does this work with credit cards? i charge everything and then pay off the balance each month.
yep!
Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach
71–80 of 94 posts
Re: Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach
#72This is really neat; having just signed up I'm yet to see how useful it actually turns out to be. I'm really happy to see startups using Plaid. I tinkered with building a budgeting app (think Simple's Goals feature but for any bank) and used Plaid. They were a super helpful bunch and the service "just works." Along those same lines, I think it's great you're using Cordova. Sometimes people feel the need to do everyth…
If you like Simple's goals feature and want it as a standalone, I use Qapital for that and love it.
Re: Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
To add on to this, even with the reticence many of us approach Mint with, it has the reputation of Intuit behind it. What can you say to alleviate these fears? (directed at Penny)
Privacy and security are really big priorities for us, so we do our best to address those concerns whenever we can. As far as personal info is concerned, we store the minimum possible info (first name and email, no address, DOB, etc). And we use a popular service called Plaid to do the transaction retrieval, so we never store sensitive credentials. Plaid actually powers many, many other financial services, so they're…
> The other aspect is that banks are really good at physical security, but not so great at data security [..snip...] but at least they're modern technology companies that probably hold themselves to higher data security standards than your bank.
Except this doesn't actually improve your banks' security at all, it's only adding another (attractive and high-value) attack surface in addition to any potential vulnerabilities that your financial providers may have.
Maybe the friction would be too much for most users, but I'd be way more likely to try something like this if there was an option to handle the data myself with an export/import process from my financial providers and not have any account credentials shared at all.
Re: Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach
#74This is really neat; having just signed up I'm yet to see how useful it actually turns out to be. I'm really happy to see startups using Plaid. I tinkered with building a budgeting app (think Simple's Goals feature but for any bank) and used Plaid. They were a super helpful bunch and the service "just works." Along those same lines, I think it's great you're using Cordova. Sometimes people feel the need to do everyth…
If anyone from Penny is still around, I have a question. In using the app an error occurred and Penny apologized and said someone would look at it shortly. About 15 minutes later I got an email from an engineer saying my request got caught right in the middle of an upgrade and that's why it failed. Great service and a fast response time, but I'm curious how much information is shared with the engineer when that happe…
Still around!
Sorry about the bug. We've been deploying all day and made the mistake of pushing something that received new server content before the updated clients themselves had time to propagate. I'm guessing that's what you ran into.
A bit about our process: we catch all errors (server and client) using Bugsnag and pipe them to Slack. Those errors are basically stack traces that hopefully give us enough context to reproduce and fix the bug. If the error was user facing (e.g. interrupted your conversation), we also open a ticket in Enchant that links back to the Bugsnag error. That way we track if/when a user hits a bug and can reach out to let them know when it's been fixed, or collect more info on the context surrounding the bug.
Like most customer support portals, Enchant can be populated with information about the person's account. In our case, we can see things like your first name (that's all we collect from you), when you joined, your phone platform, your app version, and which bank types you've attempted to link.
Does that answer your question?
As for financial data: we don't store your credentials, ever (thanks to Plaid's API, we don't have to). We do store your transactions so that we can serve them to you in-app (hopefully that's not a surprise?), along with the bank type and balance information that you see in your accounts tab. Since they're in our DB, engineers on the team can query that information. We do that on a need-to-know basis only; for example, if someone has asked us to investigate a bug they ran into, or why their numbers look off.
Hope that helps!
Re: Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach
#75Looks great, when will it be available in Canada?
Re: Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach
#76By the way, this is US only. We only link to US banks, so it wouldn't be very useful to download the app in a different region. Our team is pretty small, so international expansion probably won't be in the radar for awhile.
You'll probably find that Canada is in there for free. If you guys use the same Intuit link that Level uses, you'll probably find "Royal Bank of Canada" and "Royal Bank of Canada (US)" in the list of supported institutions. Level worked great in Canada if you went through the effort of downloading it from the US AppStore.
I just tried this and it seems to work ok. I was able to link my BMO and Capital One Costco accounts. TD didn't want to sign in.
Knowing that this is possible, I wish more of these services officially offered their products cross-border. I'm not a huge fan of Mint, and have always figured the cool new apps were US only. I guess French language support might be a roadblock.
Re: Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
If anyone from Penny is still around, I have a question. In using the app an error occurred and Penny apologized and said someone would look at it shortly. About 15 minutes later I got an email from an engineer saying my request got caught right in the middle of an upgrade and that's why it failed. Great service and a fast response time, but I'm curious how much information is shared with the engineer when that happe…
Still around! Sorry about the bug. We've been deploying all day and made the mistake of pushing something that received new server content before the updated clients themselves had time to propagate. I'm guessing that's what you ran into. A bit about our process: we catch all errors (server and client) using Bugsnag and pipe them to Slack. Those errors are basically stack traces that hopefully give us enough context…
Thanks, that was the answer I was looking for. I appreciate the openness!
In a perfect world engineers would have to request elevated permissions from a manager/team lead to query tables holding financial information, but in our un-perfect world that's usually not feasible.
Re: Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach
#78Will it not lock out my citibank account when Penny tries to login automatically to it like Mint does?
Re: Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still around! Sorry about the bug. We've been deploying all day and made the mistake of pushing something that received new server content before the updated clients themselves had time to propagate. I'm guessing that's what you ran into. A bit about our process: we catch all errors (server and client) using Bugsnag and pipe them to Slack. Those errors are basically stack traces that hopefully give us enough context…
Thanks, that was the answer I was looking for. I appreciate the openness! In a perfect world engineers would have to request elevated permissions from a manager/team lead to query tables holding financial information, but in our un-perfect world that's usually not feasible.
Box does this well; there's a button you click inside their admin portal to allow access.
Re: Launch HN: Penny (YC W17) – a personal finance coach
#80I suppose feedback / question: I'm a Mint user, and it wasn't clear to me why I should consider switching to this? I'm potentially interested since I do care about this stuff.
Here's my reaction reading the faq:
// What makes Penny different from other apps? // Penny makes your finances less intimidating and stressful. Many apps have lots of useful features, but they’re often hard to use and time-consuming.
Would appreciate more specificity. I'm not intimidated by Mint, though manipulating it to tell me what I want to know is not always fun / easy / possible.
// Penny automatically organizes your finances, explains them simply and clearly, and tells you what you need to know, when you need to know it.
Mint automatically categorizes transactions too (is that what this means?). Mint also attempts to provide understandable / actionable information.
If Penny can do something that I care about much better than Mint, I'm interested, but this seems to be making an "overall polish" argument. That's a toughie, as new startups are generally not more polished, the attraction is usually something specific that is important and done better, even if there are rough edges.