Would you use a debt payoff app without bank linking?

Hey everyone, hope you’re having a good weekend.

I wanted to share one of the early product decisions behind MyDebtLens, because it shaped how the app works from the start.

We decided not to require a bank connection.

That means users enter their own debt numbers manually: balances, APRs, minimum payments, due dates, and any extra amount they want to test.

The tradeoff is obvious. Manual entry takes more effort than account syncing.

But for this product, we felt the tradeoff was worth it.

MyDebtLens is meant to help people compare debt payoff paths, such as avalanche, snowball, and custom routes, and understand the monthly pressure and timeline tradeoffs in plain English.

For this first version, we wanted the product to stay focused on clarity, privacy, and user-controlled inputs, not bank linking, lender matching, or financial-product routing.

I’m curious how people here think about that tradeoff:

Would a debt payoff planner without bank linking feel more trustworthy, or would manual entry be too much friction?