Nope. Customer lost.
Look, I hate Quickbooks and Quickbooks Online. I really, really do, but I will not use a financial product that doesn't connect to my financial institutions. Period.
Do you want to know what MY startup dream is? I want someone to give me money, and then I want to go create a service that kicks the crap out of Yodlee and Intuit's own bank connection system. I want it to use REST APIs when it can, OFX when it should, and intelligent screen scraping when it must.
I want to build a startup based on an open core of specifications for how to connect to every financial system in the world. I want that spec to be executable and available as a simple library with bindings to every language you can think of. If you have a new institution or your bank changes and you can fix it, I want you to be able to fork the library and send us a pull request.
I want end users to be able to go through a "guided login process". "OK, log in now", "OK, click on the accounts list", "OK click on a transaction". "You're done! We've autogenerated a basic scraper for your bank. Thanks for helping us out."
I want to make money off this library by providing a simple, unified REST API behind all this mess that provides the computational resources to handle millions of customers connecting with thousands of institutions.
I want this company to provide push notifications so your app can do clever things when people spend money.
I don't want you to have to sign an NDA and pay thousands of dollars just to get permission to play with it.
I want it to be the Twilio of Banks.
But if you want to take the code and go your own way, you can.
I really don't know why we've let just a few companies keep our collective financial data locked up for so long. Is it because it's so expensive to get it working? Well why not spend it on people who will create an open, scalable system that can still make money?
Instead, we have Mint.com and mvelopes. That's it, really. Have an idea for a personal finance tool that lets you create "virtual subaccounts" for your checking and savings accounts so you can leverage double-entry bookkeeping in your personal finances through a clear metaphor? Great! Now have fun spending 10 minutes every two days copying and pasting stuff from 10 websites into 1.
It's just madness.
You know that "one weird thing" you're passionate about that's not really related to anything else you're passionate about? This is it for me.
P.S.: lubos - this isn't really about you or manager.io. I commend you for making something and getting it out there. This is about the thing that makes every one of these attempts inevitably fail, and it's sad that we're all being held hostage to crappy software because of it. I wish you success, I hope that I'm completely wrong.