Ask HN: Do you trust Mint.com, or have a preferred finance system?

Mint's uses standardized Apis that allow for balance inquries, transaction overviews, etc but NOT to transfer money. They encrypt login details so even if their db gets hacked your exposure is minimal.

In other words I feel comfortable with recommending the platform.

I don't and won't trust anyone with my credentials. Also there is wesabe.com which allows user to upload the transaction data using a desktop application or Firefox extension. Thought it is still in beta.

I use Gnucash (http://gnucash.org/) for personal and business accounting. It's a "serious" double-entry accounting system with a nice UI and good documentation.

I love buxfer.com. One of the things I love about it is that you can choose to keep your credentials local if you choose to.

Yodlee is highly regarded and has been around longer than Mint. Their primary business is running back end services for banks and financial institutions (Bank of America, Scottrade, E*trade) while offering the personal service for free. They have forums to get more info http://forum.yodlee.com https://moneycenter.yodlee.com

I personally use mint, and love it. This is for a few reasons:

* the product is really good; it's really easy to use, it connects to just about everything, and the alerts/trends system is great * I really like the alerts system; they've given me tax tips and warned me about upcoming payments that I might have otherwise missed * they seem pretty competent from the security side; they have a fair amount of material on their site covering this (e.g. http://www.mint.com/privacy/security-tech/)

Obviously mint has a huge incentive to have really strong security; since they have so much of your data they have to comply with stringent security regulations in order to just operate their business, and if mint were to be compromised it would be a huge blow to them. If you think about it, they have a lot more riding on their security than your bank does!

I can understand why other people don't want to give their credentials to mint, but the quality of the product and the fact that they seem pretty clueful makes me not really worry about it.

I tried mint and cancelled, and have moved back to Quickbooks.

1. People say mint is easy to use, the only easy part is importing all your information, after that I felt your information got lost in all the ads, yes those recommendations for new credit cards, savings accounts, checking accounts are all ads.

2. I hated the alert system, and really didn't appreciate they would log on to all my accounts daily, it should of been something they did only when I allowed or controllable. Why .. I have an email alert through one of my bank accounts, and could tell every time mint.com logged in and checked my records (which is daily). Which overall reduced security because it could of been someone else and I thought it was just Mint.

3. Allowing a third party logging into any of your personal accounts, without approval every time, just didn't sit well with me.

I've been using http://www.wesabe.com for a lot longer than I've known about mint.com

The main reason being that it supported UK banks, while mint.com was turning me away!