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Open Net Worth Docs

How your data is stored

Open Net Worth doesn’t keep your finances on a company server. There’s no sign-up and no cloud sync. Everything you enter — accounts, transactions, budgets, holdings, documents, even Lucius’s memory and conversations — lives in one database file, inside a folder on the machine that runs the app.

Where it lives

By default, in a folder called .open-net-worth in your home folder. It holds the database, the files you’ve added (statements, receipts, chat uploads), daily backups, and logs.

To keep it somewhere else — another drive, a NAS — set ONW_ROOT when you start the server, or choose a different folder in the desktop app. See Where your files live for the full layout.

Copying that one folder (with the app stopped) copies everything — that’s all it takes to move to a new machine.

Backups

The app makes a full backup of your data every night, automatically, and keeps 30 days of them. You can change that, back up on demand, or restore one in Settings → Data:

  • Automatic backups — Back up daily on or off, Keep for (days), and Back up now.
  • Restore from a backup — pick any saved backup to go back to it.
  • Export backup (.zip) — download a full copy to keep somewhere else. It leaves out your password, API token and connector credentials.

Backups are stored next to your data on the same machine, so also keep a copy elsewhere. See Backup and restore.

Separately, before Lucius changes anything, the app takes a snapshot so the change can be undone.

What connects to the internet

Open Net Worth has no analytics, no usage tracking and no automatic crash reporting. Your balances, transactions and net worth are never sent to the Open Net Worth project.

Some features do connect out, and each sends only what it needs:

On by default:

  • Prices and exchange rates — from Yahoo Finance and CoinGecko. Only ticker symbols and coin names are sent, never what you hold or how much.
  • News for Intel — news and filings about the companies you hold or watch, from public feeds (such as Google News and SEC filings), plus those sites’ icons. Turn it off with Settings → Intelligence → Monitoring → Monitoring active; that also pauses background price checks.
  • Desktop app update checks — the desktop app asks opennetworth.ai for updates every few hours, sending its version and platform. Servers and Docker never check.

Only when you set them up:

  • Your AI provider — when you use Lucius, your messages and the data he looks up to answer go to the provider you chose (Anthropic, OpenAI, a local model…), with your own key or subscription. Lucius also uses it in the background for things you turn on, such as Automations and briefs on your watchlist. Nothing goes through a server run by this project. With no provider connected, nothing is sent and the rest of the app still works.
  • Connectors — email, Telegram, a bank or broker link, web search, an external MCP server. Each one talks only to its own service, and none is on until you add it.
  • Problem reports — only when you open Report a problem, read it, and click Send report. See Reporting a problem.

The full list, with how to turn each off, is in Security and privacy.

Private Cloud

If you choose to run your book on a Private Cloud server instead of your own machine, the same single database lives on that server, and you sign in with your Private Cloud account. See Using it from more than one device.