Disclaimer: This project isn't currently publicly available.
I was using Simple as my primary bank, and their Goals feature made it possible to do envelope-style budgeting really conveniently. Unfortunately the bank that backed them, BBVA, sold to PNC. This lead to my Simple being shut down, and my account was converted first to a BBVA account and then to a PNC account.
When I lost access to the Simple app I first built myself a spreadsheet, and then started work on a webapp called Complex to replicate their functionality. Currently you have to enter all transactions manually, but I eventually plan to integrate with Plaid so I can automatically pull in transaction data. Without automatic transaction imports, I'd say Complex currently falls about halfway between the original Simple app and a spreadsheet in terms of convenience/ease-of-use.
I don't have any kind of business model for this, but if I eventually make it public I'll probably charge a monthly fee to allow automatic transaction imports so I can cover Plaid's fees. There's not much server load required to run something like this, so I expect I'll be able to keep server costs below $20/month even if I pick up a couple hundred active users.
YNAB is $100/year and though it is polished and well-designed, it's a pretty simple system that hasn't changed much recently. I think there's a lot of room to compete on price, particularly for users like me who still enter all of their transactions manually.
yeah I also don't want any third party getting ahold of my transaction data. My solution was to have my banks send alert emails to me for any transaction. Then the alert emails are forwarded to a Dockerized email server I set up. The transaction data is automatically parsed out of the emails and loaded into a database. The only cost for me is the server.
Honestly the email server could be gotten rid of if someone was willing to directly access their gmail email account via IMAP, or whoever you use for email. I thought it would be a fun challenge to make an email server x_x
My goal is to make it so people like you could write some regex for their bank alert email parsing, spin this up, and be off to the races with no third party interference.
Check out Finta.io it’s a nice simple service by a solo hacker and could be a great partner. She wraps Plaid and streams it to popular destinations like Sheets and Coda, where users are given some starter content in their account and are free to go from there. Check it out, the connector is slick, but the budgeting and analysis tools aren’t there yet.
It's a near clone of the Simple interface with new enhancements like CC Integration. Currently active in the App Stores. Web App is coming soon. uses Plaid and MX for integration
Man I miss Simple. I'm honestly shocked and saddened that nothing took its place, though they were a major pain about getting my wife an account so we could join finances and then they closed a few months after I switched away.
Have you heard of the Lunchmoney app? I found it recently and find it to be a nice in-between of spreadsheet and full automated budget app. Plus it pulls transactions in
created an account here just to say i would pay for this service if it worked near real time. my wife and i were so bummed when simple went away and we haven't found a bank or service yet that feels like it provides the same feature set effectively.
I was using Simple as my primary bank, and their Goals feature made it possible to do envelope-style budgeting really conveniently. Unfortunately the bank that backed them, BBVA, sold to PNC. This lead to my Simple being shut down, and my account was converted first to a BBVA account and then to a PNC account.
When I lost access to the Simple app I first built myself a spreadsheet, and then started work on a webapp called Complex to replicate their functionality. Currently you have to enter all transactions manually, but I eventually plan to integrate with Plaid so I can automatically pull in transaction data. Without automatic transaction imports, I'd say Complex currently falls about halfway between the original Simple app and a spreadsheet in terms of convenience/ease-of-use.
I don't have any kind of business model for this, but if I eventually make it public I'll probably charge a monthly fee to allow automatic transaction imports so I can cover Plaid's fees. There's not much server load required to run something like this, so I expect I'll be able to keep server costs below $20/month even if I pick up a couple hundred active users.