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Agree completely. When I was a student there were a bunch of these companies. One of my friends used one for he and his housemates to split their bills.

After a year, the company stopped paying the gas and electrical companies but didn't stop taking money from the students. The company then folded, closing their offices. My friends were left with bailiffs and debt collectors chasing them for the unpaid gas and electricity bills (about £2500 iirc) which they had to pay.

I would never recommend anyone insert middlemen in financial transactions if at all possible.

Appreciate the feedback! You are not required to top up your YSplit balance. You can link a debit/credit card to the app, and when your share is due, you can pay your share through that. The in-app balance is simply a budgeting feature that you can use to set money aside for your future bills.

In terms of your privacy concerns, while we've worked really hard to make our service secure and leverage trusted security storage providers, we know there'll still be some people who are not ok with sharing their bill account credentials. This is why we are very excited to be developing the YSplit card. You can essentially get a card and use it to split & pay the bills without handing over any account details. There'll be some limitations, most notably not seeing all your bill data in one place, but the splitting feature will work the same.

I didn't mean privacy and security as in "you're gonna get hacked" but "you'll sell my data and know things you don't need to know".

You (and your providers) will not only know my spending but who I share a house/utilities/services with. And personally I place quite a high value on that data (as do others who trade it)

Can confirm, as someone who works in the alternative data industry this service, if widely used, will create a dataset that can easily be sold for >$1M/year to hedge funds, credit agencies, etc.

I've seen quite a few companies that operate in this financial intermediary space and start off with strong privacy ideals, and then when they're getting traction and are raising a Series A/B can't resist adding a cool $5-10M ARR with near zero marginal cost by selling out.

I don’t see how this is a serious concern, even if they do it. I would just consider it part of the price of the service.

That's the entire point. I don't want to "pay" with my data and have no idea how it's being used. It's why I pretty much don't use any online services unless forced to.

My point exactly: if that was a serious concern, Facebook would have no users.

> I would just consider it part of the price of the service. reply

Which would make the service too expensive for me.

> Facebook

I don't use Facebook for the same reason.

But as I mentioned in the top level comment, this is a concern for me because I'm probably more privacy-conscious then an average user so I might not be exactly the type of user they're building for.

It could very well be a serious concern for you, but not a serious concern for most people. But then everyone has their own different serious concerns so if they're adjusting it here and there for everyone that would be a misallocation of efforts. So I think because of that it's more useful, at least for the developers of a product, to consider a larger set of users than a niche concern of a minority set of users.

Oh I see! From my experience, the companies that I've seen selling user data have no alternative revenue stream substantial enough to stop them from hemorrhaging money. They may also be giving most of their revenue back to their users or losing money every time their service is used. While building YSplit, we made sure it would make money every time it's used and that we would be able to upsell users on more features in the future. And the app is successfully achieving both at the moment.

If you truly intend to monetize that way, make a legally binding statement to never sell your users' data to anyone else. Otherwise I personally would never trust you, and honestly even then I'd be skeptical because I assume that legal contract would become void during an acquisition.

If I were to parse this comment in a lawyerly way, I'd conclude you didn't actually say whether your service does or does not sell users' financial data (or whether it plans to do so). Can you confirm for us your company's practices?

We do not sell any financial data and we do not intend on doing so in the future.

The fact that this is a VC-backed startup pretty much guarantees it will be doing nefarious things with its users' data somewhere down the line. Even if not intended right now.

This is an unfair comment because it's stated as a "pretty much" fact when it's simply your opinion.

Additionally, the fact that it's a "VC-backed startup" is irrelevant. Any company with any structure could be doing this.

Eh not really. Having VC backing means you have an extra incentive to do things that a bootstrapped company wouldn't, mainly to please your investors.

Well, either it's in the TOS or it's not. Simple. And if it is now, and it vanishes, well, you know what to do.

Either a business can thrive without selling user data, or it can’t. If it can’t, then eventually the data will fall in the hands of someone willing to sell it. It doesn’t matter if that someone is current management (perhaps under pressure from VCs) or future management (after inevitable acquisition or asset liquidation since the business is not viable). Therefore it does not matter how current management feels about selling user data today, or whether they are vc-funded or bootstrapped. If they aren’t building a viable business, the data they are collecting will be sold eventually.

An interesting side use case you might want to consider:

My previous 2 apartments I lived in required paying rent by paper check, delivered to their office, which was very annoying. They didn't take any forms of electronic payment, and mailing a check is a pain for millenials like me who don't usually stock envelopes or stamps. However, they also didn't take checks written by anyone other than the leasee, so that could be something that might need to be negotiated.

So this isn't a feature we have advertised on our site yet but we do support check payments on YSplit. We collect the funds before and auto send the check to the landlord to arrive 1 day before the due date. Landlords are currently not complaining that the checks are sent from us but thanks for bringing up this edge case. Super helpful to know as we grow.

Relatedly, I had the same concern as the OP (not about security, but about privacy and selling my data), and I read the “security” page on your site and totally balked at how there was not one word about selling data.

I would drop that whole page, honestly. It’s written in a pretty technical way and didn’t make me feel any safer, and on top of that made me feel like you all were deflecting from the bigger and more immediate threat, data selling.

Same here. First of all that reliance on people giving you access to their accounts is super sketchy in my opinion. I used Mint for a long time until I realized how insane it is for them to be able to access my bank and investment accounts.

Good for them if they find people paying for their service but same as you, I don't see how this can't be solved with a spreadsheet.

I find services like these bothersome for a different reason. A major selling point is catering to people that have difficulty getting the cash together to front a utility bill or rent. For every app that exploits people's inability to manage their finances I wish we'd see an app that teaches financial literacy and responsibility.

I understand that some apps try and exploit bad behaviours and these apps really annoy me to my core. They know who they are. However that is not the case with YSplit. We believe that the current process of one person managing the house finances for everyone is backwards. There is no incentive to do this and there is really only negatives that come with it. Everyone being responsible for their share of the bill teaches roommates to be more financially responsible than to allow one roommate to take care of it all and carry the burden. You nailed it when you mentioned the our biggest selling point helps those who struggle to get the cash together or front the payment. Roommates who normally relied on that one roommate are now learning how to budget better on a monthly basis for the utilities etc.

> I wish we'd see an app that teaches financial literacy and responsibility

I agree with you 100%. I'm not sure how feasible it is to build a business around it, though, since monetization techniques are likely to turn people off or harm the product. Bogleheads is an awesome existing resource, in case anyone's interested