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Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

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Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#11

Post by phoenixy1 »

llbbdd wrote: post #5
joshka wrote: post #2

I'm curious how reasonable it would be for a person, rather than a company, to have a plaid sub.

I reached out to them a couple years ago with this exact question and was told flat-out no. You might be able to sneak around it with an LLC but I think they also require you to have a public website for a plausibly banking-related business, which altogether seemed like too much effort to fake for what I wanted out of it.

So you don't have to be a business to use Plaid, but you do have to be a business to buy Plaid via the Sales channel rather than via the self-serve channel. Admittedly, when folks reach out to Sales and ask to buy Plaid and are told they're not eligible because they're not a business, this nuance is sometimes not communicated very well (or at all). We're working on it. :-)

In fact, we actually just this week launched a new sign-up flow to make it waaaay easier for non-businesses to use Plaid, so try checking it out -- after you go to dashboard.plaid.com and create an account, you should see a "Free trial" button show up on the homepage with a link to use the hobbyist onboarding flow.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#12

Post by mbm »

satvikpendem wrote: post #9
mbm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup! Actually starting to experiment with that now. Just this morning, we stood up a demo email agent (basically, email back and forth with Claude with our MCP server connected, providing the data) and it's strangely comforting to chat with it. There's something about the medium of email and how it just works because that's where you're already used to talking with your financial advisor. There's a lot of nuance in h…

A company Maybe.co recently shut down trying to do this exact same thing and couldn't make the economics work.

Thanks for sharing! Would be curious to learn more.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#13

Post by mbm »

phoenixy1 wrote: post #11
llbbdd wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reached out to them a couple years ago with this exact question and was told flat-out no. You might be able to sneak around it with an LLC but I think they also require you to have a public website for a plausibly banking-related business, which altogether seemed like too much effort to fake for what I wanted out of it.

So you don't have to be a business to use Plaid, but you do have to be a business to buy Plaid via the Sales channel rather than via the self-serve channel. Admittedly, when folks reach out to Sales and ask to buy Plaid and are told they're not eligible because they're not a business, this nuance is sometimes not communicated very well (or at all). We're working on it. :-) In fact, we actually just this week launched…

Correct, sales encourages you to sign their minimum contract, which basically gets you better support and an account manager. Pay as you go is an option, but Plaid indicated you basically wouldn't have any guaranteed support SLA post-launch if you were on PAYG.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#14

Post by phoenixy1 »

mbm wrote: post #6
joshka wrote: post #2

I'm curious how reasonable it would be for a person, rather than a company, to have a plaid sub.

I think it's rather hard because of their security & contractual requirements -- we had to sign a contract with them, go through security review, and so on.

We just this week launched a new sign-up flow to make it waaaay easier for non-businesses to use Plaid, I posted some details below.

Actually, as part of publicizing our new hobbyist-friendly onboarding, we're looking to work with hobbyists who have created Plaid-powered apps and would be interested in making a short video about their app and their Plaid experience to potentially be featured on the Plaid blog -- if you're interested, shoot me an email at ahoffer@plaid.com and I can send you the details.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#16

Post by aleksiy123 »

I’m Canadian and have been using https://lunchmoney.app/ for tracking with Plaid integrations.

They have an api and I got llm to write a CLI for it.

That way agent can pretty much pull the data it needs or wants.

One thing I also had it do is build up a series of rules for tagging which then I run a cron for once a day.

Every once in a while I just ask it to look over the rules and make new ones for uncategorized transactions.

(As a side note I think having LLM “memoize” a task through a rule engine or code is really nice pattern)

But once you have the cli with query you can pretty much ask the agent to do anything.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#17

Post by mbm »

aleksiy123 wrote: post #16

I’m Canadian and have been using https://lunchmoney.app/ for tracking with Plaid integrations. They have an api and I got llm to write a CLI for it. That way agent can pretty much pull the data it needs or wants. One thing I also had it do is build up a series of rules for tagging which then I run a cron for once a day. Every once in a while I just ask it to look over the rules and make new ones for uncategorized tra…

Nice! What are your main use-cases?

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#18

Post by mbm »

phoenixy1 wrote: post #14
mbm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's rather hard because of their security & contractual requirements -- we had to sign a contract with them, go through security review, and so on.

We just this week launched a new sign-up flow to make it waaaay easier for non-businesses to use Plaid, I posted some details below. Actually, as part of publicizing our new hobbyist-friendly onboarding, we're looking to work with hobbyists who have created Plaid-powered apps and would be interested in making a short video about their app and their Plaid experience to potentially be featured on the Plaid blog -- if y…

Sounds awesome! Would love to. Just launched our app to Plaid production this week.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#20

Post by cowlby »

I recently did this for myself using https://tiller.com/ to sync checking/credit-card transactions to a Google Sheets spreadsheet. Then a GitHub action mirrors the spreadsheet to a free Supabase database.

From there, Supabase MCP or psql gives Claude/Codex access to the transactions/balances for english queries. Really impressed with their ability to find subscription patterns, abnormal patterns, etc. Also to predict cashflow which no online tool so far is good at i.e. "tell me how much cash I can move to savings based on my monthly spend patterns and available cash".

For autocategorization, I learned Claude is really good at custom DSLs. Had it create a markdown table based ruleset to normalize payee/categories. I also run the autocat rules as part of the GitHub actions.

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