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Comment by lazerwalker | Hacker News Reader

It's not clear to me if there are any advantages to using GoBank over Simple (other than trivialities like being able to get a custom image on your debit card).

As an aside, it seems ridiculous to me that neither GoBank nor Simple refunds ATM fees charged by out-of-network ATM providers. For services that allege to be all about removing frustration for customers, it's stupid to make me open up your app to find which seemingly-arbitrarily ATMs near me happen to be part of your network. Other online banks like Ally and Schwab already offer this; why can't you?

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Simple has an answer for this in the FAQ. Note that Simple doesn't charge anything themselves for out-of-network ATMs, whereas GoBank charges $2.50 for withdrawals.

Does Simple rebate ATM fees? If you use a domestic out-of-network ATM, we will never charge you, but the ATM owner may. We do not rebate that fee, for a couple of reasons: firstly, with over 50,000 fee-free ATMs in our network and thousands of merchants offering cash back, you should be able to easily avoid fees. Our second reason is more philosophical: we anticipate that our customers would prefer we not subsidize the big banks that they left behind.

Does Simple allow for sending checks from an online interface yet? If they don't, that's one point for GoBank.

Yes, that's basically what "Send Money" does in Simple.

It does look like GoBank is doing instant person-to-person transfers, which Simple doesn't have just yet (but they've said is coming soon).

Instant person-to-person transfers is basically only going to work if the recipient is also a GoBank member, no? Unless they're partnering with a service like Dwolla to send the money?

Speaking of, it would actually be pretty cool if I could send money with Dwolla directly from Simple :) Dwolla's iPhone app is terrible, and their web interface isn't much better.

They do. I think they've had that since day 1, although I personally haven't used the functionality.

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