Lifehacker just posted a great review of Wesabe. (Disclosure: O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures is an investor and I am a board member at Wesabe. Marc Hedlund, also a Radar blogger, is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer. I know he’s going to be too bashful to toot his own horn, so I’ll take on the job.) Lifehacker picked up on some key points that are not just about the product itself:
I love their mission, community, and their desire to continually improve the site. I am confident in their privacy policy, believe they will protect my data, and like that I can take my data with me if I want. I will not be returning to Microsoft Money, Quicken, GnuCash, or Mint anytime soon!
Wesabe has the benefit of one customer in mind: the individual who is trying to manage his or her money and reach financial goals. This has led them to take a very strong stance on security and privacy, user control over data, and customer-facing business model. Do you really want a financial application whose business model is based on serving advertisers rather than serving customers? Many of the choices made (e.g. building their own uploaders and tools for users to automate their own data uploading rather than relying on third party services like every other financial application, eschewing advertising, etc.) come from this singular focus on making sure that the user comes first.
Personally, I like Wesabe because it is much easier to spot unexpected charges on my credit card bill than on the statement the bank provides, and because it lets me review my bank accounts and credit cards in one place.
But I like even more where I know it’s going. Marc and Jason, the founders, have a deep understanding of Web 2.0 principles. Wesabe is building a collective intelligence application that will automatically get better over time. The more people use it, the richer its feature set will get. So in addition to all its current benefits, there are very cool things rolling out next year as the user base gets to sufficient scale…