Why FinTarget Doesn't Connect to Your Bank (And Why That's the Point)

There's a version of this post where we dress this up as a bold privacy stance. Where we talk about data sovereignty and open banking risks and make ourselves sound principled and a little heroic.

But honestly? The main reason is simpler than that.

We wanted to make sure we never had to charge you just to get started.

The cost of "connecting your accounts"

Most personal finance platforms that offer bank and broker integrations aren't doing it out of generosity. Data aggregation infrastructure is expensive. The APIs that pull your transactions in real time, the compliance requirements around storing financial credentials, the engineering overhead of maintaining connections to dozens of institutions. It all adds up fast.

So those platforms charge. Anywhere from $10 to $30 a month, sometimes more. Which sounds reasonable until you remember that the person most likely to benefit from a finance tracker is someone who's just starting out. Someone getting their first few ASX stocks, trying to figure out what a franking credit is, wondering if their super contributions are on track.

Those are exactly the people who get priced out.

The real barrier to entry isn't features, it's the paywall

We've seen this play out. Someone decides they want to get serious about tracking their finances. They find a platform that looks good. They hit a subscription prompt before they've even entered a single transaction.

A meaningful number of them just close the tab.

Not because they can't afford $15 a month. But because they don't yet know if the tool is worth it. They haven't built the habit. They don't have the data in there. The value isn't visible yet, and you're being asked to pay before it is.

That friction compounds. The tools that would most benefit people who are just starting to engage with their money are the most likely to push them away at the door.

That's the problem we designed around. FinTarget has a free plan: not a trial, not a teaser, but a genuine tier for people who are tracking their finances and don't need anything fancy. We're building paid features for users who want more, but the core experience of understanding where your money is will always be accessible without a subscription. The goal was never to gate the basics.

Manual entry isn't a limitation, it's a feature

We know what you're thinking. Manual entry sounds like a chore.

And look, we're not going to pretend it's zero effort. When you make a trade, you add it. When you get a dividend, you record it. When you open a term deposit, you enter it.

But here's what we've found: the act of manual entry is part of what makes tracking valuable. When you type in a transaction, you're paying attention to it. You notice patterns. You see the numbers. The friction of entry is actually the friction of engagement, and that's not nothing.

If you're processing hundreds of automated transactions every week, FinTarget probably isn't the right fit for you, and that's genuinely fine. We're not trying to be everything to everyone. But for the self-directed investor who makes deliberate decisions about where their money goes, manual entry isn't a burden. It's accurate, it's deliberate, and it's what most people are already doing in a spreadsheet anyway.

On the privacy front: we'd be doing you a disservice if we dismissed this entirely. There's a genuine benefit here, even if it wasn't the primary motivation. Your bank login never touches our servers. We don't hold financial credentials, we don't aggregate your data, and we don't share anything with third parties. Your information isn't used to train models or sold to advertisers. When you close your browser, nothing in FinTarget is pinging your bank or talking to a data aggregator in the background. That's worth something, even if it wasn't the headline reason we built things this way.

What we built instead

The decision not to connect to your bank was primarily a commercial one: if we had built on top of data aggregation infrastructure, we could not have offered a free tier. The cost would have been passed on. That was a line we did not want to cross.

But the decision also reflects who we were building for.

Bank-connected platforms tend to optimise for automation: pulling in transactions, categorising your spending, surfacing patterns you were not actively looking for. That is a reasonable product for someone who has never tracked their finances and wants the app to do the heavy lifting.

We were not building for that person.

We were building for the person who already has a spreadsheet. The one with a tab for their CommSec holdings, another for monthly expenses, maybe a third where they track their super balance and try to project what it will look like at 60. They already know roughly where their money is going. They are already paying attention. They just want something better than a grid of cells to do it in.

That person does not need automation. They need a proper home for the tracking they are already doing.

So instead of building around bank feeds, we built around the questions self-directed investors and budgeters are actually trying to answer: how are my ASX and international holdings performing, what does my dividend income look like across the year, is my super growing at the right rate, and what does my total net worth look like when you add everything up?

The CSV import means you can bring your trade history straight out of CommSec, SelfWealth, or any broker that exports a file. Franking credit tracking is there because Australian investors genuinely need it. Super is a first-class module because it is a meaningful part of your net worth, not an afterthought. The cashflow view pulls income and expenses together so you can see whether you are actually getting ahead each month.

None of that required a bank connection. And all of it is available without paying a cent.

Who FinTarget is for

FinTarget is for people who want to move away from the spreadsheet without losing the clarity a spreadsheet gave them.

People who care about their cashflow and want to see it properly. People who are managing their own investments across ASX and international markets. People who want their super, their portfolio, their income, and their expenses all in one place rather than scattered across four tabs in a workbook they have to update manually every month anyway.

If that sounds like you, give it a go. No credit card required, no trial clock ticking down. Set up your portfolio, log a month of expenses, and see what it looks like when it is all in one place.

You do not need a bank connection to understand your money. You just need somewhere better than a spreadsheet to put it.

If you have feedback, we would genuinely like to hear it. Reach us at hello@fintarget.app.