charleyma

Hi Madeline - happy to share more info on pricing - we're working on simplifying pricing for early stage / bootstrapped products . Feel free to reach out directly to my email if you want to learn more (charley@plaid.com).

We'll occasionally flag accounts that have dormant API activity in our development tier, but as long as you're still using the API we're happy to cover the cost of the free account.

Hi there - full disclosure, I work at Plaid . Anyone can signup for API keys and access all the thousands of banks that we currently support on Plaid for free in our dev environment.

Once you want to add more than 100 accounts, we recommend reaching out to learn more about pricing at scale; it depends on what APIs are being used, how much data is being pulled, how often, etc. Feel free to shoot me an email directly if you have any questions! (charley@plaid.com)

Dropbox and Box employ a bit of a hybrid model.

For SMBs, there's a self service model that's low touch but for enterprises, the sales + customer service is very high touch and requires a lot more customization.

BI tools such as Periscope, Looker, Mode, Tableau, etc are also a bit of a hybrid. Usually starts off with an individual playing around or looking for a tool (pretty self service), but a full company deployment is much more hands on and high touch.

Following the framework that Patrick provides, odds are that any company that has "sales engineering" or "integration engineering" for a SaaS will likely be high touch (unless they're doing it wrong =D)

Curious for those that use "upstart" banks, what convinced you to try out and move funds into that bank account? In the US at least, customer stickiness to their financial institution is extremely high and personally, the last time I opened a new bank account and moved out all of my funds was due to how I was treated as a customer at my old bank.

The other appealing draw for me was also high interest rate, but curious to hear what are the killer features for a digital bank.

Congrats on getting into YC Chandan!

Love the logic built around pairing transactions to external wallets and tracking the cost basis, how has your experience been working with the various exchange APIs and getting those integrated?

Heyo! Charley from Plaid here, feel free to message me directly at charley@plaid.com, we want to make sure our pricing is startup friendly :)

Hi Madeline - Charley from the Plaid growth team here. Totally get where you're coming from in regards to pricing, we're working on a bunch of improvements to the site, of which pricing is at the top of my list to get on there! So that will be on there soon :)

If you have any other questions, feel free to reach me directly at charley@plaid

Sure! Here's my super biased opinion :)

A lot of the comparison is also dependent upon the use case, but I usually bring up coverage, performance, and simplicity.

Coverage - Custom integrations with the largest banks in the US that's also supplemented by "longtail" providers to give comprehensive coverage across the US.

Performance & Quality - 12 seconds or less to connect a user's bank account and begin to pull down data, which is particularly important for a mobile experience. We've also completely optimized our drop-in module used for onboarding bank accounts! (I think it looks pretty sweet: plaid.com/docs/quickstart)

Simplicity - Check out the docs yourself! (plaid.com/docs/api) usually takes only a few days to integrate, rather than a few months.

I can offer an (obviously biased) opinion :), feel free to shoot me an email charley@plaid if ya want!

Thanks Matt!! As always, happy to answer any and all questions on Plaid :D

Hi Sunny - Feel free to email me (charley@plaid) and I can get you set up and share more deets! We're working on getting pricing up on the website soon :).

Hey Matt - Working on getting that up on the website! In the meantime, feel free to email me (charley@plaid) and I can send over details.

Sounds like something I would use!

Few questions that came to mind for me: - What's the incentive on the advisor to offer the add-on service? Is it to eventually increase AUM and encourage more 401k savings from the users? Would be curious to learn if there are any numbers around this or users taking loans out, etc

- What does the platform look like? White-labeled self-hosted? What does an integration look like for the advisor

- What would be the general distribution plan and target market for getting advisors on board?

there's also the problem that it's a bit vague as to who can actually enforce faster payments. The effort is currently led by the FED, but they technically don't have enforcement power, the CFPB could do something but that'd be a bit of a stretch.

Additionally, the large banks are trying to influence the rules and requirements; for example, clearXchange + early warning system merging under a (large) bank consortium

Charley from Plaid here! We now support over 18,000+ banks in the US and Canada for Connect (transaction data) with our longtail integration :) https://plaid.com/docs/#long-tail-institutions

I posted up a detailed screen flow of the entire process on my own site if anyone is interested:

http://blog.charleyma.com/square-cash-initial-thoughts-scree...

Overall though, extremely impressed with Square's offering and it was also instantly debited to my account. Curious to see if the value increases to a somewhat significant amount if this "instant transfer" translates into 1-2 business days.

Square Cash is definitely some sort of loss-leader, but for what?

Most obvious long-run plan would be for user/debit card acquisition (which has lower interchange rates) to support their bread and butter business (merchant tools) as this would increase their profit margins by reducing processing expenses, especially since Square simply charges a single rate to merchants...

Good point Zac, It's interesting to see how banks are shifting away from traditional sources of revenue based on trading, balance sheet leverage, advisory, etc into potential new sources that involve the monetization of data more like a traditional technology company. I'm curious if there will be a dramatic cultural shift within banks as traditionally technology has always been viewed as "back-office"...

Definitely seconding a clear use-case for bankers, I've done basic versions of git repo doc sharing;

however the primary concern that I always have with any sort of version control programs is the fact that the documents must be completely internal and within our firewall, any sort of external hosting is usually not secure enough, and most solutions seem to lack easy implementation due to the speed of technology at large banks.