51–60 of 169 posts
Hey Lunch Money founder, if you are reading these comments, a big congratulations on reaching $1K so quickly! I loved reading your story so far. IMO getting to that first $1K is harder than getting from $1K to $10K. Most first timers never make it to $1K at all.
Is there a better way? Or a service that would let me enter credentials if I want to update data? Rather than storing them and updating automatically...
This looks great and I'm inclined to give it a try. But do you have a privacy policy? I try to avoid services that sit between me and my financial institutions, as I worry they're building analytics off my spending patterns and selling it to third parties.
I felt the same way, and it's part of why I made spendweek.com (a privacy-first, easy-to-use competitor to Lunch Money, YNAB with a single focus on saving money instead of keeping track of all your accounts). I am sort of proud of my privacy policy, so it's a link right at the top of the home page. Here's the basic manifesto of the SpendWeek framework in case anyone's interested: https://www.spendweek.com/blog/you-ne…
One of the last things you do before launch is pay money to yourself by running a real payment with real money in production. An automated test for config is nice, but nothing beats actually doing the critical thing yourself before launching to the world.
I'm always hesitant to use any of these services because (AFAIK) they need to store your banking credentials in order to access your account. The one exception I've found to this is Chase, which actually has an API. But even with providers like Plaid, its not clear whether the API is being used - I don't think it is, because the request does not go to Chase. Is there a better way? Or a service that would let me enter…
Without Plaid, you only have three options: connect to bank yourself with OFX, let user upload OFX file, or let user upload CSV.
OFX stands for Open Financial Exchange, an open standard to programmatically access and transmit financial data - which is basically Plaid, but provided by the banks themselves, which as you can imagine is 1000x worse than Plaid.
Connecting to bank using OFX is really annoying. First, if you want to do it without storing the user's credential, you need to run the app in the user's computer, so forget about auto update in the background. Second, I don't know a single bank that publishes their OFX connection parameters, so people rely on crowdsourced data, which is iffy at best and totally unreliable at worst. Finally, OFX is a disastrous format to parse. It uses SGML (!!!) and require DTD to parse correctly (!!!!). Furthermore, banks' implementation are, as you can imagine, widely inconsistent. For example, each transaction is supposed to have a unique identifier. However, HSBC decided to reuse them, so you can't completely rely on it to dedupe your input.
To be fair, OFX has improved, and the latest revision abandoned SGML in favor of XML and introduced OAuth for authentication. But few bank support them, and among those that do, the API is still not public, so you probably need to talk to the bank's BD people to use them. For example, Chase says "Access to the Developer Ecosystem is currently by invitation only and limited to developers and businesses that have a relationship with Chase."
Most banks support downloading OFX file yourself, so you can just let user upload them manually. This is obviously a huge hassle for the users, and you have the same problem with parsing OFX format.
For the rare cases where OFX is not available, you can count on CSV. However, since there's no standard, you can't automate the import, and must require user input to annotate the columns, which further increase user friction.
In conclusion, in today's landscape, Plaid is a necessary evil if you want to have a seamless user experience. Anything that preserves user privacy will result in a 10x worse UX.
This was super interesting! The design really helped as well. I liked this one: "Lesson learned: People care about the narrative behind your product, so don't be afraid to tell your story!" As someone who finds new things on HN all the time, I always check the "about" page, especially if it's something that isn't free. I'm surprised at how often the "About Us" isn't actually "About Anyone", there's no names, it's all…
> I'm surprised at how often the "About Us" isn't actually "About Anyone", there's no names, it's all just "Us" and "We". I tend to assume that a lot of times this is because "We" is a lie, it's "Me" and they want to avoid revealing that it's someone's side project. I could be completely wrong. I am a lot.
>That is until I realized that it was my own dumb fault because I accidentally left my Plaid environment set to development One of the last things you do before launch is pay money to yourself by running a real payment with real money in production. An automated test for config is nice, but nothing beats actually doing the critical thing yourself before launching to the world.
You picked an odd time to stop reading!
Hey Lunch Money founder, if you are reading these comments, a big congratulations on reaching $1K so quickly! I loved reading your story so far. IMO getting to that first $1K is harder than getting from $1K to $10K. Most first timers never make it to $1K at all.
To be clear, 1k to 10k in recurring revenue (SaaS style). I sell one time purchase apps, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to scale from what I make (2k$/month) to even 3k$/month any time soon.
Hey Lunch Money founder, if you are reading these comments, a big congratulations on reaching $1K so quickly! I loved reading your story so far. IMO getting to that first $1K is harder than getting from $1K to $10K. Most first timers never make it to $1K at all.
To be clear, 1k to 10k in recurring revenue (SaaS style). I sell one time purchase apps, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to scale from what I make (2k$/month) to even 3k$/month any time soon.
But I will probably re-evaluate in 11 months when my YNAB expires.
Onboarding with the kind of products may take longer than the author realises. People like my self will need reminders that this product exists. It took years of YNAB ads for me to switch from HLedger and that really only happened because I needed something my wife could use after I got married and we merged finances.