What's the best personal finance app?
I miss Mint. And when I say that, I mean that I miss the old Mint before they got acquired by Intuit and started selling my data to anyone who would buy it. I want more than what my bank offers but this space seems surprisingly quiet unless I am hiding under a rock.
What's everyone using for personal finance?
At minimum, I want:
All the normal budgeting, account views, dashboards, etc.
To see trends over time on category spend, expenses, income, net worth
Integrates via Plaid to all banks
Doesn't sell my data to credit card companies
To pay a monthly fee in exchange for the company to be workable without selling data
And then my wishlist is:
Let's me invite my spouse
Shows brokerage account performance compared to other investing strategies (ex. did I beat the market)
Sends me alerts when programmable things happen, ex I want an email if "spouse spent more than $1,000 on bagels"
Has a bunch of personalized calculators that actually work based on my numbers. Retirement is the obvious one but there are so many other ones I would use (saving for college, compound interest planner, big trips, etc.). None of the free tools in this space ever seem to get it right.
AI looks at all my transactions, sends me an email each month with places I'm wasting money or am outside the bounds of normal ("did you mean to spend that much on bagels?").
Maybe this all happens in @Monarch @Copilot @CreditKarma ? What do you use? I'd love recommendations.
Replies
Tab Slayer
I am working on a personal finance app so take my response with a grain of salt.
My goals are pretty similar to yours and the app I build more or less checks all of these boxes:
To see trends over time on category spend, expenses, income, net worth ✅
Integrates via Plaid to all banks ✅ (though some banks are still unavailable as it takes time for them to approve you)
Doesn't sell my data to credit card companies ✅
To pay a monthly fee in exchange for the company to be workable without selling data ✅
and has a few more "features":
it has the explicit goal of continuing to be a stable, bootstrapped project that I work on.
It's also open source, so if I get hit by a bus someone can fork it and run with it.
Price-wise, I plan to position it below all of the paid incumbents. Simple, cheaper, just as effective.
The wishlist is awesome, these are all features I've considered, but it's great to hear someone iterate their interest.
> Sends me alerts when programmable things happen, ex I want an email if "spouse spent more than $1,000 on bagels"
this is really interesting to me, and deff something I will build.
Ultimately, my tool is super nascent, but I'm easily influenced into building new features and over time can imagine checking all of your boxes and wishlist items. If you wanted something today that does the majority of the things you listed, I've heard from people who enjoy both monarch and copilot.
I don't know of any myself 😞 but making an app like this is one of my dreams. Especially making a point not to sell user data. I think that's so important, and isn't considered by many startups focused on building a SaaS product.
I think a lot about how I can make products that don't rely on servers, but rather do all the compute at the edge. Then I don't even need to have any ongoing server costs, or if there is a server it doesn't need to "scale."