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Comment by p-funk | Hacker News Reader

I've been planning a side project with a lot of those features. That's exactly how I think about my budgeting and that's exactly how I would like to allocate my money. I'm really not aware of any way to do this currently, apart from a lot of manual work in a spreadsheet, which is annoying and still requires restraint in spending. Mint isn't even that helpful when it comes to budgeting because their alerts and categories are always inconsistent and they change categories that you've set for no apparent reason. Not to mention the ads.

Unfortunately, getting data from bank accounts is a pain due to bank security. The approach I was going to use just to get started was to export Mint's data as a csv, and then build an app around that until I read up on the bank transaction formats that would let you pull your transaction history. Not ideal, though.

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Have you looked at plaid? I'm not sure what their rates are like, but if you're doing just a personal project, you might be able to get away with their developer evaluation (though that only lets you interface with big banks, not the small ones - the developer evaluation that is).

Edit: plaid is a nice abstraction bank api: https://plaid.com/

>I'm not sure what their rates are like

Very opaque and very expensive ($500 / mo+)

Also, they will shut down your account if you don't use your free edition enough.

Hi Madeline - happy to share more info on pricing - we're working on simplifying pricing for early stage / bootstrapped products . Feel free to reach out directly to my email if you want to learn more (charley@plaid.com).

We'll occasionally flag accounts that have dormant API activity in our development tier, but as long as you're still using the API we're happy to cover the cost of the free account.

Hi there - full disclosure, I work at Plaid . Anyone can signup for API keys and access all the thousands of banks that we currently support on Plaid for free in our dev environment.

Once you want to add more than 100 accounts, we recommend reaching out to learn more about pricing at scale; it depends on what APIs are being used, how much data is being pulled, how often, etc. Feel free to shoot me an email directly if you have any questions! (charley@plaid.com)

Ah, I had used it couple of years ago. At that point, I could get to my bank account with it at a major bank, authentication with smaller credit unions was restricted until I graduated from the dev environment.

I'm glad to hear that's not the case anymore.

> export Mint's data as a csv, and then build an app around that

This is what I do. Mint doesn't have an API, but I just inject some javascript using the console that pulls the csv file and displays the data in a way that makes sense to me.

SmartyPig does some of that. You set savings goals which is a little different than just funding categories, but you might be able to make it work. Maybe they have an API and you could let them deal with the banks?

Checkout YNAB (You Need A Budget).

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