Who's behind this?

Hi, my name is Sean Coston. I am a general surgeon moving close to retirement. I am designing this application called ClarityDB as a personal "total wealth picture" viewing (and maybe a little planning and management) application. Right now my plan is to design the app as a one place you can go to for clarity on where you are now and where you are going financially.

ClarityDB lets you track investment accounts, cash accounts, real estate, and liabilities in one place. It calculates unrealized and realized gains, money-weighted return (MWR), time-weighted return (TWR), and net worth from the transactions you record. Market prices are fetched automatically via yfinance on a nightly schedule, or you can update your holdings' real-time values during the trading day. You can import data from your brokerages, banks, and other financial institutions in a lot of cases, and soon budgeting & financial planning tools will be added. Additionally, there will be ready access to links to some tools and education that I've found valuable in my own financial journey.

How it's built

ClarityDB is a web application built with Django, a Python-based web framework, with MySQL as the database back-end. Hopefully, when it is mature enough, I will be able to "package" it into a Docker install that one could run simply by bringing up the container. If you have a continuously running Linux server with Apache2 reverse-proxying virtual hosting set up (or want to), it can be installed in that fashion.

Eventually, one hosting an instance of this app could "host" for multiple users, but really — it is designed to allow you to do all these things privately for yourself, and maybe for a few friends and family. Data never leaves your server — everything is stored in your local MySQL database. It's private — no ad tracking, no making the user the product.

Want to try it?

For now, as the basic features are actively in development, ClarityDB is only available to you if you've been invited. If you are reading this and want to try it out, I welcome you to register yourself as a user, log in, and explore — let me know what you think and where improvements can be made. Tell me about bugs you find, etc.