The aspirational vs motivated user. It's like people being told they need to go to the gym by the sales person vs the person who gets up at 6am to just work out.
That's kind of just a brag about being wealthy though, isn't it? For many people who are trying to get escape velocity to being financially secure, tracking spending + investments is a necessary reality.
No one is saying it's healthy but if you have debt, can't save or don't have investments on track to meet your future needs then what's more unhealthy, monitoring or lower living standards?
I am only talking about investments. You'll stress yourself out and might make bad decisions if you frequently look at your stock portfolio. Tracking spending isn't a bad idea if you're trying to save or struggling to save.
Did you find a suitable replacement? What do you use now? I'm interested to hear how big of an sticking point this still is with this a verbose range of options now.
different poster of course, but actualbudget (free selfhost) + simplefin (paid api for transactions) has been really good. faster and more features than the commercial options had. simplefin can also be used for your own local projects
You're correct here. The banks have limited who they are allowing into their systems more and more right now. We wanted to build direct partnerships with trading institutions to leverage their brokerages but they'd tell us to speak with their whitelisted partners like Plaid or a new (YC backed) incumbent, Snaptrade.
I'm a founder in this space (Fulfilled - posted above). Here's the reality:
You're right that incentives matter. But selling your data would be idiotic for us, same reason it would be for your bank in that trust is the entire business model.
If we want to monetize insights from aggregated data, we'd do it in-house and offer you better products. Example: Why sell your mortgage readiness data to some broker when we could source competitive mortgage offers and present them directly to you? Keep you in our ecosystem, add value to your experience, and build a revenue stream that doesn't destroy the core product.
The wealth space is crowded. Companies that burn user trust get exposed fast and die faster. The only sustainable path is treating your data like it belongs to you and not us. Any company here who doesn't get that is building on quicksand and I'd be very surprised to hear any of the larger players engaging in those practices but maybe I'm naive.
Either way, it's why we're a Fiduciary and that blankets the entire product suite.
"...Selling your data would be idiotic...same reason it would be for your bank [to sell your data] in that trust is the entire business model." I'm afraid that ship has sailed and taken your data with it.
I really don't think you read this article beyond the headline because that's not what it's about or implying...literally in the slightest.
That article is about JPMorgan being able to charge Plaid or other providers for the middleman access. They used to be operating almost for free, now Plaid has to pay for access the same way companies like mine pay Plaid.
So you don't think Plaid sells customer data? And by extension charging for customer data requests by Plaid and other aggregators isn't in fact charging for it?
So you didn't read the article and now you're just throwing out statements without validation? Great, if JPMorgan is selling your data then that's their decision and that's beyond the scope of this convo. We work with partners (Plaid, Snaptrade) who explicitly state that they DO NOT sell user data, and we maintain the same principles:
Here is the quote if you're too lazy to read this one too:
Does Plaid sell my financial data for advertising or marketing purposes?
No, we do not sell your financial data to third parties for marketing or advertising purposes.
Plaid only shares your data to power the services and products that you choose or to protect you and the Plaid network from fraud.
Plaid was founded on the principle that you have a right to your financial information and we are focused on providing products that allow you to safely and conveniently access your data and harness the power of Plaid’s secure financial network.
As Plaid develops more products and services, you may ask Plaid to share your information in ways that benefit you and that you control.
Plaid still rubs me the wrong way. Not selling to 3rd parties is great. But, everyone uses it, so that's still a lot of people getting data I don't necessarily want them to have. If I want to link a bank account to a credit card account in order to pay my bill, there's zero reason for that credit card company to have access to my bank transaction data. I still do the ACH deposit verification method where I can in order to avoid Plaid. I'd love more granular controls here or an audit log of what was pulled in.
SimpleFIN¹ looks compelling. Actual Budget can use that and it seems to work more like a privacy-oriented Plaid. But, now you need to trust a much smaller player. Really, I wish this were all standardized with strict privacy requirements.
A lot of it is going to be needs & vibes based. Some of them have more in-depth and niche features in certain areas, like transaction splitting or categorization and others are just simple and clean UI to go for ease of use.
We're entering the same market but with a tilt towards investment & actionable guidance. Same read-only capabilities on the account sync side (although our budgeting + spending side is still heavily in development) except we're an RIA that can provide professional advise (for free).
