Deploy Sure | Personal Finance App (Maybe Finance Successor)

Deploy and Host Sure on Railway

Sure is the community-maintained successor to Maybe Finance, the open-source personal finance app whose original repo was archived in 2025. It tracks net worth, accounts, transactions, budgets and investments in one place, with CSV imports, rules, and optional AI chat. This template runs a pinned Sure release with its background worker, Postgres, Redis and a Railway bucket for files, and creates your owner account on first boot so the sign-up page is never open to strangers.

About Hosting Sure

Five pieces, all wired together on Railway's private network:

• Sure: the Rails web app. Each start runs database migrations first.
• Worker: Sidekiq for imports, syncs, exports and scheduled jobs, from the same image.
• Postgres with a volume, and Redis for the job queue.
• sure-files, a Railway bucket for uploads, institution logos and exports, so web and worker see the same files.

On first boot the web service creates the owner from SURE_ADMIN_EMAIL and SURE_ADMIN_PASSWORD, then closes public sign-ups. Invite family members from Settings.

Common Use Cases

• Replace Mint, YNAB or a spreadsheet with a private, self-hosted money tracker
• Move off an old Maybe Finance install to the maintained fork
• Track net worth across banks, cards, loans, property and investment accounts
• Share one household budget with a partner through invites

Dependencies for Sure Hosting

• None to start. Optional: an OpenAI (or OpenAI-compatible) key for AI chat and auto-categorization, and a bank sync provider such as SimpleFIN or Plaid.

Deployment Dependencies

• Sure on GitHub
• Sure self-hosting docs
• SimpleFIN Bridge for bank sync (optional)

Implementation Details

First use:

1. Enter your email as SURE_ADMIN_EMAIL when you deploy.
2. Open the Sure service's domain once all services are green. The first boot migrates the database, so it takes a minute or two.
3. Log in with your email and the generated SURE_ADMIN_PASSWORD from the Sure service's Variables tab, finish onboarding, then change the password in Settings.

AI: set OPENAI_ACCESS_TOKEN on both Sure and Worker and redeploy. For OpenRouter or another OpenAI-compatible API, also set OPENAI_URI_BASE and OPENAI_MODEL.

Email: password resets and invites need SMTP. Add SMTP_ADDRESS, SMTP_PORT, SMTP_USERNAME, SMTP_PASSWORD, SMTP_TLS_ENABLED and EMAIL_SENDER to both services. Without SMTP, invite links are still shown in Settings to copy by hand.

Upgrading: each template update pins a newer Sure release. Migrations run on the next start.

Notes and limits:

• The owner variables only matter on first boot. Changing them later does not change the login.
• Give the Sure and Worker services about 1 GB each for comfortable imports. Both start on less.
• Back up the Postgres volume (Railway backups) before major upgrades; it holds all your financial data.

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.