Sweetness of the Day - Expensr.com
It’s been a while since I wrote about something truly awesome that adds value to my life . I’m reversing the trend today with Expensr, an excellent finance webapp that helps keep track of finance records online.
Now, it may not be mint, the oft-buzzed about web application that took top honors (and a healthy chunk of change) home at this year’s TechCrunch 40. Mint, in my opinion, is for those who are totally fearless about merging automatic screen-scraping and finance: a lack of online banking APIs (for obviously good reasons) makes you wonder about mint’s long term prospects.
While Expensr doesn’t have the automatic transaction downloading bells and whistles (…yet), it’s still a very snappy location-independent way of keeping track of how much I have in my accounts and how much I’ve spent this month. There’s plenty of other features that a good web2.0 app should have: community-centric, a blog, and founders who get back to me on bugs and feedback within the day, but it’s the relative ease-of-use and charting features that keep me coming back instead of jumping to Excel or Money.
And it’s free to use, of course.
Technorati Tags: Sweetness of the Day
Tags: Productivity
October 9th, 2007 at 11:39 am
Actually, Mint doesn’t screen-scrape in order to get their information. They actually are using APIs. On this page, they let you know that they’re using a service called Yodlee, which appears to provide secure online integration with most banks. I knew that it had to be something other than screen scraping, because Mint actually knows about charges on some of my cards before they’re available in the online interface, and they also notify you of upcoming bills.
I’m very happy with Mint so far. I feel like they have security concerns under control, and if they ever are hacked, the data thiefs will have a lot bigger fish to fry than my pitiful finances.
October 9th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
That’s a good point. My experience with Mint might not be what the founders were expecting: my bank doesn’t have a deal with Yodlee. In such a case, I wonder what Mint does.
November 9th, 2007 at 10:27 am
“There’s plenty of other features that a good web2.0 app should have: community-centric, a blog, and founders who get back to me on bugs and feedback within the day”
I can’t say that I really agree with you about the points regarding good web 2.0 apps. I believe good web 2.0 app doesn’t necessarily need these things. In fact, I would say you can definietly have a successful web 2.0 application without these things. Web 2.0 doesn’t mean “community based” to me. It is simply a way to make parts of your application on the web work asynchonously to improve the user’s experience. Sure this could mean community based features, but that’s far from a requirement for a successful web 2.0 application.
That being said, I can say that I do appreciate Expensr’s quick response time on bug reports, and they are definitely on their way to a top-notch application. They still have a long way to go though, IMO. Hopefully they will keep it up, because I would love to have something simpler than Money to track things like this.