You start by saying the parent comment is hard to understand, then go on to explain why the statements are true. These two statements are essentially the same

>Since gathering / ad-selling services are so lucrative, they essentially subsidize the development of the highest-quality products in the market. The best engineers work for these companies. They have massive teams of people refining their products. And, these companies use IP laws to prevent clones. Essentially, they lock out for-fee competitors.

> You get those free, truly amazing services for nothing because the companies found ways to generate value from the data being gathered. The cost to maintain that infrastructure and provide those great services is pretty high and has taken some brilliant engineers years of sweat.

The only real difference is your use of the phrase "lock-out", but I don't think that's a reasonable way to look at it. If enough people really want to be part of a fee-based ecosystem, no one is stopping a company from engaging those people. You bring up IP laws, but that's really an independent issue, since fee-based and ad-based businesses can both use IP laws in the same way.

I understand what you mean. But, for me to get the same quality of service (without regulation), I’d have to pay tens of thousands of dollars, at least. But, if there were regulations (like, to force service providers to have both a ‘free’ and a for-fee privacy-protected version), I’d probably only have to pay a few dollars.

Try Tiller. It puts all of your data into a Google Sheet with nice premade templates. Not quite as nice UX as mint but pretty close and allows for better customization.

> For instance, I would pay for a high-quality service like Mint (I don’t use it) that kept my data private, but there is none.

Have you looked at ynab.com? I find their overall philosophy on budgeting to be more effective, the app is high quality, and it's solely about your budget, not about offering you credit cards.

It's one of the few products I recommend to anyone, and it's relatively expensive ($85 for the year I believe).

I have tried it, but I didn’t think it was as useful for me personally. That is, I don’t need a budget. Instead, I need a high-usability, interactive visualization of all of my accounts (12+) with relatively accurate categorizations and alerts. But, I’d like to pay less than $49 / month.

I would try to start a service like this myself, but I don’t think the market is large enough to make it usable.

>First, do you or anyone you know directly or indirectly profit from these types of services?

Of course. No one would be using them if they weren't better off from using them.

The idea that people are perfectly rational actors with perfect information has long since been debunked.

Sure people are rational, even though you as an external actor may not agree with their motives. Even a schizophrenic is rational given what they have to work with.

I'm not sure what perfect information has to do with anything. It's impossible that perfect information could ever exist.

No, they're not. They're people. They do not act perfectly rational.

> They do not act perfectly rational.

I suppose you have your own definition for "perfectly rational" that you're standing by, and that's fine. But I fail to see the point. How is that relevant to this thread?

I originally posted that people wouldn't use these web services if they didn't receive some benefit from it, and you've done nothing more than present red herrings.