Simple. Really.

It's been 4 days since I discovered SimpleFIN, and, though I came late to the party, I can't karaoke its praises enough as a replacement for Teller.io.  Had I known the two coexisted from the start, I would've selected it as my initial 3rd party provider:

• It seems to be a robust - if straightforward - protocol for connecting to financial institutions.  
• Its stated goal is to make the protocol universal across financial institutions so that the bridge service it offers will no longer be required.  So, it doesn't look like a tenuous money grab that will be sunk when funding dries up.
• The amount it charges for its bridge service is reasonable.  It's ~$2/mo or $20/year.  In situations like these, I'm more inclined to pay a manageable cost rather than hunt for a free tier (lest the free tier prove to be unsustainable and the API reach a premature end of life. Ahem.). 
• Its offering is actually much greater than Teller's.  It contains thousands of providers, including those outside of the US.  
• It's also not limited to banking accounts.  My investment and mortgage accounts are also available.
• The interface is effectively the same too, so I don't have to write a lot of separate parsing and syncing logic.
• The protocol is read-only, and access control is easy to revoke via a single token if the data is compromised.

I'm sure I'll find more warts, but so far the ones I've encountered aren't too daunting:

• The transactions don't have good coverage of categories, so the user (or my data harvesting bot) will need to do more work.
• The API documentation is a little inconsistent with what's actually returned during a live call.  Normally, this would be a huge problem, but, because the API is so simple, it's not hard to work around the exceptions.
• The API limits per person are limited to 25 per day and 45 days' worth of data per call, but those calls fetch data for all accounts, so it's completely manageable even when fetching historical data.

What's most intriguing about this, though, is that, because the user has to opt in for a small yearly fee to get started, I can actually work towards my own value proposition on top of the access provided.  If I can add functionality like budgeting, aggregation, net worth tracking, etc. that the API doesn't immediately provide, I can add my nominal fee to SimpleFIN and still provide an offering that costs less than other personal finance tools.  

So, now, rather than being a personal itch to scratch and a research project, the work becomes a viable business idea.

Until next time, my human and robot friends.