Comment by vagostino | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vagostino | Hacker News Reader

Hi Hacker News! I’m Val, one of the co-founders of Monarch.

The personal finance problem is near and dear to me, as I was the first product manager on the original team that built Mint over 13 (!) years ago.

Despite that (and having tried every personal finance app since) I found that my wife and I were still manually updating spreadsheets to manage our household finances. We set out to solve that problem with Monarch.

We’re often asked “How is Monarch different from other personal finance apps?”.

Here are some of the things that make Monarch unique:

1) Many apps are good at showing you what happened to your money historically, but by then it’s too late to make any changes. Monarch helps you create a financial forecast (or plan) toward your goals, and then follow that plan. Unlike a spreadsheet, your plan stays up to date in realtime.

2) Personal finance apps are only as good as their underlying data. We’ve built Monarch to work across multiple data aggregators and automatically route you to the best aggregator for a given financial institution.

3) We have a transparent, subscription-based business model. We set out to build the best product in the personal finance space and believe in the “you get what you pay for” mantra. We don’t show ads nor sell your data, and we’re obsessed about your privacy.

4) We’re customer obsessed. Because we’re paid by our customers instead of advertisers, we listen to what our customers want and then build it. (Crazy, huh?). We have daily calls with customers and publish our roadmap for feedback.

5) We’re multi player. Managing your finances is often a multi person activity. Monarch makes it easy to securely add multiple people to your account, such as a partner, financial advisor, or accountant.

Monarch is available for web, iOS and Android. Finally, we’re just getting started. We have a lot of exciting things planned (Crypto support coming soon!).

We hope you’ll check us out!

I was eventually invited to the beta barely a month before the platform launched, so I don't really have a way to know how good/bad it is. This is what I experienced:

1) Bank account data sync was first class, after I got through the access/pairing process.

2) Credit card sync was terrible, laughable. As a CapitalOne CC user, first it wasn't supported at all. Then it was supported, but never worked. I need an app that unifies my spending between bank/credit, so that not working was a no-go.

3) Up front there was no estimated price or anything to set my expectations. I barely got the app working before the period ended, the beta app was yanked, and all functionality terminated. Then I saw the $10/mo pricetag and balked. What I had experienced wasn't worth $10 a month, let alone $90/year.

I don't remember having an opportunity to offer feedback when the beta ended.

On a money philosophy note, I do try to take the approach of budgeting where you have a full paycheck saved up. To me, it's the simplest way. You project based on past expenses, add margin where needed, and then allocate your spending "buckets" that way.

I understand that doing budgeting software right is hard. (Who here wouldn't, honestly?) But I'm still kind of skeptical that paying so much would really help me budget better.

Question: how does Monarch handle the once a year expense (sinking fund) type budgeting such as car insurance? Or even web hosting that I might pay on a 1, 2, or 3 year schedule?

Hi! Co-founder here. A few responses:

1) When we launched we had issues with Capital One. We've since fixed those and have thousands of customers who have successfully linked CapOne accounts.

2) Sorry about the beta experience, it may have just been bad timing and communication on our part. We are no longer in beta and definitely list our price more clearly on our website now. We do still charge $10/month or $90/year, though Beta users received a 50% discount.. Our paying users see us as much more than a budgeting tool—more of a holistic, all-in-one personal finance tool. Budgeting and cash flow analysis are just a piece of that, but it also goal-planning, investment analysis, and more.

3) I'd love to get your feedback! We do regularly survey both existing and churned users, but if there's a way to contact you, I'd be happy to hear more (and if you're willing to give us another chance now that we've improved our integration, I can make sure we figure out a way there and that you get the beta user discount).

4) We're currently working on the "sinking fund" budgeting and plan to launch that later this year.

my personal email address is robert at 3fishonawire dot com.

I'm Ozzie, co-founder at Monarch. I've written a few HN posts before about our philosophy, both of which made the front page here and generated some interesting discussion:

1) "Disrespectful Design – Users aren’t stupid or lazy": We respect our users and treat them like motivated, intelligent adults -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24461365

2)"Is revenue model more important than culture?": we've chosen an aligned business model so we don't have to show you ads for credit cards, etc: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24543510

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