Plaid was originally a budgeting app. After realizing how terrible banking APIs are, they pivoted to building a developer-friendly banking API. Now their valuation is 10B+.
So what goes wrong with budgeting apps? Sounds like there would be a huge market for personal (or small business) finance, targeting traditional CPA/CFP approaches.
I can't find sources but having made a budgeting app in the past have first-hand experience from being in the domain.
Small businesses are well catered for with tools like Xero, QuickBooks etc.
There's a psychological issue of people treating their budgeting app as the bearer of bad news (shooting the messenger effect), which results in churn.
There's also a high correlation between people looking for budgeting solutions being in a bad financial standing which makes the justification of paying for the software less likely.
That is not that interesting. It's something everyone realizes when they try make a budgeting app. Plaid decided to break the rules to create a product. They collected end users authentication details and pretended to be them to scrape data from financial institutions.
