers and answer questions about them, but it has zero ability to create, edit, or delete a single transaction. I was pretty deliberate about that — I wanted a smarter way to look at my budget, not a new way for something to accidentally mess with it. It sits there like a knowledgeable friend looking over your shoulder, not a second set of hands touching your ledger.
Not a huge, dramatic use case — just a genuinely nice quality-of-life thing for anyone who's already in the "I check my budget more if it's actually easy to check" camp. Happy to answer questions if anyone's curious how the access side works, but honestly the day-to-day value is just... asking normal questions and getting real answers back.