Hello Product Hunt! I'm the founder of Lemon. I started Lemon because I wanted to teach (Lemon comes from "Learn Money") and because I was tired of other PFMs peddling products and services that weren't a fit for me. You'll never see an advertiser disclosure on Lemon because we don't earn commissions on products.
Let us know what you think of the app and your feed.
@bglasauer Hey Barrett. Check out my answer to Bill's question.
I like Mint (long time user), but always found it a bit unsettling that Mint can say they have "advice" for you when it's nothing other than a product referral. This is their advertiser disclosure: "The credit card offers that appear on this site are from credit card companies from which Mint.com receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site, including, for example, the order in which they appear. Mint.com does not include all credit card companies or all available credit card offers."
That is wild. And that will never be on the Lemon site!
@robinraszka We do show some offers based on you spending with the hope that it might save you money in the future. The long term vision is to increase financial literacy, which I see as a combination of 1) understanding where your money goes, 2) ways to save, 3) ways to earn more, and 4) ways to educate yourself about your current finances or a product you might be considering.
The first version of Lemon was very much like DuoLingo. It was an interactive, spaced repetition learning tool, but for personal finance instead of a language. I found it to be a bit abstract, so the scope broadened to allow connecting accounts. This allowed for more specific advice and insights.
These are a few more of the types of messages we're considering for the feed: https://lemon.co/l/advice
There's been a ton of underwhelming products in this space and as someone who worked in consumer finance I'm generally not that big of a fan of most PFMs. Lemon's the first one that's really impressed me and I'm excited to see how the develops it further.
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What makes Lemon unique or better than the current products in the market, besides the lack of paid referrals? I'm a long time Quicken user, would love to switch to something else.
@billhendricksjr Hey Bill. Great question. The lack of paid lead generation is indeed a big difference. It allows us to focus on building a great product and generating *unbiased* insights / advice / suggestions without worrying about trying to convince you to click on a product referral. It also allows us to produce content (and target it to you based on your profile and spending) in the same way. For example, we spent three months determining the best online checking account https://lemon.co/l/boca ... we can't do that if the highest bidder is influencing our content.
Much of what we're working on is forward looking. Summaries of last week and daily wrap ups are great (we have one), but we're also focusing on what tomorrow, next week, and next year look like for you. And it's all delivered in a style we're all used to consuming-- a reverse chron feed.
@jmsuth Thanks, Jon! We use both plaid.com and yodlee.com which are aggregators that most apps like Lemon use. We never store any of your personal credentials (bank logins). We simply pass them along once and then discard them.
Any plans to support UK accounts? Looks like a lovely interface. Conveying this kind of data in a way the average consumer can digest is definitely a challenge!
@jamesdevonport Hey James. I agree! Our challenge is to make checking in on your finances not feel like you're "eating spinach." If all goes well in the US, I would love to add support for European countries and also translate the app + website into Spanish.
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This looks really good. I can't wait for the android/web version.
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Is there an email list we can sign up for to get a notification about the release of the android version?
UI/UX tip: It was very un-obvious that you could search for additional banks beyond the listed ones. I assumed those were the only supported banks.
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I also recommend being a little smarter when sending messages like "there's no reason to pay a $ fee to have an account" when it relates to things like annual fees on premium travel cards. I have them for a reason, because I reap many times in rewards the cost of the annual fee. That generic messaging tends to make me to view a platform as less intelligent.
@orienwu Agreed on the messaging. I wrote that one. It's intended to be for checking/savings. I myself have a hotel card that has a $395 fee that is more than worth it. Thanks for the feedback!
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@jbs Awesome! Really good start, I will be making active use of Lemon and seeing where it goes :)
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So my first question with all of these kinds of apps is always: What financial institutions do you support? 99% of the time, my bank isn't supported because I choose not to use popular ones like Chase, Wells Fargo, etc.
@unseenvision Hey Patrick. You can search for your bank. Here's a screenshot of what it looks like: The main banks are listed first, but we support almost 20,000 and I suspect yours will be there. Let us know if it's not.
@jbs hey.. I've connected all my accounts and I'm loving the"simpleness" of the app. Kudos to you and the team. But looking at this comment, I realized Aspiration (aspiration.com) wasn't amongst the banks listed. Is it possible to add that? Thank you and keep up the awesome work!
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