Unless I'm mistaken, the Testing tier only allows the use of "sandbox" banking credentials, whereas the Development tier actually lets you connect to real bank accounts. In either case, it's free to get your own transaction history.
Correct! We have three environments you can send API traffic into - sandbox, development, and production.
Sandbox + development are 100% free to use, development just requires a quick request through the dashboard after signing up for API keys. (https://dashboard.plaid.com/signup)
Sandbox- gives access to sandbox data to test the integration.
Development - add up to 100 live bank accounts
Production - add as many live accounts with paid account
Awesome! (Where were you guys 5 years ago when I was doing my PFM ;).
I went looking for a Go library for your API and the plaid one says it's not maintained/supported anymore. Is there a replacement (third party or not) for it?
we currently don't have an updated official go library for our API, but shoot me an email (charley@plaid.com) and can shoot over some recs for third party libraries
Plaid founder here. Yes - our development environment is unpaid and many people use it for personal budgeting. You can sign up here: https://dashboard.plaid.com/signup
This is FANTASTIC news, and as a Canadian interested in FinTech, I'm very excited to be able to use Plaid here. I can only imagine that getting the "big five" banks here to get on board with this would have amounted to a herculean task, so congrats to William and the Plaid team for making this happen.
I work for one of the banks listed as supported by Plaid. I am intensely skeptical about the claims they say their API can provide, knowing how our systems work internally.
Real-time transactions, for one, are not really real-time. There are many things that get in the way of making these real-time and the issues go all the way to the terminal where you swipe your card. Identity is also sketchy. Many people still share bank accounts. It is an unwritten rule that an account !== a person.
I'd be curious to know how they pull this information. There are some APIs available, but we are careful to hand out access. If they're screen scraping, then, well... god help them.
Most applications won't need "real-time" data, so I think things like end-of-day balances and transaction history are enough to cover 90% of the developer use-cases. As far as Identity goes, if you're willing to fork out $500/mo + fees for the production tier, you should be able to afford credit data from Transunion or someone else, which is going to be far more reliable than pulling ID info from bank accounts (for the reasons you stated).
I definitely share your concern about how the data gets pulled by Plaid, but as far as I can tell most major banks that have mobile applications have demonstrated that they are at least _marginally_ capable of developing high-availability REST APIs that are reliable enough for purposes like this. I wouldn't be surprised if Plaid somehow managed to get them to agree to using the "mobile app" APIs for their application.
Yes, this really bugs me too. Unfortunately, the issue is on SVB's side. We're continuing to work on it, but I'd also recommend raising this with SVB directly if you are a customer.
Both. I'll sometimes get a bill payment and immediate notice, "oh hey that's higher than usual. I ought to see why"
Also when I travel, it saves my butt all the time. Its how I detected a hotel totally screwing up the accomodation bill. Also gives me insight into exchange rate so I don't fool myself on prices.
Email contains vendor name, date, and price in Canadian dollars.
As part of testing out the API, I’d be happy to try it out and see how well it works although if all the other bank apps have it, then it kinda defeats the purpose.
Simple Bank does this (simple.com). The notifications are immediate.
It will even give you a notification when your card is run at a restaurant that includes a suggested tip - generally before the server comes back with the check to sign.
Simple is not available in Canada, which is what the above poster is referring to. Few (no?) Canadian banks offer email notifications for debit (Interac) transactions.
From my understanding YNAB at least is already using Plaid - every service I've used that uses Plaid still needs username/password for the financial institution.
I'm Canadian, and I have found it to be fairly reliable with several accounts from different parties. It gets mixed up when I buy something with PayPal in USD, it says I have paid both the US amount, and the Canadian equivalent. And it's categories aren't the smartest, but aside from that, everything works as expected.
Canada is lacking in fintech apps for consumers. I'm excited to see more companies expand north. There might not be many of us but we can be loud and proud users (with really polite app reviews! ha)
Frankly, I'm super skeptical. Maybe I just don't get it, but it would seem to me that what Plaid is claiming to do is somewhat magical.
It just seems to me, likely another poster pointed out, is that they would have to partner with every single bank they want to deal with in order to send the right credentialing steps in order to access their internal systems, provided those systems even exist, OR, they would need to have access to a mythical overarching API that inherits to all systems (which doesn't exist). So somewhere in their platform there is a `Step 2) A miracle occurs`, and I just have a hard time believing that they can just gloss over noticing that before giving at least a motivation for the miracle. I mean if my money were at stake and I wanted to pay for the service (and my business' money would be at stake too!) I'd want at least a little bit of a guarantee that the service works as advertised and is totally above board.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadhttps://plaid.com/pricing/
Correct! We have three environments you can send API traffic into - sandbox, development, and production.
Sandbox + development are 100% free to use, development just requires a quick request through the dashboard after signing up for API keys. (https://dashboard.plaid.com/signup)
Sandbox- gives access to sandbox data to test the integration. Development - add up to 100 live bank accounts Production - add as many live accounts with paid account
I went looking for a Go library for your API and the plaid one says it's not maintained/supported anymore. Is there a replacement (third party or not) for it?
we currently don't have an updated official go library for our API, but shoot me an email (charley@plaid.com) and can shoot over some recs for third party libraries
Real-time transactions, for one, are not really real-time. There are many things that get in the way of making these real-time and the issues go all the way to the terminal where you swipe your card. Identity is also sketchy. Many people still share bank accounts. It is an unwritten rule that an account !== a person.
I'd be curious to know how they pull this information. There are some APIs available, but we are careful to hand out access. If they're screen scraping, then, well... god help them.
I definitely share your concern about how the data gets pulled by Plaid, but as far as I can tell most major banks that have mobile applications have demonstrated that they are at least _marginally_ capable of developing high-availability REST APIs that are reliable enough for purposes like this. I wouldn't be surprised if Plaid somehow managed to get them to agree to using the "mobile app" APIs for their application.
I LOVE that I get an email every time my credit card is used. But my debit doesn't have that option.
FWIW, I'm thinking more into personal spending atm.
Also when I travel, it saves my butt all the time. Its how I detected a hotel totally screwing up the accomodation bill. Also gives me insight into exchange rate so I don't fool myself on prices.
Email contains vendor name, date, and price in Canadian dollars.
It will even give you a notification when your card is run at a restaurant that includes a suggested tip - generally before the server comes back with the check to sign.
You can just set the threshold to $1 though.
Immediately after checking the link I was “ohhhh” and a little surprised that I was surprised.
It just seems to me, likely another poster pointed out, is that they would have to partner with every single bank they want to deal with in order to send the right credentialing steps in order to access their internal systems, provided those systems even exist, OR, they would need to have access to a mythical overarching API that inherits to all systems (which doesn't exist). So somewhere in their platform there is a `Step 2) A miracle occurs`, and I just have a hard time believing that they can just gloss over noticing that before giving at least a motivation for the miracle. I mean if my money were at stake and I wanted to pay for the service (and my business' money would be at stake too!) I'd want at least a little bit of a guarantee that the service works as advertised and is totally above board.
You have to give out your main login credentials used to access your bank.
If anything happens to these downstream processors, the bank provides no support as you gave away your main login credentials.
My "Big 5" Canadian Bank won't provide read-only login credentials so using these type of services is a complete no-go from my end.