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Comment by largote | Hacker News Reader

Why would I migrate from Mint to this?

Mitch here, one of the co-founders.

I don't want to throw Mint under the bus: I used it for ~6 years before starting to work on Penny and it's a great tool for people that enjoy spreadsheets and crunching numbers (myself included). That said, it can be pretty intimidating to just to about everyone else. Penny requires a lot less effort on your part, since the number crunching is all done behind the scenes to generate cool insights.

To answer the specific question of why _you_ might switch: Mint hasn't really improved beyond the addition of more ads in the past four to five years. It's painfully slow (at least for me) and still has not learned that my gym membership is not software.

My main concern in using sites like this is that they'll leak my banking credentials. Mint uses Intuit's service for communicating with financial institutions, which is also used for Quickbooks and TurboTax. Credentials are encrypted and housed in a datacenter owned by Intuit. The Mint application only ever stores a token representing the account and uses the service to pull transactions from a read-only service. While I'm still uneasy about this setup, the isolation of the systems combined with the scale and the resources devoted to keeping it secure provide some piece of mind.

Can you talk about the measures that you use to protect banking credentials so that I might feel similarly safe about giving them to your service?

There are actually three major players in the transaction aggregation space: Intuit, Yodlee, and Plaid. We use Plaid, but it works the same as Intuit. In fact, Plaid has a partnership with Intuit to backfill support for bank accounts.

We never store any credentials on our system, and our access is read only. I can go on for days about why I think our system is more secure than, say, Chase[0], but if you trust Mint's practices it's probably sufficient to say that we use an almost identical system.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_JPMorgan_Chase_data_breac...

Thanks! That was exactly what I wanted to know.

That's... moderately comforting. I recently started using Mint and it's proving very helpful for tracking my spending and budgets. It's really worrying having to hand over my bank account username and password, though.

I really wish banks could provide a read-only API token instead.

Good ones do. I use CapitalOne360 as my primary bank exactly for this reason.

Because Mint has been horribly broken and useless from the day Intuit bought it. Currently I use an excel spreadsheet in lieu of my now-inactive Mint account. Because even nothing is better than mint.

Odd, I hear this complaint all the time but have never personally experienced it. Mint has always worked for me, even with a bunch of esoteric 401k and other accounts from no-name banks.

I had the same issues with Mint, it was always broken, always giving back unreadable account errors, always missing stuff in searches, never applying tags properly (and no mass tag update, argh).

Check out PocketSmith. It may not have every feature I want, but at least it actually works. There is a nominal monthly fee associated with it, but well worth it if you want to actually use an online money analysis tool to do anything.

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