On pricing, Stripe's listed rates are 30-200% higher than Plaid rates (perhaps due to high vendor costs). That said, if anyone does have feedback on where Plaid pricing is prohibiting new use cases, we'd love to hear! I'm zach at plaid if folks would like to discuss.
Our pricing is upfront: https://stripe.com/en-us/financial-connections#pricing. We’ve worked with a large beta group of users to make sure the pricing is in line with what they see in the market.
> Our pricing is upfront
Because plaid does everything not to be transparent on their pricing.
However if your customer/sales support is superior you could win just on that. Plaids is terrible. Support tickets go weeks without responses, I need to speak to a sales guy just to enable UK/Canadian connections and still haven’t heard back after weeks of chasing. Other tickets can get left for similar amount of time too.
Plaid should get out of the way and make it fully self service to enable countries/features when you’re getting started, or fix their support/sales team so users aren’t waiting weeks to hear back from them just to enable a couple of countries they already support or confirm pricing.
With regards to pricing they also make it difficult as they don’t really explain the pricing well when you enable production either. They talk about “accounts” when their API talks about “items”. After enabling production my first bill confirmed (as no sales person ever responded to me on my question) that account was item, and not accounts the institution holds which would be extremely expensive! They don’t provide any examples on how the pricing works either, so you kind of have to figure it out after you enable production. AWS docs give a pricing example to help users understand how it works. Plaid should do the same or (again) improve their sales/support to answer questions on it promptly and not leave users hanging for weeks.
Anyway glad to see some competition here, if Stripe can match the $0.30 pricing, add UK/Canada and provide faster/better support they can win this market if Plaid doesn’t sort out support/sales quickly.
Their API and app-centric approach seem to be the only upshots, and even then, other banks have relatively good apps these days.
I hate the fact that physical banks (and cash) are disappearing. I don't have complicated needs as to the digital services I consume, same as many other people. Then online banks become indistinguishable from the next, and it is ability to contact real people that sets them apart.
The situation with cash is overall very bad. Try to pay with a 100 Euro note in smaller cities. Almost no one will accept it, including banks. I regularly see very frustated tourists who with cash in hand are left out in the cold.
Chase does at least for credit cards.
Betterment has app passwords, which is better than using your full password.
but at least I don't use their checking feature, which they're oddly excited about despite it having no advantage over other banks and no possible way it ever could have an advantage.
Why can’t the reason be “losing their only source of revenue to a competitor”? That seems like a fine reason to not want people to switch
PR is a hell of a marketing tactic.
But I think I remember seeing that some of Capital One's bank account offerings have some customer facing apis.
Plaid, Finicity, and Yodlee all purport to support both those direct connections with big banks and the long tail of smaller banks and credit unions. It reads like Stripe has built some direct connections (where possible) and is wrapping other providers for everyone else. That is also, as I understand it, what MX does.
https://financialdataexchange.org/FDX/The-Consortium/Members...
My question then, is: what is the upside here, then? As a hypothetical fintech developer, why do I choose Stripe for my use case over the established competition? Why would I want my end-user's credentials in transit between multiple companies, for the same price as the rest of the market, with no improvement in performance or uptime?
Further there are significant platform minimums and platform fees that add large costs initially.
How do you reconcile the above comments from our interaction?
This matches up with my personal experience - I had to get in touch with an actual human and ask them for the pricing just to see if a project would be viable. I did get a relatively fast response that made the pricing very clear, but because it didn't come with any caveats (e.g. volume-based pricing or "we need to negotiate pricing on a per-client basis") it almost made the experience more frustrating.
Basically if your pricing is simple and universal enough that you could post it directly to the pricing page, you should post it to the pricing page. Especially for developer-focused products, hiding the pricing can lead to a serious reduction in conversion.
My use case is transaction data so the pricing for Stripe's competing product isn't posted yet, but if I was choosing between the two products and only one had pricing clearly posted on the website I'd immediately go with that one unless the pricing was so ridiculous that it wasn't affordable. And if the pricing was ridiculous, I'd probably assume that Plaid's pricing was just as bad.
Basically, I should be able to evaluate your product and its pricing without engaging with any of your employees wherever possible. I routinely remove companies from consideration because I can't plug them into a spreadsheet of prices without going back and forth with a sales team whose time I'll just be wasting anyway.
If a startup can use Stripe, who they're already integrating with, or integrate with a new provider with hidden pricing that requires them to contact a sales person, I wonder who they're going to choose. Good luck.
I remember in a previous company we migrated out of Plaid into SynapseFI because Plaid started charging a high price on a per connection request service (like, requesting a new bank connection for a new customer was quite expensive).
It seemed Plaid was focusing on the Mint like use cases: low number of users, allowing them to setup a Plaid connection one time to be used extensively subsequently. While our use case was more akin to: lots of users/authentications doing one time connections that may not be reused. (kind of what might be used for credit risk analysis, although the company was not doing that).
Aggregators all the way down...
The US really needs its own PSD2.
Let me know if I'm missing something but if Stripe is A) providing reliable connection to common banks Plaid misses and B) saving it's users from all the headaches of integrating with old school services like Finicity/Yodlee, then charging a premium sounds like fair game.
A partnership for ACH is more related to importing stable routing and account numbers, then enabling initiating ACH transfers. Scraping transaction data is a completely different integration that seems to have been forgotten.
Sadly, I'd even wager SVB-Plaid data won't improve any time soon. Remember that SVB doesn't even yet allow external bank transfers on their own bank portal.
Thank god competition is heating up.
I love how Stripe presented the pricing page, 1.5$ per account, 10cents per fetch balance. Very clear. I still have no idea how much plaid will cost me.
Also, it's not in your interest to post like this to HN anyhow. The audience will only side against you if you fulminate and call names. If you want to win readers over, you should drop all that and instead provide specific, concrete information and say what's important about it.
(Before anyone misinterprets the above: I have no idea which side you're on. I haven't looked at any of the comments you've replied to. All I know is that, whichever side you're arguing for, you're going about it in the wrong way for HN. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix that, we'd appreciate it.)
If MX and Finicity are aggregators of aggregators, that would still mean Plaid would benefit, right? Maybe you (and your sales team) do not know your competition.
Publicly airing grievances as well against Stripe, who you could potentially partner with in the future, reflects an underlying toxic corporate culture at Plaid. I do not think Stripe will likely ever want to do business with you after this and prevent others from doing the same. I have never worked at Plaid, but I am not inclined to want to work with you based on what we are seeing here. Plaidsettlment.com
https://twitter.com/zachperret/status/1521898404061716480
I think Zach knows his product very well & this could be espionage on Stripe's part, but I'm not dissatisfied with Stripe's product nonetheless.
Disclaimer: I've never used Plaid.
So if I am working for a top 10 bank, and I see value in a solution, if I cannot get it cheaper than it would cost me to develop it and time is not that big of a factor, I build it myself. If there are no time constraints and vendor can deliver solution at roughly the same cost I can build it for, I built it myself.
My guess as not being part of the stripe/plaid conversations or RFP. Zach's lawyers did not redline or challenge language around processes or IP with Stripe in RFP Agreements and that was likely the biggest downfall.
Plaid does have great litigation attorney's, I mean their class action settlement was only $58 million. So likely, Plaid might get something if there is IP that was protected. It will come out in discovery if a lawsuit gets legs.
It read like conjecture at best, and inaccurate information at worst.
Plaid's flakiness / reliance on screen scraping is probably that a lot of these banks don't expose APIs / OAuth etc.
It’s something I hit often and have to do the old microdeposit thing (if I can even figure out how to trick the service into allowing me to do that at all).
Does fidelity just have some sort of broken setup?
> To maintain system stability, Fidelity currently limits access during high-volume windows. As a result, please expect unavailability between 9-10:30am and 3-4:30pm ET. We recommend end users link Fidelity accounts between 5pm - 9am ET.
The host knows when they break. Or if they don't, they should, via automated tests.
Tell me "It's down." Not some bullshit about experiencing temporary difficulties.
You've said "Stop lying bro.", "hella sus", "This is 100% a lie", "seems suspect", all without evidence.
You seem to have some ulterior motive here that you haven't disclosed. Maybe you're right about everything, but it comes across poorly.
We provide real-time holdings, transactions, orders, historical performance (Plaid doesn't provide this at all), and balances.
Sorry for the lack of a pricing page - we're going to add that in. We have graduated pricing starting at $1/mo per linked account and decreasing at different levels of scale. That fee includes unlimited API calls. We're also offering discounted pricing to companies that integrate within the next 60 days.
Feel free to email me whenever at [email protected]
Our Fidelity integration will be out by the end of this week.
Screen scraping is a terrible compromise for sure, but without it, fintech, and the everyday consumer's ability to more effectively engage with their finances, would be severely neutered. One day, we'll have a rich financial ecosystem where financial institutions, fintechs, and consumers all talk with eachother exclusively through secure, reliable APIs, but until then, the only other alternative is to cripple this entire industry. Or have Congress pass a sweeping PSD2-esque bill, but good luck with that lol
Even better it would be best if it just emailed you every 90 days asking if you wanted to remove/continue with permissions and did token rolling automatically without the user being involved.
Imagine if you had to renew your account for Facebook every 90 days, I think they would never have built a business.
You're not winning any sympathy from me with this at all.
Plaid's other weakness is their opaque, enterprise-style pricing, which is seems like Stripe is doing away with. Hopefully they can bring the price down, because lots of consumer-facing use cases aren't viable due to the high monthly price per connection.
I hope they add support for investment account holdings—it seems like Plaid is the only one that does this well.
—
Edit: digging deeper, it looks like Stripe proxies to Plaid-like "service providers" under the covers—at least for institutions without OAuth flows. [1][2][3] Presumably they'll build in-house connections over time, but it dents my hope that their connectivity will be better than Plaid's. Either way, transparent pricing and more competition in the space is still welcome!
[1]: https://support.stripe.com/questions/what-is-the-relationshi...
[2]: https://support.stripe.com/questions/how-does-stripe-limit-d...
[3]: https://support.stripe.com/questions/who-will-obtain-my-fina...