

Show HN: Penny – simpler than Mint - dontmitch
https://www.pennyapp.io

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Daegalus
Disclaimer: I am friends with the developers, and have been using since early
alpha/beta builds.

I just gotta say, that for my uses, Penny has already replaced Mint. I used
Mint as a big picture view of my finances, and the ability to search through
my transaction history and so on. But the other majority of the features in
Mint, went unused by me. Also the constant advertising of financial services,
and other things got annoying. I tried to use the Budgets, but those aren't
well laid out.

Queue Penny, and I think i got most of what I want, and features that Mint
doesn't have, which is figuring out which of my transactions are recurring,
and allowing me to get a total of all recurring transactions as a lump sum.
That was a major feature I loved from BillGuard that I don't need to log into
that for. Simple and easy to access information of all my bank account and CC
balances, very nice graphs and breakdowns of my spending in a few clicks. And
a solid history of my transactions.

It does what I need it to do it, with less fuss and more focus. And I am sure
this product will get better with more feedback and use.

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nargz503
I'm a huge Mint user. I have a pretty good system for budgeting, I check it
almost everyday, etc. I've been using Penny for the past couple weeks though
and am getting quite hooked on the product. Simpler, less intimidating, less
stressful, and the sheer delight of interacting with a friend vs a chastising
red line is wonderful. I was skeptical of the five buckets initially (given my
detailed Mint categorization) but realize that that's really all I need. I'm
excited to see where this goes!

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ripaujla
Seems interesting but would like more information on how app works and
security

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dontmitch
We've heard similar feedback on the security front before, so we'll get to
work on adding more clarity around that.

Can you enumerate what else you'd like to know about how the app works?

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therobot24
from the ...3..pictures it looks alright i guess, but when you're managing
someone's finances it's probably in your best interest to put a significant
more content on how you do that exactly

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dontmitch
anything in particular you wanted to know? I can answer things here and or
incorporate them into the website later.

For context: totally agree with your point. we tried to avoid overwhelming
visitors since they're notoriously hard to keep engaged, but the marketing
page was just a first pass at best.

~~~
therobot24
Well the first thing that comes to mind is that you have two images of someone
talking to Penny, but only one of how i would view and manage my finances. The
biggest draw to mint is the clear and layered organization. It's faster and
easier for me to look at my recent aggregated payments then it would be to
'ask penny' if i paid. So really I'd love to see more of how a user would
use/interact with the app other than talking to penny.

Edit: wanted to add that the layout does look very clean and nice, and if it
was a calendar app or something i'd probably download it and try it out, but
am very hesitant to jump to a new space when it comes to my finances

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dontmitch
I'm gonna try to respond to your points without being preachy about the
product: forgive me if I overstep.

Mint has over 100 different ways to categorize a single transaction. That
makes for an incredibly flexible system if you're willing to put in the leg
work, but at the end of the day I wasn't seeing a lot of value add from
knowing that 24% of my spending was on travel or that I exceeded my average
monthly spending on gifts by 215%. The biggest benefit for me was just seeing
all of my transactions in one place (fwiw, I used Mint for 6 years).

With Penny, you have fast access to all of your transactions in one place (the
left pane is a history screen), and you can categorize them into one of five
categories. But, the main value add is giving you context on that spending.
Graphs are great, but graphs that are interpreted in a meaningful way are
better. Essentially, the bigger vision is to do for finances what Google Now
is doing for day to day life: pushing you useful information (now cards, or in
our case conversations with Penny) rather than you having to ask for it.

That said, we know it's a huge ask to convince people to try something new
when it comes to their finances, so totally understand where you're coming
from.

btw, to clarify: when you go to the website you should be seeing animations
unless you're coming from iOS 7. If that's not the case, lmk and I'll figure
out what's going on.

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therobot24
i completely agree, often i have to go in and correct mint for uncategorized
transactions and whatnot. I'm not saying penny doesn't have value, rather i
just want to see more of what value it adds before i download the app. It can
come off as condescending, but i love just dead simple 'explain to me like i'm
5' overviews of a product. Straight to the point and no fluff. This is product
does X (see here), Y (see there), and Z, etc.

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gillis
When is Penny coming to Canada?

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tsheaff
As an early user of Penny's beta, I've found it quite helpful. My Mint usage
trailed off a few years ago for some of the reasons you guys mention -- too
much work to manually categorize, and manual budgeting is too often inaccurate
or spikey based on just one transaction or season (e.g. Christmas or summer
vacation)

Penny solves a lot of this by making the categorization way simpler (only 4
categories) which maps much closer to my own mental model of things. The SMS-
style UI is a pretty brilliant way to get an "in"

Penny is also pretty hilarious. Lots of great copy writing going on!

