5 ms·

As someone who tried using Wesabe seriously for several months, I will tell you why they went out of business: their product was not very useful. I spent quite

As someone who tried using Wesabe seriously for several months, I will tell you why they went out of business: their product was not very useful. I spent quite a while entering receipts and tagging things and all I ever got was a few charts that showed me how much money I had spent. There was no tool for budget estimation, there was nothing to help do mortgage calculations, cripes, there was hardly a point to using the website at all with the sole exception that they had some pretty good discussion forums. The only reason I preferred Wesabe to Mint was because Mint wanted to reach into the guts of all your accounts and that felt kinda creepy.

po 16y ago
I also used wesabe for several months. When mint.com launched I was tempted but I was initially turned off by the online-ness of it. I liked that wesabe was a desktop based product and I had ownership of my data. Now that idea seems a bit quaint. I think people (including myself) have gotten a lot more comfortable with their financial data being online. I am not using mint (for my US-based accounts) and I like it a lot. The reason I stopped using wesabe was because 1.) I was MAc OS X and the desktop client they had was buggy. and b) I kept hitting bugs with the banks I used. I don't think they were able to keep up the pace. It was frustrating. I'm sure it was not lack of effort on their part. Perhaps they should have been willing to compromise more. It's really hard to say. I really appreciated Marc dumping his thoughts on the matter.
revorad 16y ago
I wonder if becoming a Q&A site for personal finance would have been a good pivot for Wesabe.
rodh257 16y ago
yeah it wasn't overly useful, but it was the best that I could get, being an Australian (thus, my bank was unsupported on Mint). The firefox plugin uploader of wesabe meant that any bank could be supported, I'm interested as to why Mint couldn't offer a similar thing?
cdr 16y ago
I found the receipt-entering and thing-tagging useful in and of itself. The auto-labeling was awesome for watching my accounts - you generally only had to label/tag a business once. I vastly, vastly prefer Wesabe's auto-labeling system to Mint's POS labeling. On Mint, any transaction from Chili Ave (a major road) gets autolabeled as Chili's, the restaurant - and so on. It makes Mint worse than useless for me. I get better info logging onto my bank's 90s era site.
- blasdel 16y ago
  I stopped logging into Mint for exactly this reason — the auto-labeling it does is abysmal, and the UI for correcting it is even worse. I have no idea what people are talking about when they fawn over Mint's user experience.
  - btmorex 16y ago
    They're talking about the signup process basically. Mint is a terrible product with a fantastic signup process. All those posts about how great it is are from people who signed up, looked around for 5 minutes, then never used it again.
    - blasdel 16y ago
      Plus almost all of the users that do stick around go for the high-end financial referrals that Mint pitches them based on their data. Cost Per Action fees for rewards cards and mortgages are through the roof for complete signups of high-value people. Their conversion rates are terrific even when you include the vast majority of people like us that sign up and never use it again. They were making quite a lot of money when they were acquired.

po 16y ago

I also used wesabe for several months. When mint.com launched I was tempted but I was initially turned off by the online-ness of it. I liked that wesabe was a desktop based product and I had ownership of my data. Now that idea seems a bit quaint. I think people (including myself) have gotten a lot more comfortable with their financial data being online. I am not using mint (for my US-based accounts) and I like it a lot. The reason I stopped using wesabe was because 1.) I was MAc OS X and the desktop client they had was buggy. and b) I kept hitting bugs with the banks I used. I don't think they were able to keep up the pace. It was frustrating. I'm sure it was not lack of effort on their part. Perhaps they should have been willing to compromise more. It's really hard to say. I really appreciated Marc dumping his thoughts on the matter.

revorad 16y ago

I wonder if becoming a Q&A site for personal finance would have been a good pivot for Wesabe.

rodh257 16y ago

yeah it wasn't overly useful, but it was the best that I could get, being an Australian (thus, my bank was unsupported on Mint). The firefox plugin uploader of wesabe meant that any bank could be supported, I'm interested as to why Mint couldn't offer a similar thing?

cdr 16y ago

I found the receipt-entering and thing-tagging useful in and of itself. The auto-labeling was awesome for watching my accounts - you generally only had to label/tag a business once. I vastly, vastly prefer Wesabe's auto-labeling system to Mint's POS labeling. On Mint, any transaction from Chili Ave (a major road) gets autolabeled as Chili's, the restaurant - and so on. It makes Mint worse than useless for me. I get better info logging onto my bank's 90s era site.

blasdel 16y ago
I stopped logging into Mint for exactly this reason — the auto-labeling it does is abysmal, and the UI for correcting it is even worse. I have no idea what people are talking about when they fawn over Mint's user experience.
- btmorex 16y ago
  They're talking about the signup process basically. Mint is a terrible product with a fantastic signup process. All those posts about how great it is are from people who signed up, looked around for 5 minutes, then never used it again.
  - blasdel 16y ago
    Plus almost all of the users that do stick around go for the high-end financial referrals that Mint pitches them based on their data. Cost Per Action fees for rewards cards and mortgages are through the roof for complete signups of high-value people. Their conversion rates are terrific even when you include the vast majority of people like us that sign up and never use it again. They were making quite a lot of money when they were acquired.