

Ask HN: How can startups using Yodlee afford it? - gilaniali

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.<p>Are there cheaper alternatives?
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staunch
You may be able to negotiate a better deal than that. As you grew you could
almost certainly negotiate a better deal. You could also scrape the data
yourself. Supporting the top 15 financial sites would probably cover 80%+ of
your users fully.

If there are not any startup friendly alternatives to Yodlee, then maybe you
just found what your startup should really be doing :-)

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tonystubblebine
You should look at the Wesabe code that got open sourced. They wrote their own
scraper for a huge number of banks. That could solve your problem at the
beginning. Although, it also creates a new problem for you, securely storing
bank credentials. They open sourced a solution for that too, but I'm sure
it'll still create costs for you.

~~~
tworats
I don't think they've released the scraper yet, have they? They said they
would, but it wasn't part of the release last I checked.

One idea might be to have a consortium of startups interested in the topic use
and maintain Wesabe's scrapers as a community.

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peteforde
This is my first time hearing about Yodlee. I went to their site and while I'm
not totally dense, it's not immediately clear what their product offering
_does_.

In plain English, what is it that these folks do that your system needs so
badly? Genuinely curious.

~~~
qeorge
Provides a unified API for myriad online banking websites.

Its how Mint is able to get your transaction history.

~~~
gilaniali
I wouldn't be surprised if Swipely and Blippy use them too.

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fookyong
Am I the only person who doesn't think this is expensive _at all_?

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.

~~~
tworats
$3 per user per month is expensive. Looking at the price SaaS offerings,
they're generally in the $5-$15 per user per month range, so $3/month is a
good chunk of change.

It's even worse for advertising based services, who generally make far less
per user per month.

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whatupwilly3
I used to work at Yodlee and do some Yodlee consulting on the side. I can't
speak to the license fees, but to the folks that say "build your own", I don't
really recommend that.

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.

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lrm242
Is that per user fee monthly? Regardless, the fee structure seems quite
reasonable given the functionality they provide. Besides, everything is
negotiable.

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webgambit
I've been in touch with Yodlee recently as well. I'm going to call them back
today to clarify, but it was my understanding that the fee was per user
account not user. Meaning if John Doe signs up and has 3 credit cards and 2
banks, that's 5 user accounts. Hopefully I'm wrong on this.

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pbreit
Yes, Yodlee is crazy expensive and doesn't seem willing to negotiate with
startups. CashEdge may be a better option. And, as has been noted, you could
handle the top 5-50 institutions yourself which would get you very broad
coverage.

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petervandijck
A dollar per user, is that per month?

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rahulchaudhary
I don't know their pricing structure, but check with <http://www.geezeo.com/>
and <http://cashedge.com/> to see if they fit within your budget or not.

Alternatively you can write your own scraper depending on what your
requirements are.

