please roll out to EU. Thanks
Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending
11–20 of 89 posts
Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending
#12Looks useful and neat, but remember kids: if you're not paying for it, you're the product. Some of their competition: http://linxo.com (used it for 5 years now), http://bankin.com (used once, preferred linxo).
Fascinating that they are both French only...
For the German market there are https://www.centralway.com/ and http://www.epost.de/privatkunden/epostapp/banking-app-kontop...
Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending
#13Why would I migrate from Mint to this?
Because Mint has been horribly broken and useless from the day Intuit bought it. Currently I use an excel spreadsheet in lieu of my now-inactive Mint account. Because even nothing is better than mint.
I had the same issues with Mint, it was always broken, always giving back unreadable account errors, always missing stuff in searches, never applying tags properly (and no mass tag update, argh).
Check out PocketSmith. It may not have every feature I want, but at least it actually works. There is a nominal monthly fee associated with it, but well worth it if you want to actually use an online money analysis tool to do anything.
Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending
#14Does it know what category to put something in if I use cash?
From my experience tracking what I spend, it's those transactions that I actually need to keep track of if I'm going to spend money more sensibly. All of the headline, automated bills that get paid monthly are easy to manage. It's the little transactions of a few bucks here and there that add up to that "Where the hell did this month's wages go?!" feeling.
If there isn't a good way to track cash transactions then it's not likely to change the way I handle my money, and consequently it wouldn't be very useful for me.
Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending
#15Looks useful and neat, but remember kids: if you're not paying for it, you're the product. Some of their competition: http://linxo.com (used it for 5 years now), http://bankin.com (used once, preferred linxo).
Fair point. Right now we're not making any money off of users. Down the line, we'd like to explore freemium features or perhaps a subscription model. We don't want to or plan to sell your data.
And for completeness: in the US the competition includes Level Money and BillGuard.
Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending
#16This looks great, really good UX/UI from a first glance. My bank has a pretty modern banking app, so some of the features (like spending graphs) are familiar to me (though not as pretty as in Penny).
Two things that I dislike with my banking app:
- No real differentiation between fixed, monthly cost and variable expenses. It would be nice if the automatically separated monthly expenses and one-time expenses.
- Lots of "-$100 Cash" transactions whenever I use an ATM. This is my main concern actually. It's really hard to have some sort of insight about my finances without seeing the biggest part of my non-expenditure spending: The stuff I pay for in cash. Especially since it distorts the monthly overviews: If I retrieve $500 from my bank account on July 31st, it's not helpful to add that to my July spending, since 90% of that money will probably be spent in August. This is really a data-entry/UX problem, no API will solve this. One thing that I would suggest: Make an extension that makes it really simple to "scan" receipts. Just one glance of the camera, some OCR and the data is in there. If it's simple enough, it may become part of my "muscle memory" to scan receipts with the app whenever I buy something, so I get meaningful analysis results.
(By the way, if you want to build something like that, check out this API: https://scanbot.io/de/sdk.html - great product & company, I'm not affiliated in any way)
Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending
#17I'm not really into the simulated live chat interface. It'd be a lot easier to click a button that said "Your spending" than to type out "Please show me my monthly spending Mr. Robot" (or to type out anything, especially on a phone).
Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending
#18Why would I migrate from Mint to this?
Because Mint has been horribly broken and useless from the day Intuit bought it. Currently I use an excel spreadsheet in lieu of my now-inactive Mint account. Because even nothing is better than mint.
Odd, I hear this complaint all the time but have never personally experienced it. Mint has always worked for me, even with a bunch of esoteric 401k and other accounts from no-name banks.
Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending
#19"and you hereby appoint Penny as your true and lawful attorney-in-fact and agent, with full power of substitution and resubstitution, for you and in your name, place and stead, in any and all capacities, to access third party internet sites, servers or documents, retrieve information, and use your accounts, passwords, and other information"
Lol, no.
Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending
#20I'm not really into the simulated live chat interface. It'd be a lot easier to click a button that said "Your spending" than to type out "Please show me my monthly spending Mr. Robot" (or to type out anything, especially on a phone).
There's actually not a lot of typing involved since the responses are pre-populated for you. You can see an example of what that looks like on the marketing page.