The connected budget app makes an implicit argument: the friction of manual entry is too high, so we'll remove it. Connect your bank, and your transactions appear automatically. The appeal is obvious. The trade-off is usually not fully understood by the people making it.
When you connect a financial app to your bank account, your data passes through a financial data aggregator — Plaid, MX, Finicity, or similar. These companies exist in the middle of the transaction, collecting your financial data and making it available to apps that pay for the service. Your relationship with the aggregator is governed by their privacy policy, not the app's.
The data you're actually giving away
A bank feed connection gives the aggregator your complete transaction history: every purchase, every transfer, every payroll deposit, every subscription, every ATM withdrawal. This is more comprehensive financial information about you than most people share with anyone. Reporting on financial data aggregators has revealed that this data has been used for purposes beyond stated use cases — credit scoring, insurance underwriting, targeted advertising, and sale to third parties.
Your financial data. Your device. Only. Free forever.
What manual entry actually costs
The argument for bank connection rests on the assumption that manual entry is prohibitively burdensome. In practice, 30 seconds per transaction is not a significant burden — it produces a much richer record than automated import. "STARBUCKS $8.47" tells you almost nothing. "Coffee $8, fourth today, deadline week, the caffeine isn't even working anymore" tells you something about a pattern. The manual entry is slower and better in every dimension except speed.
moneytyping's no-bank-connection architecture is a deliberate choice: your financial data lives on your device, is readable only by you, and never passes through an aggregator's systems. There is nothing to aggregate, sell, or breach.