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> You will first need to sign up for Plaid and apply for the development plan. I guess I'm not the target audience. The only reason I would even consider build

> You will first need to sign up for Plaid and apply for the development plan. I guess I'm not the target audience. The only reason I would even consider building something like this is so that I'm in full control. I have no idea what Plaid is. All I know for sure is that I don't want to sign up for it and also introduce a major dependency. I don't understand what the advantage is over Mint. I get to do more work and not be in control. Usually you can only get one of those.

Jemaclus 8y ago
Plaid is an API for banks, basically: https://plaid.com https://plaid.com. It's pretty fantastic (especially compared to the way you used to have to go about it.) As for advantages over Mint, I'm sure Mint has updated recently, but as of ~2 years ago, if you had a bank that didn't expose an API, Mint would take your credentials and more or less scrape the bank websites to get your information into their systems to do their voodoo magic to show you your stats. Plaid has done most of that legwork for you (interfacing with banks) and exposed the data via a nicer API, so you don't really have to worry about anything being wrong because of scraped data -- it's coming directly from the source. That's my understanding, anyway. As for how is this better than Mint? No idea. It's just a demo that shows that you could, if you wanted to. And Plaid is more or less the new standard for interacting with bank data, at least in the US.