Show HN: Penny – simpler than Mint | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Penny – simpler than Mint

pennyapp.io

12 pointsdontmitch11 comments

Disclaimer: I am friends with the developers, and have been using since early alpha/beta builds.

I just gotta say, that for my uses, Penny has already replaced Mint. I used Mint as a big picture view of my finances, and the ability to search through my transaction history and so on. But the other majority of the features in Mint, went unused by me. Also the constant advertising of financial services, and other things got annoying. I tried to use the Budgets, but those aren't well laid out.

Queue Penny, and I think i got most of what I want, and features that Mint doesn't have, which is figuring out which of my transactions are recurring, and allowing me to get a total of all recurring transactions as a lump sum. That was a major feature I loved from BillGuard that I don't need to log into that for. Simple and easy to access information of all my bank account and CC balances, very nice graphs and breakdowns of my spending in a few clicks. And a solid history of my transactions.

It does what I need it to do it, with less fuss and more focus. And I am sure this product will get better with more feedback and use.

I'm a huge Mint user. I have a pretty good system for budgeting, I check it almost everyday, etc. I've been using Penny for the past couple weeks though and am getting quite hooked on the product. Simpler, less intimidating, less stressful, and the sheer delight of interacting with a friend vs a chastising red line is wonderful. I was skeptical of the five buckets initially (given my detailed Mint categorization) but realize that that's really all I need. I'm excited to see where this goes!

Seems interesting but would like more information on how app works and security

We've heard similar feedback on the security front before, so we'll get to work on adding more clarity around that.

Can you enumerate what else you'd like to know about how the app works?

from the ...3..pictures it looks alright i guess, but when you're managing someone's finances it's probably in your best interest to put a significant more content on how you do that exactly

anything in particular you wanted to know? I can answer things here and or incorporate them into the website later.

For context: totally agree with your point. we tried to avoid overwhelming visitors since they're notoriously hard to keep engaged, but the marketing page was just a first pass at best.

Well the first thing that comes to mind is that you have two images of someone talking to Penny, but only one of how i would view and manage my finances. The biggest draw to mint is the clear and layered organization. It's faster and easier for me to look at my recent aggregated payments then it would be to 'ask penny' if i paid. So really I'd love to see more of how a user would use/interact with the app other than talking to penny.

Edit: wanted to add that the layout does look very clean and nice, and if it was a calendar app or something i'd probably download it and try it out, but am very hesitant to jump to a new space when it comes to my finances

I'm gonna try to respond to your points without being preachy about the product: forgive me if I overstep.

Mint has over 100 different ways to categorize a single transaction. That makes for an incredibly flexible system if you're willing to put in the leg work, but at the end of the day I wasn't seeing a lot of value add from knowing that 24% of my spending was on travel or that I exceeded my average monthly spending on gifts by 215%. The biggest benefit for me was just seeing all of my transactions in one place (fwiw, I used Mint for 6 years).

With Penny, you have fast access to all of your transactions in one place (the left pane is a history screen), and you can categorize them into one of five categories. But, the main value add is giving you context on that spending. Graphs are great, but graphs that are interpreted in a meaningful way are better. Essentially, the bigger vision is to do for finances what Google Now is doing for day to day life: pushing you useful information (now cards, or in our case conversations with Penny) rather than you having to ask for it.

That said, we know it's a huge ask to convince people to try something new when it comes to their finances, so totally understand where you're coming from.

btw, to clarify: when you go to the website you should be seeing animations unless you're coming from iOS 7. If that's not the case, lmk and I'll figure out what's going on.

i completely agree, often i have to go in and correct mint for uncategorized transactions and whatnot. I'm not saying penny doesn't have value, rather i just want to see more of what value it adds before i download the app. It can come off as condescending, but i love just dead simple 'explain to me like i'm 5' overviews of a product. Straight to the point and no fluff. This is product does X (see here), Y (see there), and Z, etc.

When is Penny coming to Canada?

As an early user of Penny's beta, I've found it quite helpful. My Mint usage trailed off a few years ago for some of the reasons you guys mention -- too much work to manually categorize, and manual budgeting is too often inaccurate or spikey based on just one transaction or season (e.g. Christmas or summer vacation)

Penny solves a lot of this by making the categorization way simpler (only 4 categories) which maps much closer to my own mental model of things. The SMS-style UI is a pretty brilliant way to get an "in"

Penny is also pretty hilarious. Lots of great copy writing going on!

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