Replace Rocket Money: Self-Host Wallos and Audit Every Subscription for $0

Quick audit: Netflix, Spotify, iCloud, GitHub Copilot, that domain you meant to cancel, the streaming service you opened twice. Plenty of households report losing $200+/year to subscriptions they forgot about — and the apps that promise to find them want your bank login and $4–12/month for the privilege.

Wallos (ellite/wallos, GPL-3.0) is the self-hosted answer: a subscription tracker in one Docker container. Manual entry instead of bank scraping — which is a feature, not a limitation: nothing leaves your hardware, and typing in each subscription is exactly the spending-awareness exercise. Dashboard, statistics, renewal notifications, multi-currency, household members. Let’s put it on the NAS.

The compose file

Wallos is refreshingly boring infrastructure-wise: PHP + SQLite, no separate database container, two volumes.

services:
  wallos:
    image: bellamy/wallos:5.10.1
    container_name: wallos
    ports:
      - "8282:80"
    environment:
      TZ: America/Toronto
    volumes:
      - ./db:/var/www/html/db
      - ./logos:/var/www/html/images/uploads/logos
    restart: unless-stopped

The two volumes are the entire state: ./db holds the SQLite database (your subscriptions, settings, history), ./logos holds uploaded provider logos. Lose the container, keep the folders, lose nothing. TZ matters because renewal reminders are date-driven — set it to your actual timezone, not the README’s Berlin default.

mkdir -p db logos && docker compose up -d

Open http://<nas-ip>:8282. First run asks you to create the admin account — there is no default password, which is the correct design.

First-run setup: 10 minutes that pay for themselves

1. Create your admin user, then go to Settings → Household and add members. Splitting “mine / partner / shared” is what makes the per-person stats useful later.
2. Currencies. Set your main currency and add the rest. For automatic exchange rates, grab a free Fixer API key and paste it in Settings — Wallos converts everything to your main currency for the totals. (Free tier is rate-limited; for a subscription tracker that updates daily, it’s plenty.)
3. Categories. The defaults are fine, but add the ones that match your life — “Dev tools” and “Domains” if you’re us.
4. Add every subscription. Name, price, billing cycle, next payment date, payment method, category, member. Yes, all of them — the 20 minutes of data entry is the audit. You’ll find at least one “wait, I’m still paying for that?” — everyone does.

Reverse proxy: put it behind Traefik

Exposing port 8282 directly is fine on the LAN, but if you want it on your domain with TLS, add Traefik labels (or your reverse proxy of choice) — and drop the ports: mapping. Dropping the port is only half the step: the service also has to join Traefik’s external network, or Traefik can’t reach the container at all:

services:
  wallos:
    image: bellamy/wallos:5.10.1
    container_name: wallos
    environment:
      TZ: America/Toronto
    volumes:
      - ./db:/var/www/html/db
      - ./logos:/var/www/html/images/uploads/logos
    networks:
      - traefik
    labels:
      - "traefik.enable=true"
      - "traefik.docker.network=traefik"
      - "traefik.http.routers.wallos.rule=Host(`wallos.yourdomain.com`)"
      - "traefik.http.routers.wallos.entrypoints=websecure"
      - "traefik.http.routers.wallos.tls.certresolver=letsencrypt"
      - "traefik.http.services.wallos.loadbalancer.server.port=80"
    restart: unless-stopped

networks:
  traefik:
    external: true

The traefik.docker.network label matters once a container sits on more than one network — it tells Traefik which network to route through. Same pattern as every other service on the box.

Notifications: the actual money-saving feature

A tracker you never look at is a spreadsheet. Wallos sends renewal reminders — configure them under Settings → Notifications:

• Email via SMTP (your own mail server or a transactional provider).
• Webhook-style integrations for the notifiers Wallos supports.

Set reminders a few days before renewal, not on the day — the point is the cancellation window, and annual renewals are where the real money hides. A $149/year renewal you forgot about dwarfs a $9.99/month one you notice.

Backup and updates: the two-command playbook

Because state is just two folders, backup is nearly a tarball — with one safety step. SQLite can be mid-write when the tar runs, and a live tar can capture a torn file (especially in WAL mode), so stop the app for the few seconds the copy takes:

# backup (run nightly via cron)
docker compose stop wallos
tar -czf /backup/wallos-$(date +%F).tgz db logos
docker compose start wallos

# update — deliberate: bump the pinned image tag in the compose file first, then
docker compose pull && docker compose up -d

The image is pinned (bellamy/wallos:5.10.1) rather than :latest on purpose: for a finance-adjacent app, upgrading is a deliberate step — read the changelog, bump the tag, then pull — not silent drift.

If you can’t afford even that blink of downtime, copy the database with SQLite’s own online backup instead — sqlite3 db/wallos.db ".backup '/backup/wallos.db'" — and tar the logos alongside it.

That’s the whole disaster recovery plan: re-create the folders from the tarball on any machine, docker compose up -d, done. SQLite means no separate database server to dump or version-match on restore — the ceremony you skip is the server, not the care when copying the file. For a finance-adjacent app, test the restore once — untar into a temp dir, point a second compose at it, confirm your subscriptions are there.

The math

The manual-entry “downside” is doing real work. Automatic categorization trains you to ignore the app; typing in $16.99/month for something you use twice a year forces a real decision.

Plenty of people report finding $200+/year in forgotten subscriptions once they list everything — your mileage will vary, but the first forgotten annual renewal usually covers the 20 minutes of setup many times over.

Cheat sheet

Twenty minutes of data entry, one container, zero dollars, zero bank passwords. The subscriptions you forgot about are the ones costing you the most — go find them.