I use YNAB. I thought about building my own now that AI coding make this feasible. But the moat that I can't cross is the integration with my bank accounts. Plaid and the like are too expensive and don't cater to one-off users like me.
Has anyone been able to find a personal financial data provider that has a reasonable price?
Plaid has a pay-as-you-go option that's only about $2/month for this use case. (I believe the current rack rate PAYG pricing is 30 cents per month per connected bank login).
The privacy angle is interesting. I'm curious how people view the pricing strategy of taking a one-time payment for lifetime access. My first thought was that it encourages the developer to focus more on recruiting new users rather than keeping existing ones happy - makes me wonder what will become of the product if new user growth stalls.
I've wrestled with this idea. Do you think the general population will all be vibe coding finance apps? I have to think that most will still just pay the big players.
(I say this as someone who vibe coded a finance app, and it works!)...now I'm not sure what to do with it, it works for me - do I open it to the world or just keep making it great for me.
Has anyone been able to find a personal financial data provider that has a reasonable price?
I haven't done it at first because
(1) they all have monthly / yearly costs and I wanted a flat fee;
(2) I can't update the account without the user having logged in because of how the encryption works.
Must be ready to go then
Personally, I don't like subscription-based apps so didn't want to create yet another one.
And I built this around my personal needs so I plan to support it indefinitely.
Regarding long term improvements, there is a number of paying users that once I achieve, any new users are basically profit.
The service was built to be cheap to run and maintain so I could charge a one time fee.
My inspiration for trackm was actually moneywell.app which i bought a license for in 2009.
The "look X years" into the future feature was pulled from it.
I no longer have a mac or ios device, so built trackm to fill the void.
Monetizing this is going to be challenging.
(I say this as someone who vibe coded a finance app, and it works!)...now I'm not sure what to do with it, it works for me - do I open it to the world or just keep making it great for me.