I use YNAB. I thought about building my own now that AI coding make this feasible. But the moat that I can't cross is the integration with my bank accounts. Plaid and the like are too expensive and don't cater to one-off users like me.
Has anyone been able to find a personal financial data provider that has a reasonable price?
As a few others have said Plaid is actually rather cheap if you only have a handful of accounts. I created my own personal finance tracker when Intuit Mint shut down and Plaid costs me $1.80 per month for all my linked accounts which feels very reasonable to me
Check out Lunch Flow, that's the exact reason I built this :) we Aggregate multiple providers behind a simple api for global coverage, and with a pricing friendly to individuals not businesses.
Plaid has a pay-as-you-go option that's only about $2/month for this use case. (I believe the current rack rate PAYG pricing is 30 cents per month per connected bank login).
I think GoCardless stopped accepting new accounts recently, which makes it a bit harder to rely on now.
Feels like the options for EU/SEPA are still pretty limited. I’ve been looking into alternatives as well, curious if you’ve found anything that works well also?
Otherwise, with the scraping approach Woob https://woob.tech/ (FLOSS) works well enough on some banks... It's damn absurd that banks and even supermarkets do not offer authenticated feeds for data export but that's is unfortunately...
Me personally I think banks do their best to push people toward cryptos only because of their crappy services... Even the worst CEx offer better data access the banks...
The privacy angle is interesting. I'm curious how people view the pricing strategy of taking a one-time payment for lifetime access. My first thought was that it encourages the developer to focus more on recruiting new users rather than keeping existing ones happy - makes me wonder what will become of the product if new user growth stalls.
I've wrestled with this idea. Do you think the general population will all be vibe coding finance apps? I have to think that most will still just pay the big players.
(I say this as someone who vibe coded a finance app, and it works!)...now I'm not sure what to do with it, it works for me - do I open it to the world or just keep making it great for me.
Yeah, the 4-year forward projection was what got me hooked on moneywell in 2009, when I bought a "forever" license for them. I have since wanted a budgeting app that would have that feature too, so I built trackm.
Regarding the one-time fee and subscription, 100% agree. I delayed adding account sync because of the monthly / yearly costs. And also, because with the model of recuring rules looking into the future, I tend to use the app on a daily basis to correct things (payment is scheduled on 16th but is cleared on 17th so I need to update it).
When I add bank account sync, I'll have to think how to charge it. I still don't want to have a subscription for it, so need to think about it.
Finally, I don't do client-side encryption. There is encryption in transit (https / tls) and at rest.
I can't open any database without the user's password, so even if someone were able to exfiltrate the user databases, they still would need to know the encryption key used to read the data.
Really strong effort. A lot of useful features that I'm looking for in budgeting apps. You've obviously gone for a privacy feature as its selling point but how is the encryption different to anything else? Surely every finance app has a strong encryption?
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Has anyone been able to find a personal financial data provider that has a reasonable price?
I haven't done it at first because
(1) they all have monthly / yearly costs and I wanted a flat fee;
(2) I can't update the account without the user having logged in because of how the encryption works.
Feels like the options for EU/SEPA are still pretty limited. I’ve been looking into alternatives as well, curious if you’ve found anything that works well also?
- https://www.saltedge.com
- https://www.fabrick.com
- https://www.bridgeapi.io
but they do not offer a free tier AFAIK
Otherwise, with the scraping approach Woob https://woob.tech/ (FLOSS) works well enough on some banks... It's damn absurd that banks and even supermarkets do not offer authenticated feeds for data export but that's is unfortunately...
Me personally I think banks do their best to push people toward cryptos only because of their crappy services... Even the worst CEx offer better data access the banks...
Feels like the options are still pretty limited unless you go paid/enterprise.
Woob is interesting, but scraping always feels like a ticking time bomb.
Thank you for the suggestions!
> I've been dogfooding it for the past 10 days
Must be ready to go then
Personally, I don't like subscription-based apps so didn't want to create yet another one.
And I built this around my personal needs so I plan to support it indefinitely.
Regarding long term improvements, there is a number of paying users that once I achieve, any new users are basically profit.
The service was built to be cheap to run and maintain so I could charge a one time fee.
My inspiration for trackm was actually moneywell.app which i bought a license for in 2009.
The "look X years" into the future feature was pulled from it.
I no longer have a mac or ios device, so built trackm to fill the void.
Monetizing this is going to be challenging.
(I say this as someone who vibe coded a finance app, and it works!)...now I'm not sure what to do with it, it works for me - do I open it to the world or just keep making it great for me.
Regarding the one-time fee and subscription, 100% agree. I delayed adding account sync because of the monthly / yearly costs. And also, because with the model of recuring rules looking into the future, I tend to use the app on a daily basis to correct things (payment is scheduled on 16th but is cleared on 17th so I need to update it).
When I add bank account sync, I'll have to think how to charge it. I still don't want to have a subscription for it, so need to think about it.
Finally, I don't do client-side encryption. There is encryption in transit (https / tls) and at rest.
I can't open any database without the user's password, so even if someone were able to exfiltrate the user databases, they still would need to know the encryption key used to read the data.