Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by devinsit 1861 days ago
Absolutely none at all! uFincs is all about manual entry (although CSV import + recurring transactions makes things a bit easier).

I made a deliberate choice to not support any bank integrations for privacy reasons (although simplicity is also a big factor).

2 comments

Not having integrations is a deal breaker for me. All of my financial information lives in other systems that I need to be able to import it into a single view that I can manage. There is no way I'm going back and manually entering all of that info. A privacy centric solution would store credentials for systems like plaid, bank accounts, etc. in the client on the OS keychain and open source that part of the code to be audited. The data then would be stored preferably on a self-hosted server or your cloud provider of choice. There is some sweet spot here at the intersection of the personal cloud server movement and local client credential storage that none of the current finance apps have yet addressed. Once someone does I think they may have a real hit on their hands.
I totally understand that. And I knew, when making the decision to not do any integrations, that there's a ton of people just like you that value automating everything as much as possible.

But I also made the bet that there would be people just like me who value entering things manually. Certainly far fewer people, but hopefully still people.

In any case, I also hope that the app you described eventually gets built; certainly never hurts to have more privacy-friendly options available!

privacy in what sense? the bank owns your data already, if you don't store any user data in the cloud, then is private by design, right? I was looking for something like this, but I do need auto import my transaction data, across all banks and brokers, etc. Offline first and only, ala Personal Capital, but secure and safe. Paying 20 bucks a month for the privilege of manual data entry is a bit much. There is a bunch of open source alternatives(GNU Cash, etc...), that let you manually enter your data. That said, this is my particular use case. I do wish you the best, and the app does look pretty.
Privacy in the sense that, while the bank may own your data already, third-parties like Plaid do not. And at least up in here Canada, we're a bit weaker on the whole 'bank API' system, so it generally turns into a wonderful game of "hand over your bank account credentials".

Anyways, I definitely understand where you're coming from. Plenty of other products that do have bank integrations though, so at least of there's lots of options for you!

And thanks for the design feedback :)

Plaid is own by Visa, but I get your point. As I said, wish you the best!
The deal did not go through. Plaid just got valued at close to triple what Visa was going to spend on it in a recent fund raise at around $14B post money.