Copyright © 2018-2020 Andreas Huber
Gain a quick overview of your precious metal and crypto assets!
If you primarily store your wealth in 'unconventional' assets like precious metals and cryptocurrencies, it seems difficult to get an overview of your current financial situation.
Net Worth aims to make this a little easier. In a nutshell, the application presents your precious metal and cryptocurrency holdings in a groupable and sortable table, which allows you to quickly see how your net worth is spread among the different asset types and locations.
Net Worth runs in your internet browser but works and feels mostly like a conventional desktop application. There are no logins, no passwords and your data is only ever stored locally on your computer.
While the application should work in most recent internet browsers, for privacy reasons it is recommended to install either Brave, Iron or Firefox and point it to https://andreashuber69.github.io/net-worth.
Note: It appears that some versions of Brave treat requests to external services as if they are made by cross-site trackers. So, if you experience any problems, please deactivate Brave Shields and try again. In the Privacy section you can find more information on what kinds of queries are made by the application.
In the latest desktop versions of some browsers (e.g. Brave and Chrome), you have the option to install Net Worth locally:
After the installation, you should see the application icon on your desktop. For further options, you can navigate to
chrome://apps:
Alternatively, you can also install the self-contained (i.e. browser-independent) desktop variant of Net Worth.
On recent Android phones (and presumably tablets) with the latest version of Chrome, you are automatically prompted to add an icon to your home screen when you visit https://andreashuber69.github.io/net-worth for the first time:
In the toolbar on the left there's a menu with the usual suspects New, Open..., Save, Save As... and About. On the right, you'll find buttons to add a new asset and refresh as well as controls to change the asset grouping and the valuation currency.
In the table, clicking on a row representing an asset group will expand/collapse it. For example, in the screenshot above, the Silver group is expanded, such that the grouped assets become visible. Individual assets can be edited and deleted with the triple-dot menu at the end of each row. Some columns can be sorted by clicking on their headers.
Some table cells reveal more information when hovering over them with the mouse pointer:
- Location for a cryptocurrency: Address (if specified)
- Description: Notes (if specified)
- Unit Value and Quantity, when displaying "Error": Additional error information
- Data Storage: The asset details you enter into Net Worth are stored in an application-specific space in your browser, so that it can only be accessed when your browser is pointed to https://andreashuber69.github.io/net-worth. Said data can be saved to a .assets file on your hard drive such that you can load it again later, much like you can save and load stuff with conventional desktop applications. Note that .assets files are not encrypted. If you care about privacy, you should thus ensure that these files cannot be accessed by anybody else, e.g. by storing them on a password-protected encrypted drive. Moreover, you should only use Net Worth on a device where you have a password-protected personal account. Finally, it is worth noting that most cloud storage services like e.g. Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. do not store user data in an encrypted form.
- Queries: The application queries precious metal prices and currency exchange rates (quandl.com) plus crypto currency prices (cryptocompare.com). For crypto currencies, you have the option to also track your balance, by specifying a public address instead of a quantity. If you choose to do so, the application will also send your public address(es) to an online service like e.g. blockchair.com. All queries are always encrypted (https), but of course the owners of the respective services will have access to the contents of the queries (which can be attributed to you via your IP address). This is why it is recommended to only use the application via a reputable VPN provider or even TOR.
- HD Wallets: Besides normal public addresses, the application also supports so-called xpubs (short for extended public keys) for most crypto currencies. To protect your privacy, Net Worth never sends these to external services. Instead, balances are queried with normal public addresses derived from an xpub. While this approach reveals as little as possible about your wallet, it should be noted that it's trivial to reconstruct the past transaction history from the contents of the queries. This is why, again, you should take measures so that the queries are not attributable to you, see above.
The application gathers data from various providers, who generously offer their services free of charge. Some of the providers (like e.g. blockchair.com) heavily limit the number of requests they answer from a given IP address.
This is usually not a problem for asset prices because these can be retrieved with very few requests. If you use a VPN, it is possible however that the previous user of the same IP address has already exhausted the provider limit and you therefore get error messages.
If you allow the application to query your crypto currency balance by providing a public address, the requests are spaced out such that the provider request limit is not exhausted. Depending on the number of addresses you provide, this may take substantial time, especially if you provide an xpub of a wallet with many transactions.
- Supported precious metals: Silver, Palladium, Platinum, Gold
- Supported crypto currencies: Bitcoin, Monero, Litecoin, Ethereum Classic, ERC20 Tokens, Ethereum, Bitcoin Gold, Dash, Zcash. Others will be implemented depending on demand.
- Assets can be grouped according to asset type or location.
- Assets other than precious metals and cryptos can be added as (manually valued) Misc assets.
- Liabilities can be added as negatively valued Misc assets.
- Supported valuation currencies: 27 fiat currencies plus silver ounces (XAG), gold ounces (XAU) and Bitcoin (BTC)
- Intuitive, flexible user interface that auto-adapts to almost any screen size.
- Free, open-source, no ads
- Works on almost any platform, including mobile phones and Raspberry Pis.
To see the known issues, ask questions, report problems or suggest improvements, please use the Net Worth Issue Tracker.
The source code and full change history is available at https://github.com/andreashuber69/net-worth and https://github.com/andreashuber69/net-worth-desktop. You can also review the code with the developer tools while your browser is directed to the https://andreashuber69.github.io/net-worth.
Net Worth was created because no other freely available site/tool seemed to support both precious metals and crypto currencies and I was fed up with maintaining an increasingly complex set of Excel sheets.
Net Worth is a so-called Progressive Web Application (PWA). PWAs can be used exactly like conventional web applications but at the same time are automatically cached locally such that they still load in seconds if the network is slow or even down. On an increasing number of browsers, especially on mobile platforms, PWAs can now also be added to the home screen such that they look and feel much like a locally installed app.
The PWA model was chosen due to the following advantages over conventional desktop applications:
- PWAs work on most popular platforms/browsers.
- No installation is required, just surf to https://andreashuber69.github.io/net-worth and let your browser handle the rest.
- Distribution is straight-forward.
Of course, there are also some (minor) disadvantages:
- It is impossible to overwrite a local file from within a browser without user involvement. The Save menu item will therefore always create a new file rather than overwrite the originally loaded one. Since browsers typically store files in a special Download folder, the user usually needs to manually copy the newly saved file over the one she loaded. For an application like Net Worth this should not result in too much of an inconvenience, because files are typically changed rarely.
- If a web site attempts to open a new browser window, pop-up blockers sometimes get in the way. Most browsers allow the user to authorize exceptions.
