Intro

This is the first in a series of blogs about the development of Charoite and the motivation behind it. It'll be a bit technical at points, but will stay high level wherever possible.

All words will be my own, typed by hand. As such you'll probably find some spelling errors or grammar mistakes. I try my best though.

Why?

I love spending money, but only on things I want. All the other money that gets spent is well... an expense, and personal budgeting/financing software is just expensive.

As a person working in software, I'm aware of both how much software costs to make/run, as well as the margins on it. Which led to me, as a consumer, really disliking SaaS products. For something as critical as knowing your financial state, it shouldn't really require something like a monthly subscription (or so I thought).

It was something brewing in my mind for a while and at some point development became a hobby of mine, and that started me down the path of creating a finance tracker that my wife and I could use.

The Data

A finance tracker is only as good as the data that's in it; a tracker with no data is a blank sheet.

Plaid

If you're reading this blog, then you've most likely used a finance tracking app and it most likely uses Plaid. So like anyone else I thought, hrm, maybe I should build a low cost Plaid clone.

Alas, that's not quite possible. Without enterprise agreements, Plaid cost at the time $3/user/month and had per request fees of $0.10. So if I wanted monthly updates, that's $6 already?! Oh boy, whelp what's next?

Open Banking

Turns out as of 2026, there's an initiative in some countries of the globe to push for Open Banking laws, where we wouldn't have providers which historically had to scrape websites for your data (oh boy so secure!). Note nowadays most are using secured OAuth APIs, and that's what these laws would push for, but also most banks don't allow said APIs for general access.

So as someone just trying to bootstrap a casual thing, can't do that!

Manual Imports - CSV, QBO, etc.

I didn't really want to do manual imports but you know. Felt like the next immediate fallback. Unfortunately, one of my banks stopped allowing mass exports of data, and even getting to them on some other bank websites was such a pain.

Really folks, it's a CSV download for data that should be in parquet in a data lake. This costs nearly nothing and is the customer's data anyways. Oh well... onto something else.

MX

This brought me back to looking for a provider. The next major financial data provider in the US/CA is MX. However they're even more focused on enterprise customers, which alas was not me.

SimpleFIN Bridge

Eventually, my search led me to SimpleFIN Bridge. Built by the person who wrote the SimpleFIN protocol, it's a very low cost service, sitting at $1.5 a month, for 25 accounts per subscription. It uses MX under the hood, so think of it as prenegotiated rates on MX for the masses along with backend servers for pulling and caching the data.

The protocol is not as rich as say Plaid or MX, but their commitment to privacy, security, and stated mission of supporting Open Banking appealed to me a lot. In testing it supported nearly all of my accounts and provided at the building blocks of what I needed.

Conclusion

So that's why SimpleFIN Bridge is the first data provider available in Charoite and why, even though I tried to avoid a SaaS option, folks will still need to engage with SimpleFIN Bridge's subscription in order to automatically pull data from their bank.

We might have more data providers in the future, and maybe we'll have direct bank integrations for free, I'll have to reach out to them for that.