| From the Privacy policy (https://www.pennyapp.io/privacy.html): > We will never sell any information that could identify you for marketing purposes, and we only share limited amounts of information with third-party services on a need-to-know basis. Very nice! It doesn't show up in HN but they've even gone out of their way to bold the relevant bits. From the FAQ: > Penny supports over 15,000 banks in the United States, so if your bank is in the U.S., she can probably connect to it. She can even connect to your Venmo or PayPal account! > Penny never stores your bank login information. After she first establishes the connection to your bank, she gets a separate, secret access code to retrieve your transactions from your bank. That way, she can access your transactions without ever needing your bank account credentials again. Do 15,000 banks in the USA really have an external API with API keys? That's pretty amazing. From poking around the site looks like they're using Plaid (https://plaid.com/). Now that's seriously cool stuff to normalize! >> How do you make money? > Right now, we make money through donations and by partnering with financial products that we think you might find worthwhile. You can find out more about our partnerships here. Both the donations and partnerships allow us to continue offering Penny’s services for free. > At some point, we will need to start charging for some aspects of Penny. We will give you plenty of advance warning when we’re nearing that milestone. In the meantime, you can enjoy all of Penny’s features free of charge! While I like the idea of allowing people to track their finances better, I don't get how a company like this gets funded without a clear monetization strategy. I'm sure they've got some ideas internally and were probably included in their pitches, but I don't immediately see what it would be. Maybe get individuals to pony up $X/mo for the service? I doubt they would. People are cheapskates ... particularly so when the market is people that want to reign in their spending. |
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.