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Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending

pennyapp.io

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Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending

#51

Post by kvcrawford »

curun1r wrote: post #32
dontmitch wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Whi…

That's... moderately comforting. I recently started using Mint and it's proving very helpful for tracking my spending and budgets. It's really worrying having to hand over my bank account username and password, though.

I really wish banks could provide a read-only API token instead.

Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending

#52

Post by cookiecaper »

largote wrote: post #46
dontmitch wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This relies on you actually remembering the text commands though, as opposed to just seeing the different buttons and taping whichever one you care about.

It's kind of like a human-friendly CLI, so I can appreciate that, but I agree that there should at least be clickable defaults.

Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending

#54

Post by dontmitch »

cookiecaper wrote: post #52
largote wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This relies on you actually remembering the text commands though, as opposed to just seeing the different buttons and taping whichever one you care about.

It's kind of like a human-friendly CLI, so I can appreciate that, but I agree that there should at least be clickable defaults.

Sorry for not being more clear: the responses are just buttons that you click. For the majority of any conversation, there's no typing involved.

Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending

#55

Post by david_p »

Sujan wrote: post #12
david_p wrote: post #5

Looks 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...

I guess that's because I'm french myself and selected services that work in my country :)

Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending

#56

Post by jbob2000 »

The unfortunate thing about apps like these is that if you are wise enough to use it, you are wise enough to not need it.

Totally anecdotal, but the people I know who have trouble managing money are just completely unaware of it. Money goes in and money goes out, and they only do something if someone calls them or sends them a letter. As soon as you show these people the numbers, they get it. It clicks for them.

Mint and Penny both suffer from the same thing those "hire a maid" apps suffer from; Once I've made the initial contact, I have no reason to continue to use the service, I can just contact the maid directly. Same thing with Mint/Penny; Once I am shown my finances, I have an awareness of my financial situation and don't need the service any more.

What will drive me to continually use this service, beyond my initial few weeks? You can only analyze my finances so much before there is nothing left to tell me. And then you will get to the point that Mint is at, where you start offering me credit cards and credit reports and mortgages, because that's the only thing left to do in this space.

Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending

#57

Post by kdamken »

HerpDerpLerp wrote: post #41
kdamken wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Shame it has gone subscription only :( I hate ongoing charges for that sort of thing.

Yea I've been on the fence about trying that out, especially since it's missing some key features (reporting, the calculator). At least YNAB4 is supported til the end of 2016, gives them time to get the new one fixed up.

Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending

#58

Post by largote »

dontmitch wrote: post #54
cookiecaper wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of like a human-friendly CLI, so I can appreciate that, but I agree that there should at least be clickable defaults.

Sorry for not being more clear: the responses are just buttons that you click. For the majority of any conversation, there's no typing involved.

Why would you use the screen real estate on a "conversation" then instead of just showing the data?

Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending

#59

Post by fibbery »

jbob2000 wrote: post #56

The unfortunate thing about apps like these is that if you are wise enough to use it, you are wise enough to not need it. Totally anecdotal, but the people I know who have trouble managing money are just completely unaware of it. Money goes in and money goes out, and they only do something if someone calls them or sends them a letter. As soon as you show these people the numbers, they get it. It clicks for them. Mint…

I totally disagree about Mint. I have accounts across so many different services (bank, credit cards, loans, investments) and it saves me so much time because I only have to log in one place and I can see the full picture of my finances. I also like the trends feature so I can breakdown spending into different categories. Plenty of financial services have stats on their sites, but mint unifies all of them.

Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending

#60

Post by curun1r »

dontmitch wrote: post #43
curun1r wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Whi…

There are actually three major players in the transaction aggregation space: Intuit, Yodlee, and Plaid. We use Plaid, but it works the same as Intuit. In fact, Plaid has a partnership with Intuit to backfill support for bank accounts. We never store any credentials on our system, and our access is read only. I can go on for days about why I think our system is more secure than, say, Chase[0], but if you trust Mint's…

Thanks! That was exactly what I wanted to know.
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