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Ask HN: Best way to trigger a webhook every time I swipe my AMEX?

25 points by secondbreakfast ↗ HN
I just played around a little with Plaid and Replit, and it seems insanely complex to get transactions from my AMEX account to trigger something like a Zapier web hook.

I want to log each AMEX transaction in a Google Sheet.

Has anybody set this up before? Easiest way?

19 comments

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IgorPartola
Amex has a large purchase notification email you can set up. Have it go to a mailbox with a limit of like $0.01 if it will let you and trigger events based on when the email arrives.
secondbreakfast
Smart idea. I want a little more structured data though, around merchant name and transaction amount.
ev1
The email contains card last digits, card type, merchant name, and transaction amount.
rpier001
I expect the emails themselves are just formatted strings. You could use an email parser to get the structure back out. You or someone else mentioned Zapier webhooks, so https://parser.zapier.com/ might be extra relevant.
secondbreakfast
Ah, haven't heard of parser.zapier.com before. Yes I mentioned Zapier! This could be perfect, will report back.
reustle
I've used this for years, but I believe the minimum is $5 or $10. It's amazing how instant it is most of the time, though. Sometimes I have an email before the card is back in my wallet.
Jugurtha
I love reading things like these. Is there a word for the mushy feeling I get when people praise something or someone? 'Giddy' is the closest I can think of, but I'm looking for a word used only in this situation.
macNchz
Yeah this would be very easy to configure with Zapier if you use an email service with filters like gmail: just set a filter rule to auto-forward the email to a Zapier parsing address and you're good to go.

I get notifications from Chase for purchases > $0.

PaulHoule
You can get email notifications for transactions, posting those to a web hook shouldn’t be hard.
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cweagans
https://github.com/kevinschaich/mintable may be of interest.
secondbreakfast
Ah yep. This looks amazing. Forking now.
secondbreakfast
Followup: Just set this up and it works perfectly. Forked the repo and made some formatting changes and set up a Github action to pull in new transactions every hour. The bonus part is I also linked my checking accounts and other credit card, so all my transactions get pulled in to a spreadsheet and formatted how I want them. Thanks for the tip.
igammarays
If you prefer Airtable to Sheets, try Fintable. No additional tools needed (Zapier), you get an Airtable base with an archive of your transactions and an easy API to query. With options for connecting via Plaid OR Finicity as some banks don’t work with one or the other.