I've been using https://lunchmoney.app/ since it launched. On top of being one of the cleaner saas apps I use the developer has been super responsive whenever I've submitted feedback or feature requests. It's the first budgeting/expense tracking app I've ever actually stuck with which I attribute to the aforementioned "cleanness"/usability. Genuine +1 from me (and I'm not even including my referral link)
Does it ingest transaction data from all major credit cards like Mint can? It only says "banks" on the landing page.
Co-founder of a (yet to be launched) Mint competitor here [1]. One pattern I think we all see over and over again is when products get bought by a large company, they often lose their "soul" (and the original team). Both those things happened with Mint. Another important pattern I've seen is that products, in the long-term, morph to take the form of their revenue model. Many personal finance products are free, but ma…
This space is really difficult to crack for a few non-obvious reasons. The first is that the total TAM is less than you think; for most people, tracking their spending to manage budgets just doesn’t appeal to them. For many consumers, just seeing all of their finances is incredibly depressing. I suspect the 13mm Mint users are a large portion of the addressable market for this kind of product. So without a strong mon…
Co-founder of a (yet to be launched) Mint competitor here [1]. One pattern I think we all see over and over again is when products get bought by a large company, they often lose their "soul" (and the original team). Both those things happened with Mint. Another important pattern I've seen is that products, in the long-term, morph to take the form of their revenue model. Many personal finance products are free, but ma…
How are you approaching your product in a way that discourages your company from morphing it into a money manager that upsells your users credit cards or loan products?
Does anyone have a suggestion for a finance/budgeting app that's easy to use for splitting costs? My girlfriend and I don't have joined finances, but we do generally split everything down the middle. So most things are "I pay with my card, tally it up, then you Venmo me your half at the end of the month." I'm currently using YNAB and then split each relevant transaction, but it's very very tedious.
Splitwise would work, but another way would be to tag everything that needs to be split, and then to compare the sums at the end of the month. Basically make the "tally it up" part automatic.
The nice thing about manual entry, and using Splitwise, would be that you could pull out your phone and say "your turn to pay" and treat it like a balancing act instead of transferring money. Whoever is behind, pays today.
> I think you could run a reasonable lifestyle business here if you don’t take VC, but I’m skeptical this can ever be truly mass-market. You Need a Budget (YNAB) is proof of this. I don't believe they've taken any VC funding and are a pretty successful lifestyle business in the Budgeting/Finance space.
They’re great, but they aren’t super quick with features and I wish the product had more, especially when it comes to the graphical reports. It’s also an expensive product for most people. But we do need more of these sustainable low-growth non-VC style SaaS companies out there.
If a product is good, we shouldn't judge it on its inability to continuously add new features.
After struggling with Mint and YNAB for a while, I figured that I didn't really want to budget. I was tired of categorizing and setting up $20 budgets. I ended up with a simpler methodology which is basically a MUCH simpler version of YNAB. It worked really well and I've stuck with this for a while now. Just a few weeks ago, my partner and I launched Funded [0] that follows this method. Would love to get feedback fro…
Maybe I am just wired differently, but every budgeting program is just annoying at best. I get "scolded" because I went over my $40 clothing budget budget because I bought a coat or a suit, or took advantage of a sale. I don't buy clothes one pair of socks at a time per month, I take advantage of good sales and every few years I need a suit. One way to potentially solve this is to "roll over" any excess from month to…
It sounds like you aren't looking for budgeting and just want to see categories over time (which is mostly what I want and seems like a lot of people here). However, if you are interested in budgeting, one solution is what YNAB does. You can have an expense and carry it over between months. For example, if you have a utility that's due by-monthly you can budget half every month. Or if property taxes are due twice a year, do the same. For some reason a lot of budgeting tools fail miserably at this.
Off Topic, most of the services mentioned here use Plaid to connect to banks. This means that Plaid (now Visa) has full access to your entire banking history. Combined with credit card data they know almost everything you purchase. I find that fact quite unsettling.
I think Mint uses Plaid, but I think the others may use Yodlee
In 2010 they transitioned from Yodlee to Intuits in house system, (FICDS?). I would be surprised if they moved from FICDS to Plaid, but maybe.
This space is really difficult to crack for a few non-obvious reasons. The first is that the total TAM is less than you think; for most people, tracking their spending to manage budgets just doesn’t appeal to them. For many consumers, just seeing all of their finances is incredibly depressing. I suspect the 13mm Mint users are a large portion of the addressable market for this kind of product. So without a strong mon…
Off Topic, most of the services mentioned here use Plaid to connect to banks. This means that Plaid (now Visa) has full access to your entire banking history. Combined with credit card data they know almost everything you purchase. I find that fact quite unsettling.
I think Mint uses Plaid, but I think the others may use Yodlee
I thought Mint originally used a third party but transitioned to their own platform years ago? I remember reading about a rocky transition for users.