@zackshapiro great questions! 1. Our cost per user is pretty low right now, so we haven't monetized yet. That said, our strong preference is to make money using a subscription model. Mint, Level, etc. all make money by selling your information to advertisers; it's great in that allows them to provide their services for free, but it also doesn't sit well with us. 2. We've gotten quite a few requests for this, so we'll be adding that option soon. 3. When in your history view, click on the category icon for any transaction. That will let you quickly switch between different categories. The third animation on our marketing page (https://www.pennyapp.io/) has an example. (We'll also be adding better education around this.) 4. We built the frontend using React + Cordova, which allowed us to ship Android and iOS apps within two weeks of starting. We're only a two person team right now, so we didn't have the bandwidth or desire to go fully native right off the bat. Let me know if you want more depth on any of those!

@dontmitch Thanks for the quick response Mitchell. Glad to see you're not selling my financial data away. I'd be off Penny ASAP if you were. Looking forward to using this!

@dontmitch I was more asking if I could switch something from Everything Else to Food, for example. Doesn't look like there's a way to do this at the moment

@zackshapiro I think this is what you're looking for: That let's you switch the category to whatever you like (or ignore the transaction altogether). Again, we'll make the user education better moving forward, sorry about that!

@alykumpula I see what you mean. Penny's focused on 2 things right now: providing meaningful context to your finances and give you actionable advice on how to spend better without having to actually budget, they've done really well in keeping the app simple. (also, they're a 2 person team too....)

@kkdub Some of Penny's forecasts are...odd. Glitch? Also might be nice to have an option to skip convo mode if desired.

@kkdub thanks for checking it out and glad you like the UX. And we actually do exactly that when it comes to linking a bank account: if we don't support your bank, Penny asks you which one you want to link so we can notify users when we add support for their requested account(s). Great minds think alike ;) With respect to your weird numbers, the most likely culprit is miscategorized transactions. We do our best to auto-categorize all of your incoming transactions and learn from your categorizations moving forward, but we're definitely not perfect yet. Just head to the settings pane, click on the icon next to any transaction, and select the correct category. The third animation on https://www.pennyapp.io demonstrates this process if you're interested. Hope that helps!

@melissamonteee 🙏

@melissamonteee Cheers! Let us know what you think :)

@timithmcdoyle We'll definitely reach out to everyone over email when we add more bank support. No promises, but we hope it'll be soon!

@merekdavis We'll hopefully have Simple and Capital One integrated soon. No promises, but we'll let you know ASAP when they are!

Which banks are supported?

@imalexquach Totally understandable. I love how simple it is using it with one of my accounts already, so it'll be staying on my phone and getting a lot of use. Love how reports are given in the friendly "chat" interface.

@merekdavis Penny's probably already let you know this, but we support Simple and Capital One now!

@staticsteven got a link to the other ones named Penny? (I'm guessing it could be a play on MoneyPenny from James Bond, but that's a guess)

@staticsteven We're currently integrated with a few top US banks and are rolling out to more soon, but until we get more bank coverage you probably wouldn't find the app very useful. If you don't mind, what bank(s) do you use? We can see if we can support those faster. re Penny: we've seen a few other similarly named apps that were just referring to the currency. I think ours is better because Penny is also a woman's name, so our reference goes two ways :)

@staticsteven 1) Unfortunately there's a non-trivial amount of working to add support for other countries, and we started Penny from scratch just under 3 months ago. Hopefully we'll get to Canada soon though! 2) We settled on Penny because it was a play off of the one cent coin and was a catchy name for a person. We didn't realize there were any other Penny's out there to be honest; Facebook's MoneyPenny article landed after we had already soft launched.

@_jacksmith @dontmitch @imalexquach okay okay i spoke too soon, i apologize. I think I only had the impression that the name Penny was popular - maybe I just saw the Pennies app everywhere on the app store recently and that made me think there were a lot.

@imalexquach I would love to use this up in Canada as well—I think if you cover RBC and TD you're doing great. After that you can add BMO, CIBC, PC Financial, and Scotiabank and you basically account for everyone.

@seriousallie Thanks for the feedback! Backing out of actions would be really nice to have, and it's on our (huge) list of features to build. Thanks again!

@alexgiess nice! Thanks for sharing 👍 And duly noted about getting quicker access to the category spending and month over month comparisons. We're still trying to strike the right balance between being friendly/approachable while not getting in your way. We'll get there eventually!

@dontmitch I can't even imagine! Best of luck on locking those down and I'll look forward to trying Penny out when Capital One is supported.

@dontmitch just signed up, and wanted to say I really like the interface. Taking a more conversational approach to mobile banking is really interesting. Curious to know, what specific pain points were you hoping to solve when you set out to build Penny?

@bshums Glad you like it! First, existing solutions (Mint, BillGuard, Level) are really good about presenting your information graphically and really bad about helping you interpret that information. Second, we think traditional budgets are like News Year's resolutions: most people abandon them after about a month. So those are the two big things we're trying to solve. We want to provide meaningful context to your finances and give you actionable advice on how to spend better without having to actually budget. More context for anyone interested: I've used Mint for 6 years and I have been a personal finance enthusiast long before that (h/t my dad). Unfortunately, Mint hasn't changed in about 5 years except for the inclusion of more ads. And it's pretty complex—there are over 100 different ways to categorize a transaction. At some point I stopped and asked myself, "What value am I getting from painstakingly categorizing every one of my transactions?" and realized, I didn't have a good answer. Mint told me that 26% of my spending was on food, but I had no context on whether that was good or bad or why I should care. I've also tried out Level and BillGuard, among others, but found them to be very budget-heavy. In my experience, most budgets are pretty noisy: you'll be under your clothing budget one month and then blow past it another month because that's just the nature of spending. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯