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Comment by hbrn | Hacker News Reader

Plaid was originally a budgeting app. After realizing how terrible banking APIs are, they pivoted to building a developer-friendly banking API. Now their valuation is 10B+.

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Ahhhh, I didn’t realise the VISA buyout fell through.

Plaid then got a 2021 round of $425MM at a $13.4B valuation “according to a person familiar with the matter”. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/07/plaid-hits-13point4-billion-...

I throw this $1 bill at their direction in exchange for a 1 trillionth share.

So what goes wrong with budgeting apps? Sounds like there would be a huge market for personal (or small business) finance, targeting traditional CPA/CFP approaches.

My dumb guess: The people financially-conscious enough to budget aren't the ones willing to pay for a budgeting service.

And everyone wants one customized for their exact setup. Excel works and wins.

I can't find sources but having made a budgeting app in the past have first-hand experience from being in the domain.

Small businesses are well catered for with tools like Xero, QuickBooks etc.

There's a psychological issue of people treating their budgeting app as the bearer of bad news (shooting the messenger effect), which results in churn.

There's also a high correlation between people looking for budgeting solutions being in a bad financial standing which makes the justification of paying for the software less likely.

That is not that interesting. It's something everyone realizes when they try make a budgeting app. Plaid decided to break the rules to create a product. They collected end users authentication details and pretended to be them to scrape data from financial institutions.

Risking every penny I own by trusting credentials with Plaid is a worthwhile trade off for having to deal with my bank’s website less.

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