Show HN: Fion – A new tool to track your spending, without a budget | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Fion – A new tool to track your spending, without a budget

fion.co

33 pointsFionMoney53 comments

I don't have enough information/trust to actually give my email, because I don't know whether the product will work for me. Basic questions like:

- Is this a web app? Are there mobile apps? Android/iOS?

- How does it work? Does it read my SMSs? Do I need to upload my invoices? Does it read my email? What level of access and hand-holding does it need?

- Does it work for non-US residents?

- No pricing information, as already pointed out.

- Currency support? All screenshots are USD, so I don't know if this will work for me.

There's also the fact that you list "third-party analytics" in the list of service providers that get access to my information on your Privacy page.

>Service Providers. We share information with third parties who provide services to us, such as customer service, interfacing with Third Party Sites, analytics, website management, information technology, and other similar service providers.

Happy to answer your questions:

- Fion is a web app, available on both desktop and mobile.

- Fion currently uses Plaid to link your US-based bank accounts. Your information is encrypted end-to-end and your credentials are never accessible to us.

- Fion is free.

- We plan on offering multi-currency support in the near future.

- Service Providers refers to things like Google Analytics on our website, live customer support, and Plaid.

What’s your revenue model?

As the saying goes : If the product is free, you’re the product.

“We plan to make money” doesn’t cut it.

There are many good financial tools almost exactly like yours. Why do you believe you will succeed.

Making this clear up front is vital.

Few here will go on blind faith (I hope)

In the world of distrust, who do I distrust more. Random post on HN, or Intuit and Empower Retirement? This tool looks like it does what Mint and Personal Capital do, the difference being Intuit can probably already buy my entire transaction history from a partner, so giving it to them isnt something they dont already know.

Maybe I'm an outlier, but I wouldn't adopt a product unless I knew the business model.

For it to actually be free forever and not sell my data, presumably you'll be selling other products on top?

> Fion offers personalized recommendations, exclusive deals, and insights based on your spending patterns and financial information and powered by AI and machine learning. We don’t sell ads and we’ll never sell your data.

From: https://www.fion.co/blog/introducing-fion/

So:

We don't sell ads, but we do sell "personalized recommendations" and "exclusive deals".

We don't sell your data to third parties. We plan to offer recommendations and save people money through our own platform.

I think you should just remove "we don't sell ads". You are absolutely selling ads and personalizing them based on user data.

It's just flat out wrong to say you don't sell ads.

Not saying the practice itself is wrong, just that your copy is not factually correct.

Our copy is factually correct. There are no ads in our app. We don't sell any ads. We don't use user data to sell ads. If you signed up for Fion, you would see this.

It's not unfathomable to build a business that is aligned with its users' best interests. We have a vision and it starts with a free tool to answer questions about your finances. We have many more features and tools to come.

What you've seen so far is just our first step. There's much more to come.

"powered by AI and machine learning" wahahaha. No thanks. I'll stick with YNAB.

If you're not paying for it, you're the product.

> If you're not paying for it, you're the product.

“You are not the product being sold, you are the livestock being farmed.”

As a fellow YNAB user there would be no reason to switch anyways. YNAB provides far more control over your money/finances than a simple transaction aggregator.

Ah hah! This is what I'm here for: Other options that I haven't heard of... Because Mint and Simple ain't cutting it.

“We will never sell your data” except we may change our mind, have the right to amend our privacy policy anytime we like without notifying you (apparently it’s on us the consumer to periodically review their privacy policy for updates) and would hope to eventually sell our company (and your data) to some other company that will do whatever they want with it.

What could go wrong?

In french "fion" is slang for "arse". So we had a good laugh reading "Fion. Meet your new money machine".

“Fion. Money coming out your wazoo.”

When we launch in French-speaking markets, we'll consider a different name. Possibly Filon, which has a better connotation in French.

Don't go with Fillon though, you'd have to give the money back :-/

Filon is also bad, means running away... Having a product name being different in different countries would hurt the brand too.

"Filon" means a mine vein (and is used figuratively as a source of easy money). So the name seems pretty good.

As far the dictionary goes, that's true.

But "filons" is the imperative tense of a verb literaly meaning "let's run away".

And also "Fillon" is the name of a politician who was exposed for fraud while he was running for presidency. He was sentenced last spring, his name was all over French news for a while, and it became quite infamous.

edit, added more context

Sure, but as I said "un filon" or "un bon filon" as meaning "easy money" is very common.

I could not find the most important piece of information - can I even use it? Most of similar apps can only work with few US-based banks which makes them useless in EU. Fion is on .co which means Columbia?

And yes, for wider adoption the business model needs to be transparent.

+1 I won't sign up without properly understanding how it works and how it syncs the data (do I email receipts? Will it connect to my banks in Belgium and Singapore?)

Right now, Fion supports connections to US-based banks.

Regarding the business model, we will expand on this topic on our blog. Our goal is to be the most transparent and user-friendly option in personal finance.

I'm interested in the use case for people who use tools like this. Do you have a lot of bank accounts/credit cards so that logging into each bank site is a pain?

I tried to get into finance tracking along these lines (YNAB), and it was a lot of work. I don't care where every penny goes because it became clear that most of my pennies go to the same place every month (housing, utilities, etc.). I just want to spend less money on the every day things I have control over.

I'm trying out a system for that specific purpose over at spendweek.com. I've realized that some people just love to see all the data, which is great. Others of us just want a simple tool to curb bad spending habits.

This name will not work very well in the french-speaking market.

Fion is slang for asshole in French.

Hey,

congrats on the launch! I see there's some critique here already that could be a bit hurtful - don't take it to heart. As most of these commenters haven't even had a chance to try your app yet, this signals to me that something isn't quite resonating with the way you sell your product, and you'll need to work on your messaging a bit more to win them over.

From my experience successfully launching fintech API[1] on ProductHunt and HN, a fleshed out pricing page can really help with the credibility. Also, a more concrete statement on privacy would be very helpful too.

Best of luck!

[1] https://wisefin.ai

Thanks for the kind words. We actually appreciate all the feedback.

We anticipated comments about the name Fion as well as skepticism regarding our free business model. However, we did hope to receive a bit more feedback on the design and interface. We're quite proud of what we've built.

I'm very interested in a product like what it sounds like you are building, but the site doesn't give me enough information to feel like trying it. Other people have summed it up, so I won't rehash it.

Fion is a new personal finance tool that lets you search your spending, across all your cards. It's available on both desktop and mobile.

We noticed it's still surprisingly hard to answer simple questions about our finances. There are other personal finance apps and sophisticated paid budgeting tools, but we wanted to build an easy (and free) way to search transactions that doesn't involve creating and maintaining a budget.

We're excited to share Fion with the HN community.

Not that it shocks me or anything but: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fion

I confirm that this product cannot be launched in France with this name

I concur. Colleagues are dying of laughter right now

We will consider a name change when we launch in French-speaking markets. Filon, for example, may be a suitable option.

It's risky between Fion and Fillon https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39135906

Tête de fion is a common insult in France

Reminds me when I first came across Hasura (means "total loss" in Greek slang - not something you'd want to associate with your application data layer).

I like the idea of decoupling transactions from budgets, but maybe your page could show examples of some of the simple questions your tool could help users answer? The web page is beautiful but felt a bit light on feature information to me.

Please consider a customer-pays model with a promise not to sell data. I can't trust you with my data if I don't know how you use it.

Is a promise a realistic way to prevent it?

What about in the event of a sale, merger, takeover, etc?

Is there a proper legal way to make it unusable forever? Even if there is a legal way, if the technological means exist, will it be taken and sold anyway?

This is awesome, I got all my accounts hooked up and... realized I couldn't do anything about my Bitcoin holdings... is there any easy way to just connect to a tracker like coinmarketcap.com and just pass in your Bitcoin holdings? It's a fancy dashboard.

Thanks for signing up. We'll research support for Bitcoin transactions as well as crypto holdings as part of our upcoming investment dashboard.

To be honest, even something as simple as coinmarketcap.com and allowing you to enter how much you have would be great for the accounts portion.

I did love the fact that M1Finance and Vanguard Plans are supported by your dashboard and will be following along with you as one of my favorite financial products (alongside M1Finance and Privacy in my opinion)

Why should we trust you? Who are you? You don't have any information about the company or the people who are involved/invested. You're asking for a lot of high value information while providing us with none. I don't even want you to have my email address, let alone access to my banking info.

Given the various privacy focussed comments here: for a self hosted FOSS tool to track your spending, consider Firefly III.

So, it says they're not selling data. It also has no pricing page. There's no way I'd consider handing over that kind of data and access without a clear understanding of their business model.

I had the same thoughts.

Sounds nice--but what is the catch?

We plan to offer paid premium features such as spending insights and advanced reporting. We also have plans for personalized recommendations and exclusive deals, provided the incentives are aligned with our users. We'll never sell your data to third parties, or try to sell you something you don't need (e.g. a credit card or loan offer).

Paid budgeting tools generally charge between $80-$100 per year, which can be a good value if a budgeting methodology works for you and saves you money. This, however, limits the size of the market significantly.

Fion is free because we want to make it easy for as many people as possible to track their spending across all their cards.

We will expand on this topic on our blog, because it's a very important issue that all free personal finance apps need to address.

> Fion is free because we want to make it easy for as many people as possible to track their spending across all their cards.

This sort of statement is unhelpful because while it's true in a sense, it's not your business plan. Your business plan reason for making it free is you will capture a lot of users, and will monetise through advertising and freemium options.

And that's fine.

Saying it's free because you want to help people just sounds like empty marketing.

> We may use your data to create aggregate or statistical information that does not directly identify a specific person, and we may share that information

So no selling of your personal data, but they hope to sell aggregated data. Privacy policy also has quite a lot of details about a possible merge / buyout, and non-responsibility in this scenario, so they may hope to amass some data as _freemium_ and then to sell the whole company for a nice profit.

But wait:

  We *may* use your data to create aggregate or statistical information that does not directly identify a specific person, and we *may* share that information.

This doesn't say they won't sell your data, it just says they might anonymise it.

They do say:

  [We do not share your information] with any third parties so they can market to you

But what can 3rd parties themselves share that info for marketing.. I'm not sure..

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