Top all-time · #394
Plaid
Company blog · plaid.com/blogprogrammingbusiness
Plaid is the company blog at plaid.com, writing about programming and business. Since 2015, 141 different Hacker News readers have linked it 215 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-12, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 1 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers mostly mention Plaid as a bank-data API and fintech company, linking its pages as sources or for signup and jobs. The one praised item is its API documentation.
- Recommended for · 1 comments
- API docs called 'so well done and documented'.1
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Plaid helps all companies build fintech solutions by making it easy, safe and reliable for people to connect their financial data to apps and services.
Most-linked posts?
- /32 people · 32 mentions · first linked 2015-03-14
- /15 people · 19 mentions · first linked 2016-03-01
- /legal/5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-12-11
- /how-we-handle-data/4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-01-13
- /legal/4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-01-13
- /docs/api/3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-06-24
- /3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-03-14
- /safety/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-04-27
- /security/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-05-09
- /careers2 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2015-07-01
What Hacker News says?
If you have privacy concerns, you can put fraud alerts and put a free credit freeze your credit reports Equifax: https://www.equifax.com/personal/credit-report-services/cred... Experian: https://www.experian.com/freeze/center.html TransUnion: https://www.transunion.com/credit-freeze And also freeze a few other reports NCTUE (utilities and telecom): https://www.nctue.com/consumers ChexSystems (banking): https://www.c…
Comment linking /legal/data-protection-request-form/
on “Tell HN: Salary data is for sale”Submitted Exploring performance differences between Amazon Aurora and vanilla MySQL as a story · 137 points
HN discussionI believe most if not all legitimate companies that ask for your banking credentials (besides your bank, obviously) are just passing them straight to https://plaid.com/ . It's still questionable whether you should trust Plaid with your banking credentials, but at least you probably don't need to trust that Paypal and Mint are both going to store your credentials securely.
Comment linking /
on “Facebook Asking for Some New Users' Email Passwords”Submitted Plaid Layoffs as a story · 56 points
HN discussionI haven't heard any reports of Plaid doing bad stuff with user transaction data, so I suspect there's a bit of paranoia in the comments here. On the other hand, there's an underlying (and valid) concern that handing over bank credentials to a third party is risky and, even assuming good faith from Plaid, they have to store passwords on their servers somehow (probably encrypted). Since they make money from integratio…
Comment linking /security/
on “Facebook Asking for Some New Users' Email Passwords”Submitted A New Architecture for Plaid Link: Server-Driven UI with Directed Graphs as a story · 54 points
HN discussionYou don't even necessarily have to predict earnings. If you've ever connected to your financial account via a service like Plaid or it's ilk, that service has an API endpoint[1] they can call to neatly package up your income information. Sometimes it seems innocuous and unassuming for a one time use like identity verification, or to set up automated payments, or a one off transfer/disbursement. Other times it's for…
Comment linking /products/income/
on “Off-Facebook activity”Submitted Adopting the OpenAPI schema to generate Plaid’s SDKs as a story · 35 points
HN discussionSo you didn't read the article and now you're just throwing out statements without validation? Great, if JPMorgan is selling your data then that's their decision and that's beyond the scope of this convo. We work with partners (Plaid, Snaptrade) who explicitly state that they DO NOT sell user data, and we maintain the same principles: https://plaid.com/safety/ Here is the quote if you're too lazy to read this one to…
Comment linking /safety/
on “Show HN: Wealthfolio 2.0- Open source investment tracker. Now Mobile and Docker”Submitted Sync: A new paradigm for building on transaction data as a story · 27 points
HN discussionPlaid - https://plaid.com/careers San Francisco, CA - Full Time - Software Engineers Plaid is a platform for financial technology applications. We allow developers to build apps like Venmo, Wealthfront, and ZenPayroll that interface with core banking infrastructure. Since launching two years ago, we’ve built integrations with most of the major banks and now power thousands of fintech applications. In the process, we…
Comment linking /careers
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2015)”Submitted Goodbye Dockerfile, Hello Bazel: Doubling Our CI Speed as a story · 20 points
HN discussionhttps://plaid.com/
Comment linking /
on “Privacy – Forget Your Credit Card”Submitted Exploring performance differences between Amazon Aurora and vanilla MySQL as a story · 11 points
HN discussionPlaid.com | Software Engineer, Data Engineer, Product Manager, Designer, or Product Support Engineer | Remote or Onsite (San Francisco). More at https://plaid.com/careers Hey all co-founder of Plaid here. We’re working to democratize financial services by enabling anyone to hook up to their users (or their own) bank accounts. We're live with the top 15 banks in the US - you can check out our docs here ( https://plai…
Comment linking /docs
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2016)”Submitted We grew AI Coding adoption at Plaid as a story · 5 points
HN discussionExcel[0] has this functionality built in via Plaid[1]. There are other solutions like YNAB[2] or Wealthfront[3]. I agree with you though. I have a nice python program for understanding my finances, but I still have to manually update bank/credit card/loan balances. [0] https://plaid.com/blog/microsoft-announcement/ [1] https://plaid.com/ [2] https://www.youneedabudget.com/ [3] https://www.wealthfront.com/
Comment linking /
on “Spreadsheet formulas for personal finance”Submitted Show HN: Remote MCP Server for Plaid Developers on Claude as a story · 4 points
HN discussionREAD: https://plaid.com/legal/#consumers
Comment linking /legal/
on “Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block”Submitted Plaid's Journey from AWS Aurora to TiDB as a story · 4 points
HN discussionTheir link to delete data for CA residents: https://plaid.com/legal/data-protection-request-form/
Comment linking /legal/data-protection-request-form/
on “Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block”Submitted Plaid Layer as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAs someone who's worked in fintech for 10 years, I think this is a bad take. Out of all aggregators (what this is called), Plaid is by far the most open and privacy-forward. First, they're transparent about being a 3rd party that's part of the flow (see https://plaid.com/blog/the-all-new-plaid-link/ ). It's clear it's Plaid, they use neutral colors and not the bank's, etc. They have a portal where you can manage you…
Comment linking /how-we-handle-data/
on “Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block”Submitted Plaid's Journey from AWS Aurora to TiDB as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThey're not hiding the fact. From their website [1]: "When you choose to connect your financial accounts to an app using Plaid, you will be prompted to enter the username and password associated with those accounts. Plaid then links your accounts to the app you want to use so you can share your data." [1] https://plaid.com/how-it-works-for-consumers/
Comment linking /how-it-works-for-consumers/
on “Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block”Submitted How we transform credit card transaction descriptions into API-consumable JSON as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI don't think this is true, and Plaid makes pretty explicit claims that they do not do this, i.e.: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18655417 - https://plaid.com/how-we-handle-data/
Comment linking /how-we-handle-data/
on “Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block”Submitted Plaid Deposit Switch: Automating account funding as a story · 3 points
HN discussionGuess this is related: Plaid blog post 'The Year Ahead' https://plaid.com/blog/the-year-ahead/ ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25754256 )
Comment linking /blog/the-year-ahead/
on “Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block”Submitted Is RAG Dead?: Building a smarter chatbot as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
