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Plaid founder here. Stripe does not integrate with any bank API's directly (AFAICT). They wrap two aggregators, MX and Finicity to build this product. (Also, no

Plaid founder here. Stripe does not integrate with any bank API's directly (AFAICT). They wrap two aggregators, MX and Finicity to build this product. (Also, not sure what MX products they are using, but MX itself is an aggregator of aggregators, including others such as Yodlee.) On pricing, Stripe's listed rates are 30-200% higher than Plaid rates (perhaps due to high vendor costs). That said, if anyone does have feedback on where Plaid pricing is prohibiting new use cases, we'd love to hear! I'm zach at plaid if folks would like to discuss.

ianstormtaylor 4y ago
Thanks for the reply! I came to that same conclusion about their use of "service providers" after reading through their support docs (and added an edit above), definitely a bummer.
- zachperret 4y ago
  We all wish more banks had API's! Our team is actively working with many more banks to launch them soon, but alas -- legacy infrastructure is slow to move!
matdehaast 4y ago
@zach this is what I find very frustrating about the current players. We recently got pricing from you and obviously being under NDA won’t share the figures but I’m not seeing the discount you quote above compared to stripe. Further there are significant platform minimums and platform fees that add large costs initially. How do you reconcile the above comments from our interaction?
sicromoft 4y ago
Plaid doesn't have publicly listed pricing at all. Might as well be infinite. If a startup can use Stripe, who they're already integrating with, or integrate with a new provider with hidden pricing that requires them to contact a sales person, I wonder who they're going to choose. Good luck.
deleted 4y ago
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emrekzd 4y ago
Unlike Plaid, Finicity and Yodlee have direct integrations with some banks. Example: Silicon Valley Bank has direct integration with Finicity. SVB through Plaid breaks quickly (because they require some weird 2fa policy). Let me know if I'm missing something but if Stripe is A) providing reliable connection to common banks Plaid misses and B) saving it's users from all the headaches of integrating with old school services like Finicity/Yodlee, then charging a premium sounds like fair game.
- phoenixy1 4y ago
  Plaid has direct integrations with many banks too -- Silicon Valley Bank is actually a Plaid partner for ACH processing (see https://www.svb.com/news/company-news/silicon-valley-bank-and-plaid-partner-to-provide-secure-and-efficient-tokenized-payment-solutions https://www.svb.com/news/company-news/silicon-valley-bank-an...). Not sure when your bad experience with 2fa was but Plaid's connection to SVB has improved over the past ~6 months as we've begun to work together more closely and should continue to do so. [I work at Plaid]
  - tjm5081 4y ago
    Hate to argue, but I agree that Plaid's connection to SVB is indeed unusuable. I've been trying to use them for over a year and we ended up dropping SVB just this month. Chase is on OAuth and WAY better if you need TXN data. A partnership for ACH is more related to importing stable routing and account numbers, then enabling initiating ACH transfers. Scraping transaction data is a completely different integration that seems to have been forgotten. Sadly, I'd even wager SVB-Plaid data won't improve any time soon. Remember that SVB doesn't even yet allow external bank transfers on their own bank portal.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
edwinarbus 4y ago
Edwin from Stripe here. Stripe does integrate directly with banks. In our beta period, most volume we’ve seen has been over bank APIs. Some banks do not have APIs—we use financial partners to connect with them, and we’re talking with many banks in hopes that they will enable direct API access soon. Our pricing is upfront: https://stripe.com/en-us/financial-connections#pricing https://stripe.com/en-us/financial-connections#pricing. We’ve worked with a large beta group of users to make sure the pricing is in line with what they see in the market.
- iknowstuff 4y ago
  Which banks have OAuth APIs? I would love to switch to one of those instead of exposing my password due to my bank's incompetence.
  - thekyle 4y ago
    I know that Charles Schwab has some sort of OAuth flow which I used when connecting my account to TurboTax this year.
    - lbotos 4y ago
      So, I got very excited about this, but it seems that banks are expecting "bank integrator" aka companies, and not giving access to end users :( If any knows of a bank that has API access in the US do share!
      - vineyardmike 4y ago
        You might find luck using companies targeting algo trading. A lot of companies allow use of the account more like a checking account (eg interactive brokers). They have an API and also allow different logins to have different authorizations.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - 4y ago
FintechRisen 4y ago
I'm very familiar with both Finicity and MX. I know that MX isn't an aggregator of aggregators. Stop lying bro. Tell people about how you abuse credentials and take some responsibility rather than trying to constantly pass the buck and blame others.
- dang 4y ago
  Hey - can you please make your substantive points without personal attacks or swipes? We ban accounts that do those things—especially new accounts showing up to fight shit out like this. Not cool, no matter how right you are or feel you are. Also, it's not in your interest to post like this to HN anyhow. The audience will only side against you if you fulminate and call names. If you want to win readers over, you should drop all that and instead provide specific, concrete information and say what's important about it. (Before anyone misinterprets the above: I have no idea which side you're on. I haven't looked at any of the comments you've replied to. All I know is that, whichever side you're arguing for, you're going about it in the wrong way for HN. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix that, we'd appreciate it.)
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lukeramsden 4y ago
> MX itself is an aggregator of aggregators Aggregators all the way down... The US really needs its own PSD2.
amonroe369 4y ago
You seem pretty clueless about your competitors and you are talking poorly, very openly about them here Zach. That is not a good look in any way and reflective of a poor corporate culture. If MX and Finicity are aggregators of aggregators, that would still mean Plaid would benefit, right? Maybe you (and your sales team) do not know your competition. Publicly airing grievances as well against Stripe, who you could potentially partner with in the future, reflects an underlying toxic corporate culture at Plaid. I do not think Stripe will likely ever want to do business with you after this and prevent others from doing the same. I have never worked at Plaid, but I am not inclined to want to work with you based on what we are seeing here. Plaidsettlment.com
- pc86 4y ago
  Creating a throwaway for this (potentially valid) criticism destroys any credibility you may have.
  - amonroe369 4y ago
    fair criticism. My points remain. Having talked to Plaid's sales team, not bad people. I just don't trust providers that openly talk poorly of competitors and plaids sales team did that and the CEO of the company is doing it in public.
    - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
      You haven't read many Stripe stories, huh
      - bluecrab 4y ago
        There aren't that many. Bolt does not count.
    - balls187 4y ago
      I have no dog in this fight--I did not interpret that to be talking poorly about stripe. It read like conjecture at best, and inaccurate information at worst.
thomaslord 4y ago
It sounds like the issue noted above is less the actual pricing, and more that it's difficult to find out what the pricing is. This matches up with my personal experience - I had to get in touch with an actual human and ask them for the pricing just to see if a project would be viable. I did get a relatively fast response that made the pricing very clear, but because it didn't come with any caveats (e.g. volume-based pricing or "we need to negotiate pricing on a per-client basis") it almost made the experience more frustrating. Basically if your pricing is simple and universal enough that you could post it directly to the pricing page, you should post it to the pricing page. Especially for developer-focused products, hiding the pricing can lead to a serious reduction in conversion. My use case is transaction data so the pricing for Stripe's competing product isn't posted yet, but if I was choosing between the two products and only one had pricing clearly posted on the website I'd immediately go with that one unless the pricing was so ridiculous that it wasn't affordable. And if the pricing was ridiculous, I'd probably assume that Plaid's pricing was just as bad. Basically, I should be able to evaluate your product and its pricing without engaging with any of your employees wherever possible. I routinely remove companies from consideration because I can't plug them into a spreadsheet of prices without going back and forth with a sales team whose time I'll just be wasting anyway.
xtracto 4y ago
> That said, if anyone does have feedback on where Plaid pricing is prohibiting new use cases, I remember in a previous company we migrated out of Plaid into SynapseFI because Plaid started charging a high price on a per connection request service (like, requesting a new bank connection for a new customer was quite expensive). It seemed Plaid was focusing on the Mint like use cases: low number of users, allowing them to setup a Plaid connection one time to be used extensively subsequently. While our use case was more akin to: lots of users/authentications doing one time connections that may not be reused. (kind of what might be used for credit risk analysis, although the company was not doing that).
onelovetwo 4y ago
How can anyone even calculate pricing when Plaid is the worst company when it comes to pricing transparency. Thank god competition is heating up.
xtrimsky1234 4y ago
As a developer I love the idea of plaid, but the pricing is scary. The 100 first banks is great, but the pay as you go does not give me any ideas of the pricing. I love how Stripe presented the pricing page, 1.5$ per account, 10cents per fetch balance. Very clear. I still have no idea how much plaid will cost me.

ianstormtaylor 4y ago

Thanks for the reply! I came to that same conclusion about their use of "service providers" after reading through their support docs (and added an edit above), definitely a bummer.

zachperret 4y ago
We all wish more banks had API's! Our team is actively working with many more banks to launch them soon, but alas -- legacy infrastructure is slow to move!

matdehaast 4y ago

@zach this is what I find very frustrating about the current players. We recently got pricing from you and obviously being under NDA won’t share the figures but I’m not seeing the discount you quote above compared to stripe. Further there are significant platform minimums and platform fees that add large costs initially. How do you reconcile the above comments from our interaction?

sicromoft 4y ago

Plaid doesn't have publicly listed pricing at all. Might as well be infinite. If a startup can use Stripe, who they're already integrating with, or integrate with a new provider with hidden pricing that requires them to contact a sales person, I wonder who they're going to choose. Good luck.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

emrekzd 4y ago

Unlike Plaid, Finicity and Yodlee have direct integrations with some banks. Example: Silicon Valley Bank has direct integration with Finicity. SVB through Plaid breaks quickly (because they require some weird 2fa policy). Let me know if I'm missing something but if Stripe is A) providing reliable connection to common banks Plaid misses and B) saving it's users from all the headaches of integrating with old school services like Finicity/Yodlee, then charging a premium sounds like fair game.

phoenixy1 4y ago
Plaid has direct integrations with many banks too -- Silicon Valley Bank is actually a Plaid partner for ACH processing (see https://www.svb.com/news/company-news/silicon-valley-bank-and-plaid-partner-to-provide-secure-and-efficient-tokenized-payment-solutions https://www.svb.com/news/company-news/silicon-valley-bank-an...). Not sure when your bad experience with 2fa was but Plaid's connection to SVB has improved over the past ~6 months as we've begun to work together more closely and should continue to do so. [I work at Plaid]
- tjm5081 4y ago
  Hate to argue, but I agree that Plaid's connection to SVB is indeed unusuable. I've been trying to use them for over a year and we ended up dropping SVB just this month. Chase is on OAuth and WAY better if you need TXN data. A partnership for ACH is more related to importing stable routing and account numbers, then enabling initiating ACH transfers. Scraping transaction data is a completely different integration that seems to have been forgotten. Sadly, I'd even wager SVB-Plaid data won't improve any time soon. Remember that SVB doesn't even yet allow external bank transfers on their own bank portal.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

edwinarbus 4y ago

Edwin from Stripe here. Stripe does integrate directly with banks. In our beta period, most volume we’ve seen has been over bank APIs. Some banks do not have APIs—we use financial partners to connect with them, and we’re talking with many banks in hopes that they will enable direct API access soon. Our pricing is upfront: https://stripe.com/en-us/financial-connections#pricing https://stripe.com/en-us/financial-connections#pricing. We’ve worked with a large beta group of users to make sure the pricing is in line with what they see in the market.

iknowstuff 4y ago
Which banks have OAuth APIs? I would love to switch to one of those instead of exposing my password due to my bank's incompetence.
- thekyle 4y ago
  I know that Charles Schwab has some sort of OAuth flow which I used when connecting my account to TurboTax this year.
  - lbotos 4y ago
    So, I got very excited about this, but it seems that banks are expecting "bank integrator" aka companies, and not giving access to end users :( If any knows of a bank that has API access in the US do share!
    - vineyardmike 4y ago
      You might find luck using companies targeting algo trading. A lot of companies allow use of the account more like a checking account (eg interactive brokers). They have an API and also allow different logins to have different authorizations.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - 4y ago

FintechRisen 4y ago

I'm very familiar with both Finicity and MX. I know that MX isn't an aggregator of aggregators. Stop lying bro. Tell people about how you abuse credentials and take some responsibility rather than trying to constantly pass the buck and blame others.

dang 4y ago
Hey - can you please make your substantive points without personal attacks or swipes? We ban accounts that do those things—especially new accounts showing up to fight shit out like this. Not cool, no matter how right you are or feel you are. Also, it's not in your interest to post like this to HN anyhow. The audience will only side against you if you fulminate and call names. If you want to win readers over, you should drop all that and instead provide specific, concrete information and say what's important about it. (Before anyone misinterprets the above: I have no idea which side you're on. I haven't looked at any of the comments you've replied to. All I know is that, whichever side you're arguing for, you're going about it in the wrong way for HN. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix that, we'd appreciate it.)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

lukeramsden 4y ago

> MX itself is an aggregator of aggregators Aggregators all the way down... The US really needs its own PSD2.

amonroe369 4y ago

You seem pretty clueless about your competitors and you are talking poorly, very openly about them here Zach. That is not a good look in any way and reflective of a poor corporate culture. If MX and Finicity are aggregators of aggregators, that would still mean Plaid would benefit, right? Maybe you (and your sales team) do not know your competition. Publicly airing grievances as well against Stripe, who you could potentially partner with in the future, reflects an underlying toxic corporate culture at Plaid. I do not think Stripe will likely ever want to do business with you after this and prevent others from doing the same. I have never worked at Plaid, but I am not inclined to want to work with you based on what we are seeing here. Plaidsettlment.com

pc86 4y ago
Creating a throwaway for this (potentially valid) criticism destroys any credibility you may have.
- amonroe369 4y ago
  fair criticism. My points remain. Having talked to Plaid's sales team, not bad people. I just don't trust providers that openly talk poorly of competitors and plaids sales team did that and the CEO of the company is doing it in public.
  - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
    You haven't read many Stripe stories, huh
    - bluecrab 4y ago
      There aren't that many. Bolt does not count.
  - balls187 4y ago
    I have no dog in this fight--I did not interpret that to be talking poorly about stripe. It read like conjecture at best, and inaccurate information at worst.

thomaslord 4y ago

It sounds like the issue noted above is less the actual pricing, and more that it's difficult to find out what the pricing is. This matches up with my personal experience - I had to get in touch with an actual human and ask them for the pricing just to see if a project would be viable. I did get a relatively fast response that made the pricing very clear, but because it didn't come with any caveats (e.g. volume-based pricing or "we need to negotiate pricing on a per-client basis") it almost made the experience more frustrating. Basically if your pricing is simple and universal enough that you could post it directly to the pricing page, you should post it to the pricing page. Especially for developer-focused products, hiding the pricing can lead to a serious reduction in conversion. My use case is transaction data so the pricing for Stripe's competing product isn't posted yet, but if I was choosing between the two products and only one had pricing clearly posted on the website I'd immediately go with that one unless the pricing was so ridiculous that it wasn't affordable. And if the pricing was ridiculous, I'd probably assume that Plaid's pricing was just as bad. Basically, I should be able to evaluate your product and its pricing without engaging with any of your employees wherever possible. I routinely remove companies from consideration because I can't plug them into a spreadsheet of prices without going back and forth with a sales team whose time I'll just be wasting anyway.

xtracto 4y ago

> That said, if anyone does have feedback on where Plaid pricing is prohibiting new use cases, I remember in a previous company we migrated out of Plaid into SynapseFI because Plaid started charging a high price on a per connection request service (like, requesting a new bank connection for a new customer was quite expensive). It seemed Plaid was focusing on the Mint like use cases: low number of users, allowing them to setup a Plaid connection one time to be used extensively subsequently. While our use case was more akin to: lots of users/authentications doing one time connections that may not be reused. (kind of what might be used for credit risk analysis, although the company was not doing that).

onelovetwo 4y ago

How can anyone even calculate pricing when Plaid is the worst company when it comes to pricing transparency. Thank god competition is heating up.

xtrimsky1234 4y ago

As a developer I love the idea of plaid, but the pricing is scary. The 100 first banks is great, but the pay as you go does not give me any ideas of the pricing. I love how Stripe presented the pricing page, 1.5$ per account, 10cents per fetch balance. Very clear. I still have no idea how much plaid will cost me.