Sure, a free community fork of the abandoned Maybe finance app, self-hosts in Docker with its $1 million codebase intact

Setup is two secrets and one command. Sure’s Docker guide has you save a compose.yml, make a .env file holding a SECRET_KEY_BASE and a POSTGRES_PASSWORD, and run docker compose up. Then you open http://localhost:3000 and register by hitting “create your account.” That’s the whole install for an app that a funded company spent years building.

The guide is blunt about the first secret. You generate it with openssl rand -hex 64, because “a shared or guessable value would mean session cookies can be forged.” Nobody wants a forged cookie anywhere near a net-worth chart.

The company behind the original is gone. Sure’s README says of it: “The business end of things didn’t work out, and so they stopped developing the app in mid-2023.” Before that, the team had been “spending nearly $1 million on development (employees, contractors, data providers, infra, etc.),” according to the same page, before open-sourcing the app. The original Maybe repository still sits there with 54.2k stars and the line “This repository is no longer actively maintained.”

Sure’s own opening line is the shortest obituary in open source: “This repository is a community fork of the now-abandoned Maybe Finance project.” Both projects ship under the AGPLv3 license, which is why anyone could pick the code up and carry on. The README adds that “Maybe” is a trademark of Maybe Finance, Inc., so the fork answers to a different word. Maybe became Sure. Somebody finally committed.

Sure says it is “a fully working personal finance app that can be self hosted with Docker,” and it can be reached from “a browser, the macOS desktop app, the mobile app,” plus API clients. If you’d rather not run a server, the README also lists one-click deploys on Render, PikaPods and Hostim.

The volunteers are chasing a problem the original team left behind. The README admits that “with data-heavy apps, inevitably, there are performance issues,” and the maintainers made a public Skylight dashboard showing “the problematic requests seen on the demo site,” then asked contributors to fix them. Most projects hide their slow pages. This one posted them.

The activity is real. At this writing the repo shows 13.8k stars, 4,125 commits and 473 open issues. The code that cost a startup nearly a million dollars now runs on whatever is humming in your closet, and the people improving it aren’t on anyone’s payroll.

My money says this is the shape abandoned open-source apps keep taking. A big star count (Maybe has 54.2k) means a ready audience, and the AGPLv3 license means nobody needs permission. What decides whether a fork survives is the boring queue: bug reports, slow pages, upgrade paths. The Skylight dashboard suggests Sure’s maintainers know it.

418 open pull requests are still waiting for somebody to say sure.