Looking at the Plaid pricing, it costs $1.50 to initially connect an account and $0.30 per month after that for each account. Assuming the average user connects 4 accounts and does not pay for a subscription, the cost is $6 initially + $1.20 per month, per user.
How does Emma survive this cost?
If the percentage of users who pay for a subscription drops below some value, will Emma be forced to become a paid app?
The pricing you are mentioning is well off from what we pay. 
We have also raised $3.1m dollars to date.
No, we are not going to become a paid app - we want mass volume.
At this point, we are making revenue via Emma Pro, Emma Rewards, Switching and a few Referrals.
The other cool thing is we have dropped support for TrueLayer and Saltedge, which we were using in the UK.
I can see a future where we will replace Plaid as well.
When Emma started out, before having mass volume and investment, how did you grow the app? Was there a time when you had to pay the higher price and take a loss until you had enough users to change to Plaid’s mass volume plan?
We were only on TrueLayer (for free) + were using Google Cloud (for free).
The price you are reporting is not close to what it is - any provider charges about 0.15-0.30cent per connection. This goes down with volume. 
That is interesting and a lot less than I expected. So $0.15 to $0.30 is normal for connecting a new account. Is it also $0.30 per month to continue receiving transaction data for an account, or is the monthly price less? (before mass volume is reached)
Edit: I’m finding that even a small change in the monthly cost per item can make or break the net income. With 8000 users, the difference between $0.30 and $0.03 in cost could mean the difference between -$36,000 and $5000 net income. I see why negotiating the price is important, and why you’re working to replace Plaid.
Yeah, but still it’s not that expensive.
For us, replacing all the third parties means faster support, more control over the product and generally speaking a better experience for everyone. 
It also makes my job much easier 
Fun fact about Plaid: they categorize payments to them as Eating Out, using their transactions API. I thought they could get this one correct 
I spoke with Plaid’s growth team recently and they offered $1.25 per initial institution connection + $0.25 per month per institution, and this was their Scale Plan which requires $500 minimum monthly payments. At $1000 minimum, their initial connection cost is still $1.15. It is hard to get into this space as a single developer unfortunately. I will have an app out there but I don’t think people will pay for it lol