Deploy and Host Sure on Railway

Sure is an open-source personal finance app, the community-maintained continuation of Maybe Finance. Track every account in one place, see your net worth over time, categorize transactions with rules, set budgets, and import history from CSV, Mint, YNAB, Actual or another Sure instance.

About Hosting Sure

Sure runs as a Rails web app plus a Sidekiq worker, backed by Postgres and Redis. This template runs that exact upstream topology on the pinned stable release (0.7.6), and adds a Railway Storage Bucket for uploaded and generated files.

The bucket matters. Web and Worker are separate containers, and a Railway volume can attach to only one of them. Data exports, Sure imports, account logos, receipts and statements are written by one process and read by the other. With the bucket, both see the same files, and the files survive redeploys.

Web and Worker also share one set of secrets and encryption keys. Bank and provider credentials that you save in the web app can be decrypted by the background jobs that sync them.

Common Use Cases

Replace Mint, Monarch or YNAB with a finance app whose data stays in your own database
Track net worth across bank, credit, investment, crypto, property and loan accounts
Import years of transaction history from CSV, Mint, YNAB, Actual Budget or a Sure export
Share one household budget with family members, each with their own login
Add optional AI chat and auto-categorization with your own OpenAI or Anthropic key

Dependencies for Sure Hosting

Postgres 16 (bundled)
Redis 7.4 (bundled)
S3-compatible object storage (bundled Railway Storage Bucket)
Optional: SMTP credentials for password resets and invites
Optional: OpenAI key for AI features, Twelve Data key for exchange rates and stock prices

Deployment Dependencies

Sure source: https://github.com/we-promise/sure
Self-hosting guide: https://github.com/we-promise/sure/blob/main/docs/hosting/docker.md
Environment reference: https://github.com/we-promise/sure/blob/main/.env.example

Implementation Details

First boot. The deploy asks you nothing. Every password and key is generated for your project. First boot takes about two minutes while Web runs the database migrations. Until then the Worker logs warnings about missing tables. That is expected and stops on its own.

Your first login.

Open the Web service's public URL. You land on the sign-up page.
Create your account. The first account on the instance becomes its admin.
Finish the three onboarding screens (name, preferences, goals).

Close sign-ups. New instances allow open sign-up, so anyone with your URL can create their own separate household. They cannot see your data. To stop this, go to Settings > Self-Hosting and set onboarding to Closed or Invite only. You can also set the ONBOARDING_STATE variable on the Web service.

Keep these values. SECRET_KEY_BASE and the three ACTIVE_RECORD_ENCRYPTION_* variables on the Web service encrypt saved credentials. If you change them, stored bank tokens and API keys can no longer be read.

Optional settings on the Web service. The Worker picks them up automatically.

SMTP_ADDRESS, SMTP_PORT, SMTP_USERNAME, SMTP_PASSWORD, EMAIL_SENDER for password resets and invites
OPENAI_ACCESS_TOKEN for AI chat and auto-categorization
TWELVE_DATA_API_KEY for exchange rates and security prices (also settable in Settings > Self-Hosting)

Upgrading. Change the image tag on both Web and Worker to the new release, for example ghcr.io/we-promise/sure:0.7.7. Web runs migrations on boot.

Why Deploy Sure on Railway?

Railway is a singular platform to deploy your infrastructure stack. Railway will host your infrastructure so you don't have to deal with configuration, while allowing you to vertically and horizontally scale it.

By deploying Sure on Railway, you are one step closer to supporting a complete full-stack application with minimal burden. Host your servers, databases, AI agents, and more on Railway.