[Freedombox-discuss] Bootstrapping a userbase (or: killer app)

[Matt G.]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 1:35 PM, James Vasile
<vasile at freedomboxfoundation.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:26:28 -0800, "Matt G." <mattismyname at gmail.com> wrote:
>> mint.com replacement. Freedombox would pull user's financial status from
>> various institutions and present it to them in an aggregated form. Users
>> could view spending trends, create budgets, etc. It would appeal to anybody
>> who is interested in managing their money (almost everybody on earth). It
>> aligns with freedombox's strengths because it protects some of the most
>> sensitive data in any person's life. The biggest complaint people have with
>> mint.com is that they do not want to trust their financial data to a 3rd
>> party. It is theoretically easy to implement. Obviously the biggest
>> implementation obstacle would be enabling it to seamlessly pull data from a
>> variety of financial institutions. It could be killed if a majority of
>> financial institutions do not provide the user an open API for pulling
>> their data. People might say, "Why not use GnuCash?" First, GnuCash runs as
>> a traditional application on my PC and cannot offer "cloud" features such
>> as mobile device access, email alerts, etc. Second, GnuCash's data import
>> functionality does not work well and thus fails requirement #2 above.
>> mint.com's automated data importing works quite well.
>
> Many financial institutions do not provide APIs.  Some give you manual
> download of xml files.  Some don't even give you that.
>

Yes. Where APIs were available, we'd use those. In other cases, we
would have to allow developers to create web scraper modules to parse
the html for each different bank. These would require ongoing support
from their developers as the bank changed their html over time.
Freedombox would poll for and install updated scrapers as necessary. I
know it is ugly and not sustainable for the long term, but beauty and
sustainability are not requirements for a bootstrap app.

Suppose some decent-sized chunk of the population started using such a
thing. Users would naturally be upset if the bank changed their
formatting or did something else to disrupt freedombox's access to the
data. We could make sure we put in place a system to make it easy and
convenient for the user to complain to their bank about the change.
Banks could then differentiate themselves from their competitors by
offering users "freedombox compatible" access to their data.

The other thing to consider here, is that most major banks already
provide APIs for Quicken to download financial data. This is
essentially what GnuCash and other non-quicken apps (AceMoney, etc.)
uses, but they don't do a good job of making it easy for the user to
set up. If doing this for freedombox, we would have to make sure
ease-of-use was a top priority.