Show HN: Truebill – Find and track paid subscriptions, cancel with one click | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Truebill – Find and track paid subscriptions, cancel with one click

truebill.com

103 pointsidrism46 comments

The idea seems great. But my spidey sense is going crazy. You want access to my financial/purchase data, and the service is free. So you will monetize ..... how?

I am 100% not saying you intend to scam or steal. But clearly access to my data is key to your eventual monetization plan, and this is a loss leader to get in the door. Since the ultimate plan is not stated, I have no choice but to imagine it, and nothing I can think of warms my heart.

The ability to feed your service with something like a periodic manual export from Mint (assuming such a thing is possible) would go a long way toward reassuring me.

Again, the core idea seems fantastic, and could save many people real money, including myself.

Thanks for the kind words. Definitely understand where you're coming from in terms of security. Our plan isn't really to monetize your data, it's moreso to make intelligent recommendations that we hope our users will follow. For instance, "you're paying $10 per month for Hulu, on average users are x% more satisfied with Netflix, click here to switch from Hulu to Netflix".

We've definitely discussed the idea of a manual export/import - we may get to that in the future.

>Our plan isn't really to monetize your data

>it's moreso to make intelligent recommendations...

That is exactly what monetizing data is!

Hi all, We're former founders of Webs (formerly FreeWebz). We made Truebill because too many people are getting ripped off by monthly subscriptions that they either forgot about or are too lazy to cancel. Now that so much is moving over to subscriptions, we think it warrants one place to manage them all.

This is a great idea, but I'm immediately concerned about giving my financial account information to any sort of free service.

What is your business model? Why not charge a one-time $10 fee up front to build trust, and revenue?

A one-time up-front $10 fee may build trust, but it would also scare people away.

There's a few ways we can go for revenue. Here's an example: Since we know what subscriptions are popular, and we can have verified ratings on those subscriptions, we'll be able to make recommendations. For example, "You're paying $12 for Pandora. People seem to be happier with Spotify, and your friends love it. Give it a try!" Using those referrals, we'd get a cut of the subscription revenue from Spotify.

I would recommend trying an upfront or recurring fee first. If that doesn't work then try advertising/referrals. It is easier to implement and will generate more revenue in the short term if it works.

Don't worry about scaring people away at this stage. You actually want to find the people who really need this service so you can figure out what they really want and care about and build those features. If someone pays, that means they really want it.

What about splitting the product and offering the results for free and the convenient auto-cancel as a one time fee.

Also I'd feel better if you didn't store anything long term, I'm more interested in this as a on-demand service than as something that constantly pulls my data.

> What about splitting the product and offering the results for free and the convenient auto-cancel as a one-time fee

As a user who agrees that I would be more comfortable if I knew they made money, I'm wondering if the "convenience" of auto-cancel is negated by having to pay for it specifically.

I don't have a better suggestion than the others in this thread though.

I'm also wondering if I would pay a subscription fee when the goal is to reduce the subscriptions, at some point I'll have reached an satisfactory state where this service will be the next to be knocked off.

Good luck to the team, and thanks for saving me ~$25/month!

Umm, you just found me $6000 that I have been over billed by one of the services that I requested deactivation....

1. Time to fix my accounting processes for this particular business 2. This is amazing!

How do you make money?

Wow, that's a ton of $.

To answer the money question, right now we actually don't make money. In the future, we think we can make $ by making intelligent recommendations i.e. "you like x and y, try signing up for Z subscription service.

Maybe consider taking a cut of the savings... ;)

if you're creating $6,000 in value, people would definitely be willing to give you a cut of that.

I have to ask... what was charging you 500/mo?

Logentries.com for $1200 per month. I shifted to logstash and cancelled but it did not get processed.

You do not redirect to PayPal to login but give me a on site form? Any reason for this? Your service looks great, but this seems sketchy :)

Edit:// Sorry i just saw you answered that already. Fucking banks. Trying since years to find a local one with a read only api with no luck yet. They just offered me read/write APIs based on expensive business accounts...

Do what I did; download their mobile app, reverse engineer it and call the web api's yourself to scrape the data.

My current bank has no mobile App (seriously). The only bank that has one where i can look at my account without TAN is the only bank here in Switzerland which is no actual Bank therefore also without the bank secret.

I asked them what would happen if i did this, they told me this is reason enough to sue me.

You could write a web scraper that keeps a session alive to get around the TAN

I feel like a noob right now that i havent thought about this. This wouldnt even break any logical rules my bank maybe has. I gotta try this. BIG THANK YOU!

No problem, glad I could help.

It was nice thing to have, made me feel in control, while packing up my groceries after having paid in the checkout line, I'd get a Notifo push message from my watcher; I just wonder why it's not something all banks would do; I'm certain customers would love getting the notifications and it would help prevent or at least catch fraud quickly.

absolutely. i am doing this with my paypal and bitcoins as well. i really dont get why the fucking richest economy sector isnt able to do such basic things. (afaik germany and the uk have a standard for that tho)

How do you actually cancel the subscriptions? For example, in order to cancel a Comcast subscription wouldn't you need the last 4 digits of my social security number or something?

This looks slick!

One idea I'd recommend is to look at what the user is subscribing to and monitor for when deals are available and alert the user to that. For example Xbox Live is usually $60/year, however there are frequent sales (Amazon, eBay, etc) that offer discounts to $35/year. Similarly with music subscriptions, etc.

There's your revenue model as well. Because you're saving the user money they can kick you back a few bucks (maybe a percentage of the savings).

I think I would be one of your ideal customers. I have a plethora of subscription services that i'll either periodically cancel and renew, or just permanently forget to cancel.

What does your service offer that scrolling down my bank statement won't already achieve? There is already a proven barrier of laziness here, why doesn't that also exist for the process of downloading and utilizing your service?

Most people don't look at their bank statement often. For those that do, they sometimes overlook things. I think the most common reason for cancelling through Truebill, though, is not wanting to waste time dealing with cancelling the service.

The point is, you shouldn't HAVE to look at your bank statement to find this stuff. We do it for you, and we keep an eye on things for you. If you want to make sure you're not charged again, just set an alert. No need to check your bank statement.. just wait for an email from us.

Wow, beautiful site!

I'm loving this trend of services to save me money (Paribus is one other example that I love). However, I too am concerned about handing financial information over to a third party. I'd love to hear the business model.

Thanks! See my reply to tomkinstinch re: business model

Just signed up, site seems fast and works great. What's the stack like?

Thanks! Stack is currently Node + Postgres + React + Relay. Which reminds me... if anyone wants a job, let me know! We need mostly back-end or full-stack

You could make an "offline" app instead of a web service. I think people trust "apps" more then web services. Especially if it's open source.

What if there's a bill like, say, Comcast, and your user only wanted to cancel one service (TV) and not another (Internet)?

Good point. For now, you can just add that in the "Reason" and we'll see it. But maybe we should add a "notes" column. We could also have checkboxes for specific services, like Comcast, where we know their different offerings.

I got scared when the interface asked for my paypal user/password. I'd feel much more comfortable with OAuth.

Thanks for the feedback. We're definitely thinking about OAuth for Paypal. Unfortunately, banks and credit cards don't usually have modern APIs :) so we're forced to do old-school authentication. That said, we use Plaid for that, so we don't deal with any passwords ourselves.

This seems like a great idea, but the detection isn't perfect--some annual/semi-annual bills get picked up as inactive monthly, and scheduled investment withdrawals show up as subscription services. That isn't fatal, but having a way to manually correct things would help a lot!

Yep, this is definitely on our roadmap. Also, our platform is getting better as it goes, so these small mixups are getting fixed. Thanks.

> 19,821 Banks Supported

How did you arrive at that number? Is that number advertised anywhere on the Plaid.com website?

I asked Plaid and that's what I was told. It's probably larger than that now since they're constantly adding long-tail support.

I researched them in the past but couldn't find any public list of the banks they support, so it's hard to tell how much coverage they have compared to Yodlee.com for instance.

Do you have to be a paying customer to pry that information (i.e. list of banks they support) out of them?

No need to sign up. You can actually find the full list in our docs: https://plaid.com/docs/#long-tail-institutions

Not correct - I had to sign up for an account just now so I could get API keys to hit the endpoint.

Besides, the account is limited at the moment. I get the following error:

    {
      "code": 1306,
      "message": "invalid institution permissions",
      "resolve": "Your Client ID does not have access to this institution endpoint"
    }

Cool stuff, I wonder how you guys will make money but will be trying it out. Hope it's all secure :)

How does this work exactly? I mean, since all banks' statements are different.

I really don't want to turn off 2FA even temporarily.

What would a workaround for this look like?

We support 2FA on almost all banks.. Which one are you having trouble with?

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