Aequo

Overview

What Aequo is

Aequo tracks personal finances across accounts, budgets and savings goals — on desktop and on a mobile companion that read and write the same file. There is no Aequo server anywhere in the picture, and no sign-up.

That constraint is the product, not a detail of the implementation, and it decides arguments. Local password screens, for instance, were rejected outright: an app with no accounts gains nothing real from a fake login. If data at rest needs protecting, the honest answer is encryption with a passphrase — which is what Aequo ships.

Features

What it does

Under the hood

One file, not a database

The whole dataset is a single JSON file. SQLite was the obvious choice and the wrong one: its lock manager assumes exclusive local access, and a binary file that mutates in place is exactly what consumer sync clients handle worst. A single JSON is atomic by nature, diffs cleanly, and stays under a megabyte in normal use. The cost — every save rewrites the whole file — is real, and it is paid for with a debounce.

Writes go to a temporary file, get flushed, then rename over the target, with the previous version kept as a backup. Concurrent edits are caught by optimistic concurrency: each save carries a hash of the revision it started from, and a poller in the main process notices when the file changes underneath. On divergence Aequo stops and asks, keeping the displaced version — it never silently overwrites, and it never deletes data on its own.

Gallery

Screens