Ask HN: How can startups using Yodlee afford it?
I wanted to build a new product using the functionality that Yodlee provides (it is used by inDinero, Mint, etc), but using their contact form, I was contacted by a sales agent who says that I would have to sign a 1 year to 3 year contract, pay an upfront fee of $12,500 and pay a user fee between $3 per user to $1 per user, depending on volume.
Are there cheaper alternatives?
(
15 comments
| 15 points
| on HN
)
If there are not any startup friendly alternatives to Yodlee, then maybe you just found what your startup should really be doing :-)
One idea might be to have a consortium of startups interested in the topic use and maintain Wesabe's scrapers as a community.
In plain English, what is it that these folks do that your system needs so badly? Genuinely curious.
Its how Mint is able to get your transaction history.
If you're creating a banking application and cannot extract enough revenue from a user to mitigate a $3 cost per user for a business-critical vendor, you're probably barking up the wrong tree.
It's even worse for advertising based services, who generally make far less per user per month.
Not sure what kind of site you are trying to build, but aggregation is a really Long Tail kind of functionality. I've heard countless times from people that "Yodlee supports 15 of my institutions but they don't support my one bank and that makes the aggregated data useless without it." And Yodlee supports thousands of sites. Even if you built custom support for 80% of the sites, the "all or nothing" mentality of a lot of aggregation users means that does not translate to satisfying 80% of the users.
Alternatively you can write your own scraper depending on what your requirements are.