Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshka | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious how reasonable it would be for a person, rather than a company, to have a plaid sub.

There’s also this: https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/. Very reasonably priced and it works great. Actual Budget uses it.

Could you share more about how it works?

You link your accounts in simplefin which uses MX (similar to plaid) to pull the data. Except simplefin is really simple to setup.

https://actualbudget.org/docs/advanced/bank-sync/simplefin

Nice, thanks for sharing. I’m curious how MX compares to Plaid.

Tiller https://tiller.com/ is a good Plaid "proxy". It'll write data to a Google Sheets and can maneuver from there.

I think it's rather hard because of their security & contractual requirements -- we had to sign a contract with them, go through security review, and so on.

We just this week launched a new sign-up flow to make it waaaay easier for non-businesses to use Plaid, I posted some details below.

Actually, as part of publicizing our new hobbyist-friendly onboarding, we're looking to work with hobbyists who have created Plaid-powered apps and would be interested in making a short video about their app and their Plaid experience to potentially be featured on the Plaid blog -- if you're interested, shoot me an email at ahoffer@plaid.com and I can send you the details.

Sounds awesome! Would love to. Just launched our app to Plaid production this week.

I would love this. I’ve built software to manage my business and personal finances and am using hacks right now (activity csvs for personal, quickbooks transaction api for business).

In an ideal world I’d move it all to plaid to help analyze finances, cc spend, etc.

I’m happy to hear you’re working on a hobbyist product.

Awesome. Definitely need to highlight this better somewhere on the main page (probably /pricing and in the /docs pages), but https://dashboard.plaid.com/ has it. More vague plans right now.

I reached out to them a couple years ago with this exact question and was told flat-out no. You might be able to sneak around it with an LLC but I think they also require you to have a public website for a plausibly banking-related business, which altogether seemed like too much effort to fake for what I wanted out of it.

So you don't have to be a business to use Plaid, but you do have to be a business to buy Plaid via the Sales channel rather than via the self-serve channel. Admittedly, when folks reach out to Sales and ask to buy Plaid and are told they're not eligible because they're not a business, this nuance is sometimes not communicated very well (or at all). We're working on it. :-)

In fact, we actually just this week launched a new sign-up flow to make it waaaay easier for non-businesses to use Plaid, so try checking it out -- after you go to dashboard.plaid.com and create an account, you should see a "Free trial" button show up on the homepage with a link to use the hobbyist onboarding flow.

Correct, sales encourages you to sign their minimum contract, which basically gets you better support and an account manager. Pay as you go is an option, but Plaid indicated you basically wouldn't have any guaranteed support SLA post-launch if you were on PAYG.

Thank you for the info! Is this a somewhat recent change or has it always been this way? "A couple years ago" in my comment was doing some heavy lifting, I probably reached out around 2017ish.

It must be very very new, since we weren't offered it a couple months ago!

https://www.yodlee.com/ is another provider

Reply on news.ycombinator.com