dontmitch

Heh, don't blame you. We did fight for and win approval to write a forward to our privacy policy to make it more accessible. Outside of that, we didn't want to innovate in an area we know very little about and instead deferred to what our law firm told us we should be doing.

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!

yep!

Appreciate it!

And just because we're working on this idea doesn't mean you can't too. It all comes down to execution. A little competition is healthy for everyone :)

This ^.

The startup costs are way higher with Yodlee and (before they shut off access) Intuit. Their APIs are also not nearly as friendly as Plaid's.

Just looked back at my notes.

That first Show HN post sent about 700 unique people to our website, of which about 100 clicked the download button and roughly 40 signed up. That may seem like a small number, but it was huge for us at the time. It gave us a lot of new information about where people would fall off in our funnel, uncovered some edge cases we hadn't accounted for, etc.

That FAQ is a little out of date—I'll update right now. Once you remove duplicates, we support closer to 8-10k banks through Plaid, and we have two monetization strategies (monetization was our focus at YC):

1. A premium subscription service that gets you some power features within Penny; we just launched that today. 2. Recommending affiliate products.

It's important to note that affiliates can be a mixed bag. Mint.com was the product that turned me onto Betterment when I was hunting around for ways to invest my money; I'm legitimately thankful that they did since I love Betterment. At Penny, we think we can tastefully and in good faith recommend some affiliate products. Those recommendations fit perfectly into our coaching model too.

Unfortunately, most personal finance companies start pushing credit cards on people that don't need them because it pays the most money. We're building Penny in a way that disincentives crappy behavior like that.

Agreed. We've reached out to Google a couple of times asking if they can display a more helpful message than "not compatible with an of your devices" when the real reason is "Only available in the US". Not a great UX.