I’ve started using money dashboard to compare to Snoop and Emma…and so far am finding Money Dashboard does everything I need for free.
The big stumbling block in Emma for me seems to be manual accounts having a premium fee to use.
It would be great if these could be made free to match the competition but otherwise it makes me think money Dashboard might be a better shout?
In terms of Emma, we don’t have plans to put them in the free plan.
Money Dashboard makes money by selling users’ data, we use a subscription.
Yeh that’s fair enough. There’s just not enough appeal for me in the paid option. I don’t really have an issue with my anonymised data being shared to make a fully free version of Emma
I’d prefer data wasn’t sold for a 'free" account - so I support the stance taken on this.
That’s okay, it’s our job to make it better. 
In terms of Emma, the subscription model works really well for us and we are laser-focused to make it better. If you have any suggestions, we are super happy to hear.
Affiliate marketing like Yolt/Snoop doesn’t go anywhere, same for data (MoneyDashboard). These businesses are half dead or dead, like Yolt.
Yeh I guess it would hard to win me over to a paid model when your competition offers it for free.
Unless you started including things I already pay for like travel insurance or mobile insurance or something I just don’t know why I’d pay for something I can get for free
I think there’s a debate to be had about us (consumers) and them (companies) being antagonistic or collaborative, or somewhere in the middle. Ultimately, I think customers get the most out of the companies they really invest in, whether in shares or subs or just buying products. If a free service works for you, that’s great, but watch out for the downsides! Data leaking away, services closing (Yolt) and more. Is it worth it?
Yeh I agree
If you take monzo as an example. I think they’re 1 of the best free products for banking out there.
Starling is also great - but monzo won me over mainly by having more users and easier transfers with people who had it already as there wasn’t much difference.
I’ve become so invested in monzo I push all my friends towards it and want them to get their paid tier right for me. Even if it was a tiny bit more expensive but gave me what I wanted I’d pay it as I’m invested in the business.
With Emma I’m new. I’ve tried the free product and it seems very similar to the competitors - but 1 of the competitors offers the same and more for free. And all of Emma’s paid product that I’m interested in for free. So there’s not investment from me. It would defy logic to not go with the competition.
If Emma’s free product was best in market and gave matched their free counterparts - I’d be keen on paid add-ons as I’d be loyal. But there’s no loyalty until I’m invested in some way as you mention.
Yeah, I agree completely. Personally, I used a couple of aggregators in parallel for a while before I decided Emma was the best for me. It was definitely worth trying all the options, and now there’s snoop and nova money as well out there.
I prefer the zero data sharing approach of Emma, which maybe won me over to begin with, but it sounds like you have different priorities!
That’s why they almost went bankrupt last year (and still struggling really badly). 
If you’re going to put a feature like this behind a paywall, that’s fine. But allowing a user to complete the action before telling them it’s behind a paywall is not okay. It’s a very bad user experience. I went through the flow of setting up a manual account even adding the logo for it to tell me I had to pay for that. I rage quit the app and don’t intend to return. It’s incredibly frustrating. The app should be up front about whether you can use a feature or not.
I’m sure this method converts some customers for you, but it really antagonises some too.
Yes, on one side this funnel is very evil, on the other it explains the feature clearly and shows what it’s supposed to do. A lot of people need to go through the funnel to figure it out the first time.
No. I know what a manual account is. But even if I didn’t you can explain on one screen what the feature is and that it’s a paid feature. You do not need to waste the customers time going through a feature only to find out at the last second they can’t actually use it. Be upfront about it instead of making the customer angry by pretending the feature is available until the last second.
Monzo are losing money hand over fist and people aren’t using it as a main account - competitors have improved their apps, so I’m not really sure what their USP is anymore.
Honestly I suspect that the chickens will come home to roost on that one.
*ex Monzo user. I closed my account a couple of months after opening.
Trust me, I had no idea what a manual account was before building it in the app.
But I get your point and thanks for the feedback, there is always room for improvement.
Ehehe, I wouldn’t put more than £50 there.
I have quite a few accounts that emma doesn’t currently support, so I also need manual accounts.
However, I don’t see value in paying to manually add the balances … may as well use a spreadsheet. However I would pay to automatically add the balances, for example periodically read the balance from a file on a cloud drive.
( currently I use GitHub - plord12/pension-scripts to download some account balances )
I can see some value in that too. It’s semi automated.
For now I’ve just swapped to money Dashboard as they let me manually key for free
If there are matching transactions in a real amount, smart rules can be used to update the balance, which works very well for savings accounts, but only approximately for investments