Alternatives to now-doomed Wesabe?
July 1, 2010 6:51 AM   Subscribe

Wesabe is shutting down. Are there any options other than Mint?

Personal finance tracking site Wesabe announced that they're suspending operations at the end of July and deleting everyone's data. I really like the site and its features, and now I need an alternative. What are my options?

I'm a little leery of Mint, since they don't seem to have the same commitment to user privacy and security that Wesabe stuck to. I'm not wedded to a web-based solution, but the one feature that is absolutely necessary is automatic downloading of account data. If there is a local software solution that can do that, I could be satisfied with it.
posted by backseatpilot to Computers & Internet (13 answers total) 15 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: Yodlee Moneycenter--I use a modified version of it offered by my bank and like it a lot, more than Mint (no ads!)
posted by phoenixy at 6:57 AM on July 1, 2010 [2 favorites]


Aww man, I love Wesabe and would happily have paid for it.

Dont have an answer for you, looks like I'm in the same boat.
posted by Ness at 7:01 AM on July 1, 2010


I use Thrive.
posted by mkb at 7:11 AM on July 1, 2010


Response by poster: I thought of one other feature that I'd really like to have - the ability to manually enter transactions for "cash" accounts. I like to keep track of where my cash goes and only seeing "ATM Withdrawal" on my checking account isn't sufficient.
posted by backseatpilot at 7:21 AM on July 1, 2010


Not advocating it particularly, since you're not interested (and I mostly popped in here to see other alternatives), but I know Mint has introduced the ability to manage cash withdrawal transactions. They announced it sometime in the last few months.
posted by immlass at 7:38 AM on July 1, 2010 [1 favorite]


I use YodleeMoney center and it's fine with me. It definitely doesn't have the superfriendly aspect that Wesabe had and that I think Mint is going for, but it's fairly powerful. You can do manual transactions [I have one bank account that isn't covered by them and all my transactions there are manual] and I've been managing my accounts there all of this year.
posted by jessamyn at 7:41 AM on July 1, 2010


I think I just switched to Yodlee since I can do just what you describe with cash transactions. Woo.
posted by mkb at 7:42 AM on July 1, 2010


The ability to manually enter transactions was one of the reasons I finally tried Mint. You can have it "withdraw" a cash transaction from your most recent ATM withdraw. Maybe you could have a second look at their privacy information (FAQ | Tech | Policy | Terms of Use) and see if it's changed to your liking? My only gripe so far is that my 401k account doesn't work with it yet. However, it does have support for my tiny local credit union.
posted by yukonho at 7:44 AM on July 1, 2010


I use YodleeMoney center and it's fine with me. It definitely doesn't have the superfriendly aspect that Wesabe had and that I think Mint is going for, but it's fairly powerful. You can do manual transactions [I have one bank account that isn't covered by them and all my transactions there are manual] and I've been managing my accounts there all of this year.

Another Yodlee user here. Some parts of it (including dealing with accounts that you track manually) are fairly clunky but it has all of the features I need and I haven't had any major issues with it other than it not supporting some of the more obscure accounts that I have. A lot of their charting and stats could be better, but the budget planning function is pretty useful if you categorize everything you buy (relatively easy to do if you use a credit card most of the time) and the dashboard view is good for seeing what bills are coming up and what you account balances are at any given time.

Yodlee's screenscraping code that pulls your data from various bank websites is what gets used as a backend at nearly every other similar site (including Mint and Thrive), so you'll have a very hard time finding any other site that can pull data from more sites than they do. I haven't switched to any similar service because they seem to have a subset of Yodlee's features with some Web 2.0 bells and whistles on top. Yodlee seems to be more focused on making sure all of the data pulls work (there's actually a pretty good forum where you can complain about accounts that don't work or request new ones) than adding new features and UI enhancements, but I'm mainly using it to get all of my data in one place so that's fine with me.
posted by burnmp3s at 8:47 AM on July 1, 2010


Response by poster: Ok, last question - Wesabe is allowing current users to download all of their data in the usual formats (csv, etc.). How easy would it be to take that download and feed it back in to Yodlee?
posted by backseatpilot at 10:55 AM on July 1, 2010


I'm a little leery of Mint, since they don't seem to have the same commitment to user privacy and security that Wesabe stuck to.
And yet you are now asking how to switch to the service that is the backend for Mint? I don't really follow (but then, I use Mint, so I have already convinced myself that they are safe enough)

As to your data portability question, I would not be surprised if Mint and Yodlee both announced some "data import" feature to try to scoop up folks being dumped by Wesabe. Maybe send an email to both asking about their intentions with that?
posted by misterbrandt at 12:49 PM on July 1, 2010


Yes, as Misterbrandt pointed out, Mint is powered by Yodlee. Whatever service you choose, try to get a list of compatible banks before you sign up. I was a Mint beta tester until my bank switched to a login system that Yodlee doesn't support. 3 years later I'm still out of luck.
posted by IndigoRain at 1:27 PM on July 2, 2010


Response by poster: Thanks all - I'm going to give Yodlee a try and see how it turns out!
posted by backseatpilot at 9:26 AM on July 6, 2010


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