wesabe – so much hype, so disappointed
July 13, 2007 – 10:54 pmThere has been quite a bit of buzz for wesabe - a personal financial management web 2.0 service – since they raised their vc round which included fred wilson of union sq. ventures. Given the rave reviews I figured I might have finally found my nirvana – a financial app that automatically aggregated my various bank, credit card, and retirement accounts while automatically tagging the transactions based on community tags for items and stores.
But alas it was not to be. Sign. As it turns out only a few large national banks are supported directly and the rest (which is something like 99% of the financial institutions in america) require you to download the data to a csv or quicken file and then manually upload it to the service. Are you kidding me? In this day and age? C’mon guys I could have done that with Quicken 10 years ago (ok maybe 5 years ago is more accurate) buy you get my point. Yahoo Finance figured out how to scrap account information from banks without API’s back in web 1.0 you could at least offer that.
I guess I will have to wait to see if Mint is up to the task (the looooooooong waited competitor to wesabe – are you guys EVER going to launch? C’mon McClure spill the beans!).
One of my big pet peeves with data intensive apps is that they require the user to do too much work to get any benefit. In this day and age where all data is digital and seemingly connected there is no excuse for making me do anything when it comes to data retrieval. Seriously someone figure it out please!
