7 ms·

Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

83 points by mbm 6mo ago

joshka 6mo ago
I'm curious how reasonable it would be for a person, rather than a company, to have a plaid sub.
- llbbdd 6mo ago
  I reached out to them a couple years ago with this exact question and was told flat-out no. You might be able to sneak around it with an LLC but I think they also require you to have a public website for a plausibly banking-related business, which altogether seemed like too much effort to fake for what I wanted out of it.
  - phoenixy1 6mo ago
    So you don't have to be a business to use Plaid, but you do have to be a business to buy Plaid via the Sales channel rather than via the self-serve channel. Admittedly, when folks reach out to Sales and ask to buy Plaid and are told they're not eligible because they're not a business, this nuance is sometimes not communicated very well (or at all). We're working on it. :-) In fact, we actually just this week launched a new sign-up flow to make it waaaay easier for non-businesses to use Plaid, so try checking it out -- after you go to dashboard.plaid.com and create an account, you should see a "Free trial" button show up on the homepage with a link to use the hobbyist onboarding flow.
    - mbm 6mo ago
      Correct, sales encourages you to sign their minimum contract, which basically gets you better support and an account manager. Pay as you go is an option, but Plaid indicated you basically wouldn't have any guaranteed support SLA post-launch if you were on PAYG.
    - llbbdd 6mo ago
      Thank you for the info! Is this a somewhat recent change or has it always been this way? "A couple years ago" in my comment was doing some heavy lifting, I probably reached out around 2017ish.
      - mbm 6mo ago
        It must be very very new, since we weren't offered it a couple months ago!
- mbm 6mo ago
  I think it's rather hard because of their security & contractual requirements -- we had to sign a contract with them, go through security review, and so on.
  - phoenixy1 6mo ago
    We just this week launched a new sign-up flow to make it waaaay easier for non-businesses to use Plaid, I posted some details below. Actually, as part of publicizing our new hobbyist-friendly onboarding, we're looking to work with hobbyists who have created Plaid-powered apps and would be interested in making a short video about their app and their Plaid experience to potentially be featured on the Plaid blog -- if you're interested, shoot me an email at ahoffer@plaid.com and I can send you the details.
    - mbm 6mo ago
      Sounds awesome! Would love to. Just launched our app to Plaid production this week.
    - atonse 6mo ago
      I would love this. I’ve built software to manage my business and personal finances and am using hacks right now (activity csvs for personal, quickbooks transaction api for business). In an ideal world I’d move it all to plaid to help analyze finances, cc spend, etc. I’m happy to hear you’re working on a hobbyist product.
    - joshka 5mo ago
      Awesome. Definitely need to highlight this better somewhere on the main page (probably /pricing and in the /docs pages), but https://dashboard.plaid.com/ https://dashboard.plaid.com/ has it. More vague plans right now.
- cowlby 6mo ago
  Tiller https://tiller.com/ https://tiller.com/ is a good Plaid "proxy". It'll write data to a Google Sheets and can maneuver from there.
- 8ytecoder 6mo ago
  There’s also this: https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/ https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/. Very reasonably priced and it works great. Actual Budget uses it.
  - mbm 6mo ago
    Could you share more about how it works?
    - 8ytecoder 6mo ago
      You link your accounts in simplefin which uses MX (similar to plaid) to pull the data. Except simplefin is really simple to setup. https://actualbudget.org/docs/advanced/bank-sync/simplefin https://actualbudget.org/docs/advanced/bank-sync/simplefin
      - mbm 5mo ago
        Nice, thanks for sharing. I’m curious how MX compares to Plaid.
- ForHackernews 6mo ago
  https://www.yodlee.com/ https://www.yodlee.com/ is another provider
mahemm 6mo ago
I'm surprised y'all stopped at the personal finance layer. I've been thinking for awhile that LLMs would be really effective as personal financial advisers, and this kind of hookup (plus I guess another one for investment accounts?) seems like all that's needed to bootstrap reasoning.
- justinclift 6mo ago
  > I've been thinking for awhile that LLMs would be really effective as personal financial advisers Why would you be thinking that?
  - atonse 6mo ago
    I’ve thought the same. Because the main thing a financial advisor does is have the knowledge of different financial instruments and pair it with your situation right? An LLM would do that extremely well but can also do it more often. not once a year appointments. You could have active portfolio management for a negligible fee.
    - justinclift 6mo ago
      Who accepts the liability when the LLM does its typical occasional massive judgement fuck up? Asking that because even the very best, commercially available, state of the art LLMs (presently Claude Opus 4.7 (1M) with Max effort enabled) still occasionally fucks up its decisions and judgement in significant ways. So, it's kind of horrifying to me that people would consider this for actually potentially life-impacting ways. Especially as it sounds like the consideration is to advise people in area's they don't themselves have the skill and knowledge to catch bad advice on. :(
      - mbm 5mo ago
        Yeah, investing over time in such a way to beat the S&P is actually incredibly challenging (having tried it myself). I’m very skeptical an LLM can do better than that unless it has a very large, expensive firehose of data. It may be that more mundane analysis ends up being the most useful. For example — for years, we had some money in a money market fund earning basically no interest. It just wasn’t on the radar. Had even a not very smart LLM nudged us to put the money into a HYSA earlier, we would have made thousands per year in interest. My wife also recently used our tool to do some simple investing optimization that’s going to save us a few thousand per year on taxes. Thing like this aren’t sexy but do have value, and don’t take GPT Pro.
cjgx 6mo ago
What does the Plaid integration look like? What is your approach for accounts or assets that can’t be connected with Plaid?
- mbm 6mo ago
  It's pretty straightforward! There's a widget in the app that you auth through, and then you give consent for the data pull through Plaid. This authorizes the connection, and then webhooks come in going forward as data changes. For the non-Plaid assets eg., home, car, etc., we just added custom asset MCP tools so you can manually add those and they're included in your computed net worth.
  - cjgx 5mo ago
    I’ve been using driggsby for the past couple of days and it is pretty neat! What is your plan for accounts with banks not supported by plaid? Also, is there a plan to retain daily investment balance so users can track performance?
    - mbm 5mo ago
      Great questions. On banks not supported by Plaid — while most are covered already (12,000+), totally understand that some like Fidelity aren’t. For this, we’re considering a way to manually import statements, but that wouldn’t support the live data sync that Plaid provides of course. Performance tracking — yes! Absolutely on this. We’ve been sketching this out lately since it has some nuance to get right. Would love your input on what you’d like to see here.
mbm 6mo ago
Hi all, Matt here - founder. Happy to answer any questions. Thanks for stopping by!
aleksiy123 6mo ago
I’m Canadian and have been using https://lunchmoney.app/ https://lunchmoney.app/ for tracking with Plaid integrations. They have an api and I got llm to write a CLI for it. That way agent can pretty much pull the data it needs or wants. One thing I also had it do is build up a series of rules for tagging which then I run a cron for once a day. Every once in a while I just ask it to look over the rules and make new ones for uncategorized transactions. (As a side note I think having LLM “memoize” a task through a rule engine or code is really nice pattern) But once you have the cli with query you can pretty much ask the agent to do anything.
- mbm 6mo ago
  Nice! What are your main use-cases?
  - aleksiy123 6mo ago
    I’m planning to buy an apartment soon so I wanted to be able to chat and say what kind of mortgage can I afford and where should I cut spending. The other use case funnily enough was to ask how much I’m spending on hobby dev. Make sure I’m not getting carried away across llm subscriptions, as well as cloud costs. I think the nice part is once you have the cli you just use the agent in your ide as your chat interface.
    - mbm 6mo ago
      Same here -- I mainly use Driggsby from Codex or Claude Code, not ChatGPT or Claude actually. Thanks for sharing about the apartment -- that's super cool and a really great use-case.
- jnfr 6mo ago
  Awesome to hear! (founder of Lunch Money here :)- thanks for the shoutout!)
  - aleksiy123 6mo ago
    Of course it’s a great product and has been serving me well ever since intuit killed mint. I think my only request is to expose the rules engine as a declarative api in v2. I ended up locally caching the transactions data, using cel/aip-160 as a rules engine then having the script apply the results on the data.
cowlby 6mo ago
I recently did this for myself using https://tiller.com/ https://tiller.com/ to sync checking/credit-card transactions to a Google Sheets spreadsheet. Then a GitHub action mirrors the spreadsheet to a free Supabase database. From there, Supabase MCP or psql gives Claude/Codex access to the transactions/balances for english queries. Really impressed with their ability to find subscription patterns, abnormal patterns, etc. Also to predict cashflow which no online tool so far is good at i.e. "tell me how much cash I can move to savings based on my monthly spend patterns and available cash". For autocategorization, I learned Claude is really good at custom DSLs. Had it create a markdown table based ruleset to normalize payee/categories. I also run the autocat rules as part of the GitHub actions.
- mbm 6mo ago
  That's so cool! Are you planning to open source any of this? Would love to see how you set everything up, or - maybe most interested in - some of your prompts.
  - cowlby 6mo ago
    It was all GitHub Spec Kit + Claude Opus tbh. I narrated a couple paragraphs of how I wanted to sync to flow and it knocked it out in one pass practically. Here's the initial spec it created. I started off writing to a local sqlite db instead of Supabase: https://gist.github.com/cowlby/0dbeb52403c3f3c0f1d812250520360d https://gist.github.com/cowlby/0dbeb52403c3f3c0f1d8122505203... Edit: Here's also the DSL categorization spec. First one was string based, found it cumbersome, so second one was the Markdown table refactor: https://gist.github.com/cowlby/30d6b5cf132fc1424ab146f0eaf4a13b https://gist.github.com/cowlby/30d6b5cf132fc1424ab146f0eaf4a... https://gist.github.com/cowlby/d569c8e05b5b6eecfd4d237372c06213 https://gist.github.com/cowlby/d569c8e05b5b6eecfd4d237372c06... (edit: put in Gist instead of inline here)
    - mbm 6mo ago
      This is really neat, and actually pretty sophisticated. It's like a tiny fintech. How well has the cash flow prediction worked?
jonyeazel 6mo ago
Used driggsby the other day. Friend of mine sent it to me. Suprising how easily it found all of my subscriptions. That was the main reason i tried it. I'm sure i'll dive deeper into it this week though.
- mbm 6mo ago
  Did it find any stragglers?
- chickensong 6mo ago
  Open a credit card that's just for subscriptions IMHO. It makes things really easy to manage and reason about.
  - derwiki 5mo ago
    Even better, a privacy.com card for each subscription!
avocabros 6mo ago
This seems like a solution looking for a problem. https://tiller.com/ https://tiller.com/ works great and lets you do whatever calculations you want in a spreadsheet - and, bonus, it's never going to hallucinate. I don't quite understand the desire to have these verbose summaries that you have to read from LLMs. You'll notice anomalies if you just categorize each of your expenses every so often (easy with Tiller).
- mbm 6mo ago
  Hi! Thanks for sharing. I actually built it for myself initially, and my wife. So I just built what we needed/wanted. There will be a huge variety of products in this space and ours is just one take on the problem. I love seeing anything that's taking a shot at it.
- amelius 6mo ago
  It's not the summaries. It's the ease by which LLMs can ingest and combine various data sources.
  - mbm 6mo ago
    This. It's really cool to weave other data sources into your data. I recently needed to set up some calendar events on certain dividend days, but of course, didn't know what those dividend dates actually were. So we used the MCP connector to retrieve our current Vanguard holdings, had GPT-Pro do web research to pull all the dates, and then created calendar events from that. Worked well.
mannanj 6mo ago
It's amazing to me how little people care about their data. Giving it to an AI company for non-training purposes is OK now? Was it okay before?
- 2ndorderthought 6mo ago
  I was just thinking the same thing. Dear company who has extensive military contracts and is founded in stealing data from people here is every single financial transaction I have ever made! Please don't use it for surveillance pricing tee hee. At least apple credit cards give you money for that rather then the other way around.
  - mbm 6mo ago
    Side note: the Apple Card is awesome. We have it & love it. Would really like to integrate with FinanceKit (Apple's Plaid, basically) to pull in that data too.
apsurd 6mo ago
Super cool writeup from a technology perspective. And a motivator to build more tools, play with MCP and try out Claude routines. The product pitch is also really clear. Good job all around. Now for the criticism: back in the day mint.com was mind-blowing. It's what you always thought you'd wanted. The graphs were interactive and pretty and you really loved seeing them go up. Not so much down. I was so attached to the gamified aspects, much like step counters. They reinforce habits. My mint journey ended with roughly 5 years or so of data, once they sold to Intuit, didn't like the ads and willingly syncing all my data to mega-corp. Much like Duolingo, it felt good at the time, but I don't know that it did anything for me at all. Tracking is a double-edged sword: it really does build better habits. It's better to track weight every day for example so you better understand that fluctuations are mostly noise. The daily tracking stuff is entirely useful to get the need to track daily out of your system. TLDR: checking my net-worth daily sounds like something I should coach myself out from. Ironically that probably takes tools, but the end goal is to not need them.
- mbm 6mo ago
  Awesome feedback. Agree 100% with this. I guess a couple comments: - We have a built-in CSV export tool in beta right now for cash transactions, and plan to add this for other datasets as well. You should be able to download your data when you want it. It's yours. - Yes, tracking is great, but it also has a dark side. My sort of vision, at least for what I want, is less of a gamified finance tracker and more of an ambient, always-on agent that's watching for me. It knows my preferences, it knows what I care about, and it tells me when it finds something. - Before we get there though, for now, it's really interesting to sort of tinker and build your own custom finance automations. As a programmer, it just feels liberating to get the data out of some closed banking app and into a space I'm comfortable in. - Especially from an investing standpoint, it's been neat to pair our MCP with a much smarter model like 5.4 Pro and have it do long-horizon research tasks that require a lot of web research and correlation.
  - apsurd 6mo ago
    > As a programmer, it just feels liberating to get the data out of some closed banking app and into a space I'm comfortable in. Quote of the week for me. well said. ~15 years ago I fumbled around with web programming basically because I never learned how to use excel in school. Nerded out with css, html, forms, then php and mysql to script together an unbelievably worse version of what a spreadsheet could do, but it was incredible that I could build something entirely made for my idea. And with the power to improve it. Thank you for writing and sharing your story, it's motivating and comforting even. Good luck!
moltar 6mo ago
Have to be careful with routines. There’s a very small disclaimer that’s barely noticeable that in routine mode all MCP tools, even write are always allowed. So agent can technically go rogue and start mutating your resources via MCP.
- mbm 6mo ago
  Indeed. Always have to be thinking about prompt injection when it comes to these tools.
ariwilson 6mo ago
I don't really get this; could just use Plaid and have your own transaction/net worth site/app in a few hours with Claude Code and it'd be much more consistent.
- mbm 6mo ago
  That's actually one of the best things about the current moment -- it's getting easier and easier to do things yourself, and there's less and less reason to use someone else's tool. It's sort of raising the bar for all the apps out there.
irishcoffee 6mo ago
My spouse was almost scammed out of 25k the other day, by a person. There is no way in fucking hell I'll let an "agent" touch my finances. That is madness.
- mbm 6mo ago
  It's read only, we can't move money. And I totally hear you -- we had this happen in our family as well, and it was really sad. Security is a massive priority for us, but it's always going to be a cost-benefit analysis for each person. Happy to share more about our infra in a follow-up post.
  - ForHackernews 6mo ago
    What makes it read-only? You told the AI "don't"?
    - mbm 6mo ago
      Actually, it's deterministic -- our product doesn't move money, so when the user gives us access through Plaid, we're only getting read-level permissions. We actually don't even get full account numbers. A company working with Plaid has to request separate product "scopes" through Plaid in order to be able to move money.
      - ForHackernews 6mo ago
        I'm not that familiar with Plaid, but if it works like Yodlee, users have to hand over their credentials so there's no real security, it's just that their scraper is designed to be look not touch.
        mbm 6mo ago
        Plaid has OAuth-based access for most of the big institutions now, but yes, for smaller institutions, they do scraping. Thankfully, Plaid's been around for a while now and has a good track record. It would be a non-starter to give your credentials to a small startup directly.
cantrevealname 6mo ago
To everyone who doesn’t know how Plaid works: You give your banking username and password directly to Plaid, and it keeps it (so it can continue to login). I don’t understand how anyone is OK with this. It goes against every security principle and it’s against the terms and conditions of every bank. I realize that almost no bank provides a secure and proper API to get info and/or to transfer funds, but Plaid’s solution is a disaster waiting to happen.
- thebruce87m 6mo ago
  I thought that’s what Open Banking was supposed to solve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_banking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_banking
  - jimmcslim 6mo ago
    And indeed it does, in some markets. I'll speak to Australia... here we have the legislated Consumer Data Right [1]. This currently puts obligations on banks and energy retailers to make consumer data accessible via an API, via Authorised Data Holders (ADH - the banks and retailers) and Authorised Data Recipients (ADR). However! The major criticism I have of this scheme is that as an individual power user I do not have direct access to these APIs myself. I believe there was originally an intent to support this under the scheme, however due to somewhat legitimate security and access concerns, but also I expect pushback from anyone falling into the ADH category, this is not possible. Setting up an ADR has a not insignificant compliance burden. However I have recently come across Redbark [2] which is a simple service that has taken on the mantle, and provides a simple sync mechanism for any Consumers that believe they have a Right to their Data. Not affiliated, just a happy customer and I hope that they can make the economics work over the long term. [1] https://www.cdr.gov.au/ https://www.cdr.gov.au/ [2] https://redbark.co/ https://redbark.co/
  - mbm 6mo ago
    Yup, it would be really awesome if this concept was deployed in the US. Unfortunately, open standards don't seem to gain as much traction here outside of the tech industry.
- 6mo ago
hn_acc1 6mo ago
Any thoughts on how brightplan compares to some of the other apps mentioned here? It's free via work.
- mbm 6mo ago
  Looks pretty good! Give it a try and let us know how it works?
id00 6mo ago
When I was trying to use Claude to analyze my past transactions, I found out that it was constantly hallucinating charges, sometimes adds new, double counts and etc. When I'm dealing with my finances the 95% time Claude is correct and doesn't hallucinate is not enough as I have to be vigilant and review its work all the time. So it kinda makes it worthless in this case for me
- mbm 6mo ago
  Give GPT in Codex a try! I agree, Claude still seems quite prone to hallucinations, especially with incomplete or limited datasets.
mbm 6mo ago
In case anyone is interested, just wanted to share a few high level details about our infra/security setup. - Backend & CLI are both strictly linted Rust. The webapp runs on Axum (Rust web framework), and connects to Postgres via sqlx. - Financial read-only. There's no transfer, pay, or send tool in the product. Nothing in the AI surface can move money. - We request transactions, investments, and liabilities from Plaid. We don't request auth, transfer, or payment_initiation, so we never receive full account numbers or routing numbers — just the last-4 mask Plaid returns by default. - Bank usernames and passwords go to Plaid Link, not us. We only hold a per-institution access token. - Plaid access tokens live in a separate database behind a single custody Cloud Run service, encrypted at rest by Cloud KMS. The broker calls KMS's encrypt/decrypt endpoints — the root key material never leaves Google's HSM boundary and the broker's service account is the only one with encrypt/decrypt permissions. The web app doesn't have permission to read that database. - Every encryption and decryption call passes the Plaid item ID as AAD (additional authenticated data). A ciphertext from one item cannot be swapped in and decrypted as another item's token. - Each Cloud Run service (including our web app) runs under its own cloud identity and with its own DB role. - Internal calls between services are authenticated: the caller presents a short-lived identity token from the cloud provider, and the receiver verifies it. - The prod databases have no public IP. Secrets live in managed secret storage, not in source or container images. - The AI connector is OAuth 2.1 + PKCE, scoped per user, revocable from the UI. Every tool call records the tool name, sanitized args, calling client, and the reason the agent supplied, so you can see what your LLM asked on your behalf. - There are no fetch-URL, shell, or general I/O tools in the AI surface. Tools return structured financial data and nothing else. - Networking, IAM, and DB grants are all in Terraform. All infra changes go through that path. - Infra access is gated by 2fa and security keys.
- DANmode 6mo ago
  If you’re going to downvote someone sharing technical details of their product, or worse, a Show HN?, at least indicate why. It feels like all I’ve done today is Vouch comments that have no indicated reason for being Dead.
- atonse 6mo ago
  Thank you so much for actually sharing these technical details. Shows you know THIS website’s audience. And the thought put into security at every level gives me more confidence in the overall tool. I’ve tried to build this myself (mvp for myself was just downloading statement PDFs manually and having Claude setting up ledger for plain text accounting, thinking I’ll eventually hookup plaid) I’m mostly curious about how people work with plaid. Do you need a certain threshold of users to get started? Because I’d love to get a plaid account just for my finances. I’m not interested in building a product like this, just want to connect my personal and business accounts to a clean API.
63 6mo ago
Maybe my net worth is too low but I just don't see a value proposition. I don't want daily emails from LLMs and if I need updates on my investments any more often than quarterly (at most), I should probably seek safer investments. I am a bit interested in budgeting tools, but I want them to be completely deterministic. For me at least, financial planning is pretty uneventful and time spent optimizing expenses more than I already have would be better spent seeking a higher paying job.
- mbm 6mo ago
  Thanks. If I could ask, what would interest you?
  - DANmode 6mo ago
    They said deterministic budgeting tools.
    - mbm 6mo ago
      Thanks :-)
- mapBasketWand 6mo ago
  Have you tried Actual budget + SimpleFIN as a bridge to get your transactions out of banks? I use that to track credit card spending and my checking account. Then you can connect an mcp to do analysis of the data from one place if that’s what you want
- pwinnski 6mo ago
  I use actualbudget.org to track all spending, but only update investment accounts ("off-budget" in Actual Budget terms) once a month. Completely deterministic, as all things related to numbers should be. I have pointed my LLM at the SQLite DB and asked it to tell me what it could see from my last five years of transactions, and I was impressed with the things it picked up, and what it reminded me of, but I'm not sure I saw any value in the sense of anything I would change. I'm going to have it review things monthly to see if that helps me, but I'm not sure it will. I'm generally already aware of how my finances are going because of my budget updates.
djmips 6mo ago
What are you going to have Claude run your Fantasy football team too?!?
- mbm 6mo ago
  Now that would be innovative.
alex-norcliffe 6mo ago
We (Era Finance) have a solution for exactly this - Era Context, an MCP for connecting any compatible agent to your personal finances - https://era.app https://era.app It's focussed on read tools at the moment, but we have write tools coming (money transfers, debt paydown, etc) Check it out and let me know if you'd like to see any particular features landing - just email alex at the above domain name. For background context I'm Alex the CEO, I'm ~new to HN but was the former head of web presence at stripe.com and was at Square / CashApp before that. Hi!
- mbm 6mo ago
  Thanks for stopping by, Alex! Looks awesome -- good luck to you guys!
  - alex-norcliffe 6mo ago
    Thanks so much!
- managedcode 6mo ago
  Interesting, thanks for sharing. I’m trying it ring now
- Catdice 5mo ago
  I just tried it and am floored by what it can do. Will be making it part of my routine. Kudos to you and your team!
NamlchakKhandro 6mo ago
Obligatory hledger or beancount mention
- mbm 6mo ago
  hledger is amazing.
yumraj 6mo ago
I absolutely love the idea. Problem, I don’t trust 3rd party services with access to financial data. No offense to the OP. I wish this was open source and self-hostable. Not suggesting that OP does that since I’m sure he has to pay bills :) I may look into doing something like this for personal use. I’ve gotten interested in creating desktop apps which store data locally. Have created a few using Claude code. It seems Plaid has some APIs for personal use.
- mbm 6mo ago
  Yes, give it a try! I did this on my own first before deciding to make it "a thing." It's actually a really fun project and gives you a ton of insight into your finances. I'd recommend it.
soraminazuki 6mo ago
Maybe the battle has long been lost, but why on earth would you want to entrust your entire financial transactions to an LLM? I bet LLM providers have even less safeguards regarding the use of these data than the financial industry, which to be clear is an abusive industry collecting, mining, and selling our data.
- RivieraKid 6mo ago
  Why not? How could it negatively affect my life?
- atonse 6mo ago
  In this case, the creator has explained that this is all read only. So what’s the problem?
  - soraminazuki 6mo ago
    I don't see your point. If it's not a problem, can I have read-only access to your financials? Also, the article states that the initial implementation was using Chrome DevTools MCP. That doesn't sound like read-only to me.
    - mbm 5mo ago
      Hi, just to share - the DevTools experiment was in my initial build for myself, prior to deciding to make it into a product.
    - atonse 5mo ago
      > If it's not a problem, can I have read-only access to your financials? Have you built a product like the OP and demonstrated that you've put a lot of time/thought/etc into the infrastructure? If not, then it's a clear no. Also the credentials, etc are going to Plaid (and even with that, my few Plaid integrations have all been OAuth lately), not this company. This is exactly like Stripe. I'm not giving anything "sensitive" in terms of transactions to this company regarding bank details.
- 6mo ago
Daviey 6mo ago
My primary bank, Monzo (UK) provides a full API and trigger webhook for events. This has enabled me to make a WhatsApp bot that asks me to explain abnormal transactions (using an LLM for reasoning), and also have a pre-midnight sweep balance to savings account to maximise interest daily interest. I also maintain a small daily balance, and if I spend money during the day it tops it up from the savings to maintain that low balance. If I need to spend more, I can move money manually.
- mbm 6mo ago
  That's so awesome! You should open source this. Wish we had this in the US, would make things so much easier.
neosunny 5mo ago
I was in this same situation a couple of months ago and I just sat down with my friend who is now my co-founder to https://neospend.com https://neospend.com we both were having this issues and now we don’t anymore. Check it out.
- mbm 5mo ago
  Looks neat! Thanks for sharing. This is going to be a space with many different players, which I personally think is awesome.

83 points by mbm 6mo ago

joshka 6mo ago

I'm curious how reasonable it would be for a person, rather than a company, to have a plaid sub.

llbbdd 6mo ago
I reached out to them a couple years ago with this exact question and was told flat-out no. You might be able to sneak around it with an LLC but I think they also require you to have a public website for a plausibly banking-related business, which altogether seemed like too much effort to fake for what I wanted out of it.
- phoenixy1 6mo ago
  So you don't have to be a business to use Plaid, but you do have to be a business to buy Plaid via the Sales channel rather than via the self-serve channel. Admittedly, when folks reach out to Sales and ask to buy Plaid and are told they're not eligible because they're not a business, this nuance is sometimes not communicated very well (or at all). We're working on it. :-) In fact, we actually just this week launched a new sign-up flow to make it waaaay easier for non-businesses to use Plaid, so try checking it out -- after you go to dashboard.plaid.com and create an account, you should see a "Free trial" button show up on the homepage with a link to use the hobbyist onboarding flow.
  - mbm 6mo ago
    Correct, sales encourages you to sign their minimum contract, which basically gets you better support and an account manager. Pay as you go is an option, but Plaid indicated you basically wouldn't have any guaranteed support SLA post-launch if you were on PAYG.
  - llbbdd 6mo ago
    Thank you for the info! Is this a somewhat recent change or has it always been this way? "A couple years ago" in my comment was doing some heavy lifting, I probably reached out around 2017ish.
    - mbm 6mo ago
      It must be very very new, since we weren't offered it a couple months ago!
mbm 6mo ago
I think it's rather hard because of their security & contractual requirements -- we had to sign a contract with them, go through security review, and so on.
- phoenixy1 6mo ago
  We just this week launched a new sign-up flow to make it waaaay easier for non-businesses to use Plaid, I posted some details below. Actually, as part of publicizing our new hobbyist-friendly onboarding, we're looking to work with hobbyists who have created Plaid-powered apps and would be interested in making a short video about their app and their Plaid experience to potentially be featured on the Plaid blog -- if you're interested, shoot me an email at ahoffer@plaid.com and I can send you the details.
  - mbm 6mo ago
    Sounds awesome! Would love to. Just launched our app to Plaid production this week.
  - atonse 6mo ago
    I would love this. I’ve built software to manage my business and personal finances and am using hacks right now (activity csvs for personal, quickbooks transaction api for business). In an ideal world I’d move it all to plaid to help analyze finances, cc spend, etc. I’m happy to hear you’re working on a hobbyist product.
  - joshka 5mo ago
    Awesome. Definitely need to highlight this better somewhere on the main page (probably /pricing and in the /docs pages), but https://dashboard.plaid.com/ https://dashboard.plaid.com/ has it. More vague plans right now.
cowlby 6mo ago
Tiller https://tiller.com/ https://tiller.com/ is a good Plaid "proxy". It'll write data to a Google Sheets and can maneuver from there.
8ytecoder 6mo ago
There’s also this: https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/ https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/. Very reasonably priced and it works great. Actual Budget uses it.
- mbm 6mo ago
  Could you share more about how it works?
  - 8ytecoder 6mo ago
    You link your accounts in simplefin which uses MX (similar to plaid) to pull the data. Except simplefin is really simple to setup. https://actualbudget.org/docs/advanced/bank-sync/simplefin https://actualbudget.org/docs/advanced/bank-sync/simplefin
    - mbm 5mo ago
      Nice, thanks for sharing. I’m curious how MX compares to Plaid.
ForHackernews 6mo ago
https://www.yodlee.com/ https://www.yodlee.com/ is another provider

mahemm 6mo ago

I'm surprised y'all stopped at the personal finance layer. I've been thinking for awhile that LLMs would be really effective as personal financial advisers, and this kind of hookup (plus I guess another one for investment accounts?) seems like all that's needed to bootstrap reasoning.

justinclift 6mo ago
> I've been thinking for awhile that LLMs would be really effective as personal financial advisers Why would you be thinking that?
- atonse 6mo ago
  I’ve thought the same. Because the main thing a financial advisor does is have the knowledge of different financial instruments and pair it with your situation right? An LLM would do that extremely well but can also do it more often. not once a year appointments. You could have active portfolio management for a negligible fee.
  - justinclift 6mo ago
    Who accepts the liability when the LLM does its typical occasional massive judgement fuck up? Asking that because even the very best, commercially available, state of the art LLMs (presently Claude Opus 4.7 (1M) with Max effort enabled) still occasionally fucks up its decisions and judgement in significant ways. So, it's kind of horrifying to me that people would consider this for actually potentially life-impacting ways. Especially as it sounds like the consideration is to advise people in area's they don't themselves have the skill and knowledge to catch bad advice on. :(
    - mbm 5mo ago
      Yeah, investing over time in such a way to beat the S&P is actually incredibly challenging (having tried it myself). I’m very skeptical an LLM can do better than that unless it has a very large, expensive firehose of data. It may be that more mundane analysis ends up being the most useful. For example — for years, we had some money in a money market fund earning basically no interest. It just wasn’t on the radar. Had even a not very smart LLM nudged us to put the money into a HYSA earlier, we would have made thousands per year in interest. My wife also recently used our tool to do some simple investing optimization that’s going to save us a few thousand per year on taxes. Thing like this aren’t sexy but do have value, and don’t take GPT Pro.

cjgx 6mo ago

What does the Plaid integration look like? What is your approach for accounts or assets that can’t be connected with Plaid?

mbm 6mo ago
It's pretty straightforward! There's a widget in the app that you auth through, and then you give consent for the data pull through Plaid. This authorizes the connection, and then webhooks come in going forward as data changes. For the non-Plaid assets eg., home, car, etc., we just added custom asset MCP tools so you can manually add those and they're included in your computed net worth.
- cjgx 5mo ago
  I’ve been using driggsby for the past couple of days and it is pretty neat! What is your plan for accounts with banks not supported by plaid? Also, is there a plan to retain daily investment balance so users can track performance?
  - mbm 5mo ago
    Great questions. On banks not supported by Plaid — while most are covered already (12,000+), totally understand that some like Fidelity aren’t. For this, we’re considering a way to manually import statements, but that wouldn’t support the live data sync that Plaid provides of course. Performance tracking — yes! Absolutely on this. We’ve been sketching this out lately since it has some nuance to get right. Would love your input on what you’d like to see here.

mbm 6mo ago

Hi all, Matt here - founder. Happy to answer any questions. Thanks for stopping by!

aleksiy123 6mo ago

I’m Canadian and have been using https://lunchmoney.app/ https://lunchmoney.app/ for tracking with Plaid integrations. They have an api and I got llm to write a CLI for it. That way agent can pretty much pull the data it needs or wants. One thing I also had it do is build up a series of rules for tagging which then I run a cron for once a day. Every once in a while I just ask it to look over the rules and make new ones for uncategorized transactions. (As a side note I think having LLM “memoize” a task through a rule engine or code is really nice pattern) But once you have the cli with query you can pretty much ask the agent to do anything.

mbm 6mo ago
Nice! What are your main use-cases?
- aleksiy123 6mo ago
  I’m planning to buy an apartment soon so I wanted to be able to chat and say what kind of mortgage can I afford and where should I cut spending. The other use case funnily enough was to ask how much I’m spending on hobby dev. Make sure I’m not getting carried away across llm subscriptions, as well as cloud costs. I think the nice part is once you have the cli you just use the agent in your ide as your chat interface.
  - mbm 6mo ago
    Same here -- I mainly use Driggsby from Codex or Claude Code, not ChatGPT or Claude actually. Thanks for sharing about the apartment -- that's super cool and a really great use-case.
jnfr 6mo ago
Awesome to hear! (founder of Lunch Money here :)- thanks for the shoutout!)
- aleksiy123 6mo ago
  Of course it’s a great product and has been serving me well ever since intuit killed mint. I think my only request is to expose the rules engine as a declarative api in v2. I ended up locally caching the transactions data, using cel/aip-160 as a rules engine then having the script apply the results on the data.

cowlby 6mo ago

I recently did this for myself using https://tiller.com/ https://tiller.com/ to sync checking/credit-card transactions to a Google Sheets spreadsheet. Then a GitHub action mirrors the spreadsheet to a free Supabase database. From there, Supabase MCP or psql gives Claude/Codex access to the transactions/balances for english queries. Really impressed with their ability to find subscription patterns, abnormal patterns, etc. Also to predict cashflow which no online tool so far is good at i.e. "tell me how much cash I can move to savings based on my monthly spend patterns and available cash". For autocategorization, I learned Claude is really good at custom DSLs. Had it create a markdown table based ruleset to normalize payee/categories. I also run the autocat rules as part of the GitHub actions.

mbm 6mo ago
That's so cool! Are you planning to open source any of this? Would love to see how you set everything up, or - maybe most interested in - some of your prompts.
- cowlby 6mo ago
  It was all GitHub Spec Kit + Claude Opus tbh. I narrated a couple paragraphs of how I wanted to sync to flow and it knocked it out in one pass practically. Here's the initial spec it created. I started off writing to a local sqlite db instead of Supabase: https://gist.github.com/cowlby/0dbeb52403c3f3c0f1d812250520360d https://gist.github.com/cowlby/0dbeb52403c3f3c0f1d8122505203... Edit: Here's also the DSL categorization spec. First one was string based, found it cumbersome, so second one was the Markdown table refactor: https://gist.github.com/cowlby/30d6b5cf132fc1424ab146f0eaf4a13b https://gist.github.com/cowlby/30d6b5cf132fc1424ab146f0eaf4a... https://gist.github.com/cowlby/d569c8e05b5b6eecfd4d237372c06213 https://gist.github.com/cowlby/d569c8e05b5b6eecfd4d237372c06... (edit: put in Gist instead of inline here)
  - mbm 6mo ago
    This is really neat, and actually pretty sophisticated. It's like a tiny fintech. How well has the cash flow prediction worked?

jonyeazel 6mo ago

Used driggsby the other day. Friend of mine sent it to me. Suprising how easily it found all of my subscriptions. That was the main reason i tried it. I'm sure i'll dive deeper into it this week though.

mbm 6mo ago
Did it find any stragglers?
chickensong 6mo ago
Open a credit card that's just for subscriptions IMHO. It makes things really easy to manage and reason about.
- derwiki 5mo ago
  Even better, a privacy.com card for each subscription!

avocabros 6mo ago

This seems like a solution looking for a problem. https://tiller.com/ https://tiller.com/ works great and lets you do whatever calculations you want in a spreadsheet - and, bonus, it's never going to hallucinate. I don't quite understand the desire to have these verbose summaries that you have to read from LLMs. You'll notice anomalies if you just categorize each of your expenses every so often (easy with Tiller).

mbm 6mo ago
Hi! Thanks for sharing. I actually built it for myself initially, and my wife. So I just built what we needed/wanted. There will be a huge variety of products in this space and ours is just one take on the problem. I love seeing anything that's taking a shot at it.
amelius 6mo ago
It's not the summaries. It's the ease by which LLMs can ingest and combine various data sources.
- mbm 6mo ago
  This. It's really cool to weave other data sources into your data. I recently needed to set up some calendar events on certain dividend days, but of course, didn't know what those dividend dates actually were. So we used the MCP connector to retrieve our current Vanguard holdings, had GPT-Pro do web research to pull all the dates, and then created calendar events from that. Worked well.

mannanj 6mo ago

It's amazing to me how little people care about their data. Giving it to an AI company for non-training purposes is OK now? Was it okay before?

2ndorderthought 6mo ago
I was just thinking the same thing. Dear company who has extensive military contracts and is founded in stealing data from people here is every single financial transaction I have ever made! Please don't use it for surveillance pricing tee hee. At least apple credit cards give you money for that rather then the other way around.
- mbm 6mo ago
  Side note: the Apple Card is awesome. We have it & love it. Would really like to integrate with FinanceKit (Apple's Plaid, basically) to pull in that data too.

apsurd 6mo ago

Super cool writeup from a technology perspective. And a motivator to build more tools, play with MCP and try out Claude routines. The product pitch is also really clear. Good job all around. Now for the criticism: back in the day mint.com was mind-blowing. It's what you always thought you'd wanted. The graphs were interactive and pretty and you really loved seeing them go up. Not so much down. I was so attached to the gamified aspects, much like step counters. They reinforce habits. My mint journey ended with roughly 5 years or so of data, once they sold to Intuit, didn't like the ads and willingly syncing all my data to mega-corp. Much like Duolingo, it felt good at the time, but I don't know that it did anything for me at all. Tracking is a double-edged sword: it really does build better habits. It's better to track weight every day for example so you better understand that fluctuations are mostly noise. The daily tracking stuff is entirely useful to get the need to track daily out of your system. TLDR: checking my net-worth daily sounds like something I should coach myself out from. Ironically that probably takes tools, but the end goal is to not need them.

mbm 6mo ago
Awesome feedback. Agree 100% with this. I guess a couple comments: - We have a built-in CSV export tool in beta right now for cash transactions, and plan to add this for other datasets as well. You should be able to download your data when you want it. It's yours. - Yes, tracking is great, but it also has a dark side. My sort of vision, at least for what I want, is less of a gamified finance tracker and more of an ambient, always-on agent that's watching for me. It knows my preferences, it knows what I care about, and it tells me when it finds something. - Before we get there though, for now, it's really interesting to sort of tinker and build your own custom finance automations. As a programmer, it just feels liberating to get the data out of some closed banking app and into a space I'm comfortable in. - Especially from an investing standpoint, it's been neat to pair our MCP with a much smarter model like 5.4 Pro and have it do long-horizon research tasks that require a lot of web research and correlation.
- apsurd 6mo ago
  > As a programmer, it just feels liberating to get the data out of some closed banking app and into a space I'm comfortable in. Quote of the week for me. well said. ~15 years ago I fumbled around with web programming basically because I never learned how to use excel in school. Nerded out with css, html, forms, then php and mysql to script together an unbelievably worse version of what a spreadsheet could do, but it was incredible that I could build something entirely made for my idea. And with the power to improve it. Thank you for writing and sharing your story, it's motivating and comforting even. Good luck!

moltar 6mo ago

Have to be careful with routines. There’s a very small disclaimer that’s barely noticeable that in routine mode all MCP tools, even write are always allowed. So agent can technically go rogue and start mutating your resources via MCP.

mbm 6mo ago
Indeed. Always have to be thinking about prompt injection when it comes to these tools.

ariwilson 6mo ago

I don't really get this; could just use Plaid and have your own transaction/net worth site/app in a few hours with Claude Code and it'd be much more consistent.

mbm 6mo ago
That's actually one of the best things about the current moment -- it's getting easier and easier to do things yourself, and there's less and less reason to use someone else's tool. It's sort of raising the bar for all the apps out there.

irishcoffee 6mo ago

My spouse was almost scammed out of 25k the other day, by a person. There is no way in fucking hell I'll let an "agent" touch my finances. That is madness.

mbm 6mo ago
It's read only, we can't move money. And I totally hear you -- we had this happen in our family as well, and it was really sad. Security is a massive priority for us, but it's always going to be a cost-benefit analysis for each person. Happy to share more about our infra in a follow-up post.
- ForHackernews 6mo ago
  What makes it read-only? You told the AI "don't"?
  - mbm 6mo ago
    Actually, it's deterministic -- our product doesn't move money, so when the user gives us access through Plaid, we're only getting read-level permissions. We actually don't even get full account numbers. A company working with Plaid has to request separate product "scopes" through Plaid in order to be able to move money.
    - ForHackernews 6mo ago
      I'm not that familiar with Plaid, but if it works like Yodlee, users have to hand over their credentials so there's no real security, it's just that their scraper is designed to be look not touch.
      - mbm 6mo ago
        Plaid has OAuth-based access for most of the big institutions now, but yes, for smaller institutions, they do scraping. Thankfully, Plaid's been around for a while now and has a good track record. It would be a non-starter to give your credentials to a small startup directly.

cantrevealname 6mo ago

To everyone who doesn’t know how Plaid works: You give your banking username and password directly to Plaid, and it keeps it (so it can continue to login). I don’t understand how anyone is OK with this. It goes against every security principle and it’s against the terms and conditions of every bank. I realize that almost no bank provides a secure and proper API to get info and/or to transfer funds, but Plaid’s solution is a disaster waiting to happen.

thebruce87m 6mo ago
I thought that’s what Open Banking was supposed to solve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_banking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_banking
- jimmcslim 6mo ago
  And indeed it does, in some markets. I'll speak to Australia... here we have the legislated Consumer Data Right [1]. This currently puts obligations on banks and energy retailers to make consumer data accessible via an API, via Authorised Data Holders (ADH - the banks and retailers) and Authorised Data Recipients (ADR). However! The major criticism I have of this scheme is that as an individual power user I do not have direct access to these APIs myself. I believe there was originally an intent to support this under the scheme, however due to somewhat legitimate security and access concerns, but also I expect pushback from anyone falling into the ADH category, this is not possible. Setting up an ADR has a not insignificant compliance burden. However I have recently come across Redbark [2] which is a simple service that has taken on the mantle, and provides a simple sync mechanism for any Consumers that believe they have a Right to their Data. Not affiliated, just a happy customer and I hope that they can make the economics work over the long term. [1] https://www.cdr.gov.au/ https://www.cdr.gov.au/ [2] https://redbark.co/ https://redbark.co/
- mbm 6mo ago
  Yup, it would be really awesome if this concept was deployed in the US. Unfortunately, open standards don't seem to gain as much traction here outside of the tech industry.
6mo ago

hn_acc1 6mo ago

Any thoughts on how brightplan compares to some of the other apps mentioned here? It's free via work.

mbm 6mo ago
Looks pretty good! Give it a try and let us know how it works?

id00 6mo ago

When I was trying to use Claude to analyze my past transactions, I found out that it was constantly hallucinating charges, sometimes adds new, double counts and etc. When I'm dealing with my finances the 95% time Claude is correct and doesn't hallucinate is not enough as I have to be vigilant and review its work all the time. So it kinda makes it worthless in this case for me

mbm 6mo ago
Give GPT in Codex a try! I agree, Claude still seems quite prone to hallucinations, especially with incomplete or limited datasets.

mbm 6mo ago

In case anyone is interested, just wanted to share a few high level details about our infra/security setup. - Backend & CLI are both strictly linted Rust. The webapp runs on Axum (Rust web framework), and connects to Postgres via sqlx. - Financial read-only. There's no transfer, pay, or send tool in the product. Nothing in the AI surface can move money. - We request transactions, investments, and liabilities from Plaid. We don't request auth, transfer, or payment_initiation, so we never receive full account numbers or routing numbers — just the last-4 mask Plaid returns by default. - Bank usernames and passwords go to Plaid Link, not us. We only hold a per-institution access token. - Plaid access tokens live in a separate database behind a single custody Cloud Run service, encrypted at rest by Cloud KMS. The broker calls KMS's encrypt/decrypt endpoints — the root key material never leaves Google's HSM boundary and the broker's service account is the only one with encrypt/decrypt permissions. The web app doesn't have permission to read that database. - Every encryption and decryption call passes the Plaid item ID as AAD (additional authenticated data). A ciphertext from one item cannot be swapped in and decrypted as another item's token. - Each Cloud Run service (including our web app) runs under its own cloud identity and with its own DB role. - Internal calls between services are authenticated: the caller presents a short-lived identity token from the cloud provider, and the receiver verifies it. - The prod databases have no public IP. Secrets live in managed secret storage, not in source or container images. - The AI connector is OAuth 2.1 + PKCE, scoped per user, revocable from the UI. Every tool call records the tool name, sanitized args, calling client, and the reason the agent supplied, so you can see what your LLM asked on your behalf. - There are no fetch-URL, shell, or general I/O tools in the AI surface. Tools return structured financial data and nothing else. - Networking, IAM, and DB grants are all in Terraform. All infra changes go through that path. - Infra access is gated by 2fa and security keys.

DANmode 6mo ago
If you’re going to downvote someone sharing technical details of their product, or worse, a Show HN?, at least indicate why. It feels like all I’ve done today is Vouch comments that have no indicated reason for being Dead.
atonse 6mo ago
Thank you so much for actually sharing these technical details. Shows you know THIS website’s audience. And the thought put into security at every level gives me more confidence in the overall tool. I’ve tried to build this myself (mvp for myself was just downloading statement PDFs manually and having Claude setting up ledger for plain text accounting, thinking I’ll eventually hookup plaid) I’m mostly curious about how people work with plaid. Do you need a certain threshold of users to get started? Because I’d love to get a plaid account just for my finances. I’m not interested in building a product like this, just want to connect my personal and business accounts to a clean API.

63 6mo ago

Maybe my net worth is too low but I just don't see a value proposition. I don't want daily emails from LLMs and if I need updates on my investments any more often than quarterly (at most), I should probably seek safer investments. I am a bit interested in budgeting tools, but I want them to be completely deterministic. For me at least, financial planning is pretty uneventful and time spent optimizing expenses more than I already have would be better spent seeking a higher paying job.

mbm 6mo ago
Thanks. If I could ask, what would interest you?
- DANmode 6mo ago
  They said deterministic budgeting tools.
  - mbm 6mo ago
    Thanks :-)
mapBasketWand 6mo ago
Have you tried Actual budget + SimpleFIN as a bridge to get your transactions out of banks? I use that to track credit card spending and my checking account. Then you can connect an mcp to do analysis of the data from one place if that’s what you want
pwinnski 6mo ago
I use actualbudget.org to track all spending, but only update investment accounts ("off-budget" in Actual Budget terms) once a month. Completely deterministic, as all things related to numbers should be. I have pointed my LLM at the SQLite DB and asked it to tell me what it could see from my last five years of transactions, and I was impressed with the things it picked up, and what it reminded me of, but I'm not sure I saw any value in the sense of anything I would change. I'm going to have it review things monthly to see if that helps me, but I'm not sure it will. I'm generally already aware of how my finances are going because of my budget updates.

djmips 6mo ago

What are you going to have Claude run your Fantasy football team too?!?

mbm 6mo ago
Now that would be innovative.

alex-norcliffe 6mo ago

We (Era Finance) have a solution for exactly this - Era Context, an MCP for connecting any compatible agent to your personal finances - https://era.app https://era.app It's focussed on read tools at the moment, but we have write tools coming (money transfers, debt paydown, etc) Check it out and let me know if you'd like to see any particular features landing - just email alex at the above domain name. For background context I'm Alex the CEO, I'm ~new to HN but was the former head of web presence at stripe.com and was at Square / CashApp before that. Hi!

mbm 6mo ago
Thanks for stopping by, Alex! Looks awesome -- good luck to you guys!
- alex-norcliffe 6mo ago
  Thanks so much!
managedcode 6mo ago
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I’m trying it ring now
Catdice 5mo ago
I just tried it and am floored by what it can do. Will be making it part of my routine. Kudos to you and your team!

NamlchakKhandro 6mo ago

Obligatory hledger or beancount mention

mbm 6mo ago
hledger is amazing.

yumraj 6mo ago

I absolutely love the idea. Problem, I don’t trust 3rd party services with access to financial data. No offense to the OP. I wish this was open source and self-hostable. Not suggesting that OP does that since I’m sure he has to pay bills :) I may look into doing something like this for personal use. I’ve gotten interested in creating desktop apps which store data locally. Have created a few using Claude code. It seems Plaid has some APIs for personal use.

mbm 6mo ago
Yes, give it a try! I did this on my own first before deciding to make it "a thing." It's actually a really fun project and gives you a ton of insight into your finances. I'd recommend it.

soraminazuki 6mo ago

Maybe the battle has long been lost, but why on earth would you want to entrust your entire financial transactions to an LLM? I bet LLM providers have even less safeguards regarding the use of these data than the financial industry, which to be clear is an abusive industry collecting, mining, and selling our data.

RivieraKid 6mo ago
Why not? How could it negatively affect my life?
atonse 6mo ago
In this case, the creator has explained that this is all read only. So what’s the problem?
- soraminazuki 6mo ago
  I don't see your point. If it's not a problem, can I have read-only access to your financials? Also, the article states that the initial implementation was using Chrome DevTools MCP. That doesn't sound like read-only to me.
  - mbm 5mo ago
    Hi, just to share - the DevTools experiment was in my initial build for myself, prior to deciding to make it into a product.
  - atonse 5mo ago
    > If it's not a problem, can I have read-only access to your financials? Have you built a product like the OP and demonstrated that you've put a lot of time/thought/etc into the infrastructure? If not, then it's a clear no. Also the credentials, etc are going to Plaid (and even with that, my few Plaid integrations have all been OAuth lately), not this company. This is exactly like Stripe. I'm not giving anything "sensitive" in terms of transactions to this company regarding bank details.
6mo ago

Daviey 6mo ago

My primary bank, Monzo (UK) provides a full API and trigger webhook for events. This has enabled me to make a WhatsApp bot that asks me to explain abnormal transactions (using an LLM for reasoning), and also have a pre-midnight sweep balance to savings account to maximise interest daily interest. I also maintain a small daily balance, and if I spend money during the day it tops it up from the savings to maintain that low balance. If I need to spend more, I can move money manually.

mbm 6mo ago
That's so awesome! You should open source this. Wish we had this in the US, would make things so much easier.

neosunny 5mo ago

I was in this same situation a couple of months ago and I just sat down with my friend who is now my co-founder to https://neospend.com https://neospend.com we both were having this issues and now we don’t anymore. Check it out.

mbm 5mo ago
Looks neat! Thanks for sharing. This is going to be a space with many different players, which I personally think is awesome.