The utter lack of information about who is behind this ("Industry Veterans" -- who?) makes me exceedingly reluctant to trust this.
It's an iPhone app, so there's a minimal level of DUNS/screening/etc., but enh.
Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending
31–40 of 89 posts
Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending
#32Why would I migrate from Mint to this?
Mitch here, one of the co-founders. I don't want to throw Mint under the bus: I used it for ~6 years before starting to work on Penny and it's a great tool for people that enjoy spreadsheets and crunching numbers (myself included). That said, it can be pretty intimidating to just to about everyone else. Penny requires a lot less effort on your part, since the number crunching is all done behind the scenes to generate…
My main concern in using sites like this is that they'll leak my banking credentials. Mint uses Intuit's service for communicating with financial institutions, which is also used for Quickbooks and TurboTax. Credentials are encrypted and housed in a datacenter owned by Intuit. The Mint application only ever stores a token representing the account and uses the service to pull transactions from a read-only service. While I'm still uneasy about this setup, the isolation of the systems combined with the scale and the resources devoted to keeping it secure provide some piece of mind.
Can you talk about the measures that you use to protect banking credentials so that I might feel similarly safe about giving them to your service?
Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this might (should?) be standard phrasing for any app that accesses another company's API on your behalf... We may not think of it this way, but this seems like correct legalese for any sort of assistant app, whether it takes your username and password, or you give it an API key.
That was our understanding too. One thing to clarify: it's just me and one other guy (imalex) working on this, although we're hoping to hire another person soon. We're not trying to screw anyone over with the privacy policy. We just don't know anything about legalese, so we relied on existing terminology.
Congratulations on shipping! I wouldn't worry about complaints like this too much, it kind of happens a bunch on hn.
Have you studied what mint and personal capital are doing right/wrong? Just wanted to say a word of caution as I've heard of different banks making life hard for mint.
Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending
#34"Where did my money go" budgeting has never worked for me. I've been way more successful with planning ahead every $ of income as I get it and then manually tracking expenses. Budgeting had to become an actual activity for me, and not just something done automatically by a webapp. I'm a huge shill for YNAB[0]. The software is really nice but basically it's a glorified (paid) spreadsheet. My fiance and I agree that th…
I couldn't agree more - I tried mint for a while and I basically did nothing with it besides checking my transactions. YNAB completely changed how I view my money. Now when I go to buy something, I don't just go spend. I see how much I have in that category, and if it's not enough, I either move money to it from another category, or not buy it. It's been very helpful for me in my goal of saving more than 50% of my ta…
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Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending
#35This 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 o…
Simple method: don't pay cash. At this point the only thing I use cash for is the occasional Powerball ticket.
Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending
#36I rather use a website over my phone to track my expenses. Having an app is great, but a website is the topmost priority to have.
Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending
#37"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.
I think this might (should?) be standard phrasing for any app that accesses another company's API on your behalf... We may not think of it this way, but this seems like correct legalese for any sort of assistant app, whether it takes your username and password, or you give it an API key.
And does it come with any indemnity for error, or does it make it completely legal for the company to wire your money to the Bahamas and run off with it?
Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending
#38Love the idea. I wish I could use it (I'm Canadian).
Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending
#39This must be for those people who cannot manage their email, operate a calendar, or create a spreadsheet.
I hope the HN audience hasn't degraded to the point of being incapable of handling their personal finances without needing the help of a cutesy avatar painted over a faceless algorithm owned by people who are excited at the prospect of exploiting your financial data to the fullest.
Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending
#40This must be for those people who cannot manage their email, operate a calendar, or create a spreadsheet. I hope the HN audience hasn't degraded to the point of being incapable of handling their personal finances without needing the help of a cutesy avatar painted over a faceless algorithm owned by people who are excited at the prospect of exploiting your financial data to the fullest.
>>I hope the HN audience hasn't degraded to the point of being incapable of handling their personal finances without needing the help of a cutesy avatar painted over a faceless algorithm owned by people who are excited at the prospect of exploiting your financial data to the fullest.
Maybe not, but it definitely has degraded to the point where people like you spitefully shit on other people's hard work.