When I try to pitch my budget app people always say that they have some kind of analytics in their bank app. I then tell that banks and their apps are not on the side of the clients. This article is to explain what I mean by that.

Your bank and you have different goals

Here is how I imagine a normal person relations with money: you are in charge of your budget, so you need to be in control of it. You also don’t want to stress about it now or later. To achieve this, you should control lifestyle creep, have a contingency fund and a plan of what you’d do when you stop working. If you’re in a bad financial situation, you need to know why and see how to mitigate it. And so on and so forth.

Banks run businesses. They have multiple products, for people and companies, for different life situations, and they have competitors. Enter your favourite meme about shareholder value if you like, but making you happy won’t be their north star, they simply have more things to look at. Additionally, your current and savings accounts are not very profitable compared to other things they do. I feel like this should be considered a marketing effort, because that’s how they advertise you their other products.

As a result, you probably have a bank app for every bank that has information about your accounts and your transactions. This information has little to help you with your financial decisions.

This is why products that focus on a personal and/or family budget exist.

Signs that an app is on your side

You probably heard that if you don’t pay for a product you are the product. That’s a simplification.

A positive exception from this rule is that there is ideologically free open source software that people make for dozens of years, think VLC. They have no plans to make a business of it. They don’t owe you anything either but presumably if someone is working on a thing for years for free they would make it good for themselves and if you are a bit like them you might like their app.

A negative exception would be that you pay for a product, and you’re still a product. The banking apps are one, but big companies that have many products are all the same in this regard – they would pitch you their other products through ones you already use.

Another thing that happened to me repeatedly and that I look very carefully at are companies that took investments. Such companies would need to return those investments or close, and this would become their goal. They would do all the things unrelated to why you started using them in the first place, and raise prices in process.

If it’s not a big company and not a startup in debt, the main sign that an app is on your side would be that you pay by a scheme that makes sense. If the app has to run a server or has support or whatever other opex, you likely need to pay a subscription for it to sustain. A local app that you download once can be paid once with the only risk that it will stop working after you OS update. Sometimes there are lifetime plans for otherwise subscription services – that’s maybe fine but lifetime should be perceived as the service lifetime, not yours.

Money aside, the app should declare it does the thing you want it to do. It may sound obvious but saying “I will manage my budget with my bank app” rather than “I will manage my budget with a budget app” is an example of that and people have those thoughts all the time.

Things unrelated to any user goals

Here is a list of first things came to mind that annoy me that apps have for reasons clearly other than users needs.

• Logout after some couple weeks of inactivity. Considered a security practice, I couldn’t find how exactly it’s secure.
• Cookie banners. No it’s not because EU is bad, it’s because you want analytics on your landing pages.
• Intercom with a “how can I help you” popup. I’ll ask for help if I’m stuck, thank you. Has to be another marketing gimmick.
• ✨ask ai. The worse version of the previous one.
• New feature announcements. I kind of get it, and it might be a good feature, but I can’t make myself read them because I didn’t open the app to read changelogs.

Sometimes those things appear because everyone does them. Kant and his principle of universalizability helps if you apply it in a certain way (oh the irony). So you have a feature in your app, or want to add it. Now, if you remove it from all the software, will it make the world better? If so, you probably shouldn’t have it.

Thanks for reading.

Discuss on mastodon or twitter

Sources

• Needy Programs – logins and credit card issues and software updates annoy tonsky,
• Brave improved their adblock – browsers have extentions, but chrome nerfed adblock via manifest v3 which sparkled some innovation it seems,
• Categorical Imperative – do as your actions were a universal law.