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Ask HN: Alternative to Mint.com?

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Re: Ask HN: Alternative to Mint.com?

#61

Post by phoenixy1 »

davidkuennen wrote: post #56
Workaccount2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't process how $100/yr for a static accounting program isn't severely overpriced. Do banks and credit cards charge for API requests? Is the compute necessary to balance your books require leasing A100s to crunch your numbers? A terabyte of rack space to store my transactions? Before the MBA enshitification of software, you would buy an accounting program for $60 and use it for years. And it would work great beca…

Account connection services are insanely expensive and you don't want to create all that yourself. That would be even more expensive to maintain. That's why there's services like Plaid. For every user it costs at least 1$ a month per user per connected account. That alone creates a huge amount of ongoing expenses. That's why we don't offer the ability to connect accounts within our app. Users don't understand or don'…

I work at Plaid and I think that pricing info is a bit off — assuming we’re talking about just the APIs for transactions data (which is what the budgeting apps typically use) and these prices are in USD, even customers who don’t qualify for any volume discounts are paying closer to 30-45 cents per month per connected account. (Volume discounts then can start to kick in starting at a total API spend of $300 / month -- the higher the monthly API spend, the greater the discount percentage.)

Re: Ask HN: Alternative to Mint.com?

#62

Post by theturtletalks »

qrush wrote: post #59
kingnothing wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone reading the parent comment, you should avoid YNAB if you use an American Express card. YNAB uses Plaid and the overall integration from YNAB through to Amex and back does not work.

I have found this to be the case with my Apple card - so once a month I export a .QFX from the Wallet app and import it into YNAB. This process is a bit laborious but I've never had to manually enter an account's transactions in several years of using the app.

Apple Wallet transactions just got added to shortcuts on iOS. You should be able to create a shortcut that adds the expense to YNAB whenever the card is charged.

Re: Ask HN: Alternative to Mint.com?

#63

Post by corethree »

pragmatic wrote: post #36
corethree wrote: post #3

Personal capital, now empower. I don't think there's a better one that's free as well.

Do they still call you constantly trying to get you to buy their money management services? I liked personal capital but hated the sales pressure.

Just tell them you're not interested and they stop calling. Small price to pay for something that's free.

Re: Ask HN: Alternative to Mint.com?

#64

Post by aworks »

guyzero wrote: post #14

Tiller is $79 a year - https://my.tillerhq.com/ - but puts all the data straight into a Google Sheet and lets you do what you want with it. I love the flexibility.

I'm also a Tiller user. It's much better to edit incoming transactions in an offline spreadsheet than a web tool like Mint as well as create custom reports. The daily email snapshot is also useful.

Re: Ask HN: Alternative to Mint.com?

#65

Post by phoenixy1 »

yumraj wrote: post #60
davidkuennen wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Account connection services are insanely expensive and you don't want to create all that yourself. That would be even more expensive to maintain. That's why there's services like Plaid. For every user it costs at least 1$ a month per user per connected account. That alone creates a huge amount of ongoing expenses. That's why we don't offer the ability to connect accounts within our app. Users don't understand or don'…

> For every user it costs at least 1$ a month per user per connected account. Then how is Quicken Simplifi, mentioned by some other folks in this thread, able to offer it for $2.99 per month? Volume??

I work at Plaid. The basic, non-discounted rate for the Transactions API is like 30 cents per connected account per month (or 45 cents per month if you're buying some optional add-ons to go with it), and any customer the size of Intuit would definitely be getting some kind of huge volume discount. I can't speak for other companies in this space, but I assume they have similar pricing.

Re: Ask HN: Alternative to Mint.com?

#66

Post by nervousvarun »

kingnothing wrote: post #26
qrush wrote: post #5

YNAB has turned my financial life around. I wish I had started using it 10 years ago. They also have built an importer from Mint. Some highlights I love: * One window to every account I have, which mostly automatically updates/syncs * Envelope budgeting has forced me to look at every penny and figure out what it's for * API to work with other tools (for me, Splitwise - https://github.com/vascopinho/split2ynab/ ) And…

For anyone reading the parent comment, you should avoid YNAB if you use an American Express card. YNAB uses Plaid and the overall integration from YNAB through to Amex and back does not work.

Believe this is also the case for Fidelity (Plaid doesn't work w/ Fidelity)

Re: Ask HN: Alternative to Mint.com?

#67

Post by Workaccount2 »

sph wrote: post #47
Workaccount2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't process how $100/yr for a static accounting program isn't severely overpriced. Do banks and credit cards charge for API requests? Is the compute necessary to balance your books require leasing A100s to crunch your numbers? A terabyte of rack space to store my transactions? Before the MBA enshitification of software, you would buy an accounting program for $60 and use it for years. And it would work great beca…

The idea of YNAB (I'm a paying user) is that learning to budget your money effectively with their app and methodology pays for itself tenfold. Think about it: if you are from the Western world, how many $10 do you waste each month? I spent $20 for pizza yesterday. How much money would you save if you could budget effectively (and get yearly discounts to all your subscriptions instead of paying monthly, for example?)…

If only plumbers could charge to keep a toilet in your house...

Re: Ask HN: Alternative to Mint.com?

#68

Post by zorkus »

moduspwnens14 wrote: post #19

I tried out YNAB, Rocket Money, and Quicken Simplifi. YNAB was a bit too opinionated and "hands on" for my tastes. Rocket Money seemed to be geared toward the "we'll cancel subscriptions for you" use case and was otherwise not configurable enough. Quicken Simplifi seems much closer as a spiritual successor to Mint. It's mostly hands-off, though you can set up configurable rules and budgets. And it worked with all of…

Also a +1 for Simplifi. I switched from YNAB recently. Simplifi maybe isn't as nice looking and feels like the focus is definitely on function (imo), but it seems better for general purpose tracking, and it costs a bit less.

My bank (PNC) was supposedly going to be making it harder for Plaid to connect so I went looking for a different tool. So far it seems like Simplifi will be able to connect multiple times a day for that extreme scrutiny fix! I'd rather banks just play as nice as possible with data aggregators, but I also didn't feel like moving to another bank just to keep using YNAB reliably.

I will give my experience with YNAB full credit for making me realize I need to be tracking expenses carefully, even if I don't need a tool built around YNAB's specific budgeting system.

Re: Ask HN: Alternative to Mint.com?

#69

Post by Leftium »

corethree wrote: post #3

Personal capital, now empower. I don't think there's a better one that's free as well.

I used to use Personal Capital, but now I switched to SoFi Relay[1]

Personal Capital had problems maintaining connections to my accounts, especially to SoFi. Of course SoFi has no problems connecting to SoFi accounts. SoFi connects to 21 of my accounts; there's only 3 accounts that don't work: Apple Savings, Apple Card, and Treasury Direct.

I also wrote a web app to convert the SoFi relay summary into text that can be pasted into a spread sheet: https://tt.leftium.com/ (I just paste the HTML into the textbox, and the TSV data is copied to the clipboard)

[1]: https://www.sofi.com/financial-insights/

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