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Do not trust Plaid or services that use it - it stores your login credentials directly...

I use spreadsheets - download csv from your bank, import, label categories, then you can look at it any way you like. Doesn't take that much time, and with a few heuristics, the tagging can be mostly automated...

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Plaid/Yodlee/SimpleFIN etc are slowly getting better about not having to store credentials or do scraping. It depends more on the bank. A lot of banks don't support things like oauth, but a few do support giving 3rd party apps read-only access or at least have an oauth2 flow to approve access instead of giving them your user/password.

Agreed in general though, I don't like having to give a budgeting app potential access to transfer all of my money away (even if they promise they won't)

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