NomadWealth: Self-Hosted Net-Worth App

Project overview

NomadWealth is a self-hostable personal net-worth and investment cockpit — one private dashboard for your entire financial picture, not just your stocks: public holdings, real estate, private loans, cash, business income and a FIRE projection, all switchable live between EUR, USD, GBP and RON. It began life as a single-user, env-password personal dashboard I built for my own finances, then I packaged it into a sellable product that each buyer deploys to their own Vercel and connects to their own Neon Postgres.
The defining constraint shaped every decision: as the vendor, I literally cannot see the buyer’s data. It lives in a database only they hold the keys to, reached only by code running in their account. This phase turned a working personal tool into a productised, one-click-deployable app — a setup wizard, an in-browser importer, offline license activation and a marketing site — added around the existing domain features rather than on top of a rewrite. The work overlaps most closely with custom Next.js development, product engineering and privacy-first architecture.

The challenge

A dashboard I’d written for myself worked, but it was single-user, assumed one hard-coded password and one database, and stored secrets in environment variables. To sell it, I had to make it something a non-technical buyer could stand up in minutes and trust with their most sensitive data — without gutting the domain features that made it useful in the first place.

What was delivered

I built the packaging layer additively on top of the personal dashboard, keeping the “no vendor data access” invariant as a hard rule that every new feature had to respect. That included a one-click Vercel + Neon deploy, a guided setup wizard, runtime database migrations that need no dev tooling, offline Ed25519 license activation, a privacy-preserving in-browser importer, and a public marketing and security site — while the domain cockpit itself gained live prices, alerts, sharing and a data export.

Core functionality included

Key architecture decisions

The guiding principle was to extend, not rebuild. The personal dashboard already had a working net-worth engine, a Drizzle/Neon data model and a session mechanism, so productisation added a thin packaging layer — licensing, setup, import and marketing — with almost no change to the underlying domain schema. The non-negotiable invariant sat above everything: the vendor can never see buyer data, which ruled out conventional analytics, error reporting with payloads and any license server in the hot path.
Two decisions did the heavy lifting. First, migrations run at runtime over the Neon driver rather than through drizzle-kit — the SQL is embedded into the app, applied by the setup wizard and tracked in a bookkeeping table, tolerant of “already exists” so it stays idempotent on restricted serverless hosts. Second, a first-run guard in middleware redirects every route to /setup until the install is configured, then fast-paths warm requests with a signed cookie. Licensing is offline by design: keys are Ed25519-signed and verified against a public key baked into the binary, so activation needs no network call at all.

Results and outcomes

The project became a genuinely self-hostable commercial product: a buyer can go from a single click to a working, signed-in, multi-currency net-worth cockpit on infrastructure they wholly own, with the vendor unable to read a single figure. The domain features I originally built for myself now ship as a polished, privacy-first app.

Technology used

NomadWealth is built with Next.js 15 (App Router), React 19 and TypeScript, styled with Tailwind and shadcn/ui in a dark, cockpit aesthetic with Framer Motion, and charted with Recharts and lightweight-charts. Data runs through Drizzle ORM on Neon serverless Postgres with Zod-validated Server Actions. Licensing uses Ed25519 signatures via the Web Crypto API; owner auth uses PBKDF2 and TOTP; alerts use Web Push (VAPID) and email; FX comes from Frankfurter and prices from Yahoo and (optionally) CoinMarketCap. It deploys to Vercel via a one-click template and the native Neon integration.
The delivery is most relevant to custom Next.js and full-stack development, privacy-first product engineering and ongoing support for self-hostable SaaS.