
Show HN: Truebill – Find and track paid subscriptions, cancel with one click - idrism
https://www.truebill.com/
======
gfunk911
The idea seems great. But my spidey sense is going crazy. You want access to
my financial/purchase data, and the service is free. So you will monetize
..... how?

I am 100% not saying you intend to scam or steal. But clearly access to my
data is key to your eventual monetization plan, and this is a loss leader to
get in the door. Since the ultimate plan is not stated, I have no choice but
to imagine it, and nothing I can think of warms my heart.

The ability to feed your service with something like a periodic manual export
from Mint (assuming such a thing is possible) would go a long way toward
reassuring me.

Again, the core idea seems fantastic, and could save many people real money,
including myself.

~~~
yahyam
Thanks for the kind words. Definitely understand where you're coming from in
terms of security. Our plan isn't really to monetize your data, it's moreso to
make intelligent recommendations that we hope our users will follow. For
instance, "you're paying $10 per month for Hulu, on average users are x% more
satisfied with Netflix, click here to switch from Hulu to Netflix".

We've definitely discussed the idea of a manual export/import - we may get to
that in the future.

~~~
davemel37
>Our plan isn't really to monetize your data

>it's moreso to make intelligent recommendations...

That is exactly what monetizing data is!

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idrism
Hi all, We're former founders of Webs (formerly FreeWebz). We made Truebill
because too many people are getting ripped off by monthly subscriptions that
they either forgot about or are too lazy to cancel. Now that so much is moving
over to subscriptions, we think it warrants one place to manage them all.

~~~
tomkinstinch
This is a great idea, but I'm immediately concerned about giving my financial
account information to any sort of free service.

What is your business model? Why not charge a one-time $10 fee up front to
build trust, and revenue?

~~~
idrism
A one-time up-front $10 fee may build trust, but it would also scare people
away.

There's a few ways we can go for revenue. Here's an example: Since we know
what subscriptions are popular, and we can have verified ratings on those
subscriptions, we'll be able to make recommendations. For example, "You're
paying $12 for Pandora. People seem to be happier with Spotify, and your
friends love it. Give it a try!" Using those referrals, we'd get a cut of the
subscription revenue from Spotify.

~~~
amarr
What about splitting the product and offering the results for free and the
convenient auto-cancel as a one time fee.

Also I'd feel better if you didn't store anything long term, I'm more
interested in this as a on-demand service than as something that constantly
pulls my data.

~~~
merlinsbrain
> What about splitting the product and offering the results for free and the
> convenient auto-cancel as a one-time fee

As a user who agrees that I would be more comfortable if I knew they made
money, I'm wondering if the "convenience" of auto-cancel is negated by having
to pay for it _specifically_.

I don't have a better suggestion than the others in this thread though.

I'm also wondering if I would pay a subscription fee when the goal is to
reduce the subscriptions, at some point I'll have reached an satisfactory
state where this service will be the next to be knocked off.

Good luck to the team, and thanks for saving me ~$25/month!

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bks
Umm, you just found me $6000 that I have been over billed by one of the
services that I requested deactivation....

1\. Time to fix my accounting processes for this particular business 2\. This
is amazing!

How do you make money?

~~~
yahyam
Wow, that's a ton of $.

To answer the money question, right now we actually don't make money. In the
future, we think we can make $ by making intelligent recommendations i.e. "you
like x and y, try signing up for Z subscription service.

~~~
jtrtoo
Maybe consider taking a cut of the savings... ;)

~~~
stanleyyork
if you're creating $6,000 in value, people would definitely be willing to give
you a cut of that.

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herbst
You do not redirect to PayPal to login but give me a on site form? Any reason
for this? Your service looks great, but this seems sketchy :)

Edit:// Sorry i just saw you answered that already. Fucking banks. Trying
since years to find a local one with a read only api with no luck yet. They
just offered me read/write APIs based on expensive business accounts...

~~~
NKCSS
Do what I did; download their mobile app, reverse engineer it and call the web
api's yourself to scrape the data.

~~~
herbst
My current bank has no mobile App (seriously). The only bank that has one
where i can look at my account without TAN is the only bank here in
Switzerland which is no actual Bank therefore also without the bank secret.

I asked them what would happen if i did this, they told me this is reason
enough to sue me.

~~~
NKCSS
You could write a web scraper that keeps a session alive to get around the TAN

~~~
herbst
I feel like a noob right now that i havent thought about this. This wouldnt
even break any logical rules my bank maybe has. I gotta try this. BIG THANK
YOU!

~~~
NKCSS
No problem, glad I could help.

It was nice thing to have, made me feel in control, while packing up my
groceries after having paid in the checkout line, I'd get a Notifo push
message from my watcher; I just wonder why it's not something all banks would
do; I'm certain customers would love getting the notifications and it would
help prevent or at least catch fraud quickly.

~~~
herbst
absolutely. i am doing this with my paypal and bitcoins as well. i really dont
get why the fucking richest economy sector isnt able to do such basic things.
(afaik germany and the uk have a standard for that tho)

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russell_h
How do you actually cancel the subscriptions? For example, in order to cancel
a Comcast subscription wouldn't you need the last 4 digits of my social
security number or something?

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OmarIsmail
This looks slick!

One idea I'd recommend is to look at what the user is subscribing to and
monitor for when deals are available and alert the user to that. For example
Xbox Live is usually $60/year, however there are frequent sales (Amazon, eBay,
etc) that offer discounts to $35/year. Similarly with music subscriptions,
etc.

There's your revenue model as well. Because you're saving the user money they
can kick you back a few bucks (maybe a percentage of the savings).

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jonesb6
I think I would be one of your ideal customers. I have a plethora of
subscription services that i'll either periodically cancel and renew, or just
permanently forget to cancel.

What does your service offer that scrolling down my bank statement won't
already achieve? There is already a proven barrier of laziness here, why
doesn't that also exist for the process of downloading and utilizing your
service?

~~~
idrism
Most people don't look at their bank statement often. For those that do, they
sometimes overlook things. I think the most common reason for cancelling
through Truebill, though, is not wanting to waste time dealing with cancelling
the service.

The point is, you shouldn't HAVE to look at your bank statement to find this
stuff. We do it for you, and we keep an eye on things for you. If you want to
make sure you're not charged again, just set an alert. No need to check your
bank statement.. just wait for an email from us.

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chasemiller
Wow, beautiful site!

I'm loving this trend of services to save me money (Paribus is one other
example that I love). However, I too am concerned about handing financial
information over to a third party. I'd love to hear the business model.

~~~
idrism
Thanks! See my reply to tomkinstinch re: business model

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rgbrgb
Just signed up, site seems fast and works great. What's the stack like?

~~~
idrism
Thanks! Stack is currently Node + Postgres + React + Relay. Which reminds
me... if anyone wants a job, let me know! We need mostly back-end or full-
stack

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z3t4
You could make an "offline" app instead of a web service. I think people trust
"apps" more then web services. Especially if it's open source.

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spdustin
What if there's a bill like, say, Comcast, and your user only wanted to cancel
one service (TV) and not another (Internet)?

~~~
idrism
Good point. For now, you can just add that in the "Reason" and we'll see it.
But maybe we should add a "notes" column. We could also have checkboxes for
specific services, like Comcast, where we know their different offerings.

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patricklorio
I got scared when the interface asked for my paypal user/password. I'd feel
much more comfortable with OAuth.

~~~
idrism
Thanks for the feedback. We're definitely thinking about OAuth for Paypal.
Unfortunately, banks and credit cards don't usually have modern APIs :) so
we're forced to do old-school authentication. That said, we use Plaid for
that, so we don't deal with any passwords ourselves.

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Arubis
This seems like a great idea, but the detection isn't perfect--some
annual/semi-annual bills get picked up as inactive monthly, and scheduled
investment withdrawals show up as subscription services. That isn't fatal, but
having a way to manually correct things would help a lot!

~~~
yahyam
Yep, this is definitely on our roadmap. Also, our platform is getting better
as it goes, so these small mixups are getting fixed. Thanks.

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sah2ed
> 19,821 Banks Supported

How did you arrive at that number? Is that number advertised anywhere on the
Plaid.com website?

~~~
yahyam
I asked Plaid and that's what I was told. It's probably larger than that now
since they're constantly adding long-tail support.

~~~
sah2ed
I researched them in the past but couldn't find any public list of the banks
they support, so it's hard to tell how much coverage they have compared to
Yodlee.com for instance.

Do you have to be a paying customer to pry that information (i.e. list of
banks they support) out of them?

~~~
zachperret
No need to sign up. You can actually find the full list in our docs:
[https://plaid.com/docs/#long-tail-institutions](https://plaid.com/docs/#long-
tail-institutions)

~~~
sah2ed
Not correct - I had to sign up for an account just now so I could get API keys
to hit the endpoint.

Besides, the account is limited at the moment. I get the following error:

    
    
        {
          "code": 1306,
          "message": "invalid institution permissions",
          "resolve": "Your Client ID does not have access to this institution endpoint"
        }

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dfischer
Cool stuff, I wonder how you guys will make money but will be trying it out.
Hope it's all secure :)

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Kiro
How does this work exactly? I mean, since all banks' statements are different.

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hissworks
I really don't want to turn off 2FA even temporarily.

What would a workaround for this look like?

~~~
idrism
We support 2FA on almost all banks.. Which one are you having trouble with?

