Ask HN: How can startups using Yodlee afford it? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can startups using Yodlee afford it?

15 pointsgilaniali15 comments

I wanted to build a new product using the functionality that Yodlee provides (it is used by inDinero, Mint, etc), but using their contact form, I was contacted by a sales agent who says that I would have to sign a 1 year to 3 year contract, pay an upfront fee of $12,500 and pay a user fee between $3 per user to $1 per user, depending on volume.

Are there cheaper alternatives?

View on HN

You may be able to negotiate a better deal than that. As you grew you could almost certainly negotiate a better deal. You could also scrape the data yourself. Supporting the top 15 financial sites would probably cover 80%+ of your users fully.

If there are not any startup friendly alternatives to Yodlee, then maybe you just found what your startup should really be doing :-)

You should look at the Wesabe code that got open sourced. They wrote their own scraper for a huge number of banks. That could solve your problem at the beginning. Although, it also creates a new problem for you, securely storing bank credentials. They open sourced a solution for that too, but I'm sure it'll still create costs for you.

I don't think they've released the scraper yet, have they? They said they would, but it wasn't part of the release last I checked.

One idea might be to have a consortium of startups interested in the topic use and maintain Wesabe's scrapers as a community.

This is my first time hearing about Yodlee. I went to their site and while I'm not totally dense, it's not immediately clear what their product offering does.

In plain English, what is it that these folks do that your system needs so badly? Genuinely curious.

Provides a unified API for myriad online banking websites.

Its how Mint is able to get your transaction history.

I wouldn't be surprised if Swipely and Blippy use them too.

Am I the only person who doesn't think this is expensive at all?

If you're creating a banking application and cannot extract enough revenue from a user to mitigate a $3 cost per user for a business-critical vendor, you're probably barking up the wrong tree.

Its cheap if you VC/angel money backing you, but if you're just trying to get an MVP off the ground, the upfront costs are prohibitive.

$3 per user per month is expensive. Looking at the price SaaS offerings, they're generally in the $5-$15 per user per month range, so $3/month is a good chunk of change.

It's even worse for advertising based services, who generally make far less per user per month.

I used to work at Yodlee and do some Yodlee consulting on the side. I can't speak to the license fees, but to the folks that say "build your own", I don't really recommend that.

Not sure what kind of site you are trying to build, but aggregation is a really Long Tail kind of functionality. I've heard countless times from people that "Yodlee supports 15 of my institutions but they don't support my one bank and that makes the aggregated data useless without it." And Yodlee supports thousands of sites. Even if you built custom support for 80% of the sites, the "all or nothing" mentality of a lot of aggregation users means that does not translate to satisfying 80% of the users.

Is that per user fee monthly? Regardless, the fee structure seems quite reasonable given the functionality they provide. Besides, everything is negotiable.

I've been in touch with Yodlee recently as well. I'm going to call them back today to clarify, but it was my understanding that the fee was per user account not user. Meaning if John Doe signs up and has 3 credit cards and 2 banks, that's 5 user accounts. Hopefully I'm wrong on this.

Yes, Yodlee is crazy expensive and doesn't seem willing to negotiate with startups. CashEdge may be a better option. And, as has been noted, you could handle the top 5-50 institutions yourself which would get you very broad coverage.

A dollar per user, is that per month?

I don't know their pricing structure, but check with http://www.geezeo.com/ and http://cashedge.com/ to see if they fit within your budget or not.

Alternatively you can write your own scraper depending on what your requirements are.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com