Hey 👋

It’s been a few months since the last update, and a LOT has happened.

For starters, I got endorsed for the innovator founder visa in the UK, and am now full time on Lunch Flow 🎉 Couldn’t have been possible without your support, so thank you 🙏 We’re not breaking even yet, still need a few thousand more users, but I’m optimistic we’ll get there with your help!

I have been quietly building things on the side for the last few months that I’d love to share with you 😄

Platform API - Global financial data connectivity in an evening

I started Lunch Flow because I couldn’t connect my own bank accounts to a budgeting app I really wanted to use. My mission is enable any app builder to build great apps on top of financial data, that are accessible to anyone around the world.

The platform API brings that mission even closer, where you can leverage all the integrations Lunch Flow has through a very simple API. You can even choose to have your end users cover the connection cost, and earn money on every user that signs up through your affiliate link!

We already have tens of apps using this in production, with a few having hundreds of users (shout out, Zerosum!), and the feedback we have been getting has been immensly valuable! Really excited about the future this enables! You can learn more about the integration here.

Bring your Lunch Flow connections to any SimpleFIN powered app!

Through our new destination, you can now connect your Lunch Flow connections to any app that supports SimpleFIN as a source 😄 (Yes, including Actual Budget 😄 No need for a separate script anymore). Learn more here.

Institution Notes - powered by thousands of connections & conversations

Open banking is far from perfect, and now that we manage over ten thousand connections, and had thousands of conversations with users, we have insight into a lot of institution nuances, and we now surface this data before you set up a connection, to improve your chances of a successful connection and reduce the need to contact support.

New site design & docs pages

Updated our website to make the key information and capabilities more accessible. The homepage got a full redesign, new sections for the different use cases and embedded coverage search.

On the docs side, we moved from Mintlify to a self-hosted setup with Fumadocs and interactive OpenAPI docs. Everything now lives under lunchflow.app/docs with Guides and API Reference tabs side by side, covering both the personal and platform APIs.

There have also been numerous smaller improvements to Lunch Flow in the past few months, between internal observability and infrastructure improvements, addressing smaller bugs and tweaks, and adding quality of live improvements, but this update is already long enough to list them 😅

As always, do keep the feedback coming!

Hey 👋

Been a while since the last update 😄 I have been sneaking in work whenever I get permission from my 11-month old boss.

Somehow, we now have nearly a thousand people using Lunch Flow 🤯, and I am truly humbled by the feedback people have been sharing, makes the effort worth it 🙏 keep it coming!

Next stop: 5k users.

Got a lot of exciting updates to share!

Meet Roaa, our operations manager

After trying to take a few days off with family a couple of months ago, and coming back to a long message queue and unanswered questions, I was convinced that I may be able to go fast alone, but if I wanted to go far, I needed a team.

Roaa brings experience from another company aggregating multiple providers, CarsXE, and has been doing a great job learning about open banking and bringing some sense of order into a very chaotic world (with 20k+ institutions supported, I’m still learning about new errors every week 😅 ). Here’s an intro from her in her own words:

Hey! I’m Roaa. After graduating and working in dentistry, I realized that path wasn't the best fit for me and that I could do much more. I decided to shift my career into operations, where I’ve been able to succeed by figuring things out on my own and building my experience from the ground up. Successfully managing those challenges confirmed that I’m at my best in operations, and I'm happy to help you all!

Welcome to the team, Roaa 🎉

New Integrations Directory 📖

I’ve been having lots of interesting conversations with people looking to allow users of their apps to connect their banks using Lunch Flow, covering many use cases across personal finance, property management, tax filing, and more…

but there’re already a lot of people who have live integrations using our existing API keys. You can find this growing directory here, including a way to submit your app for listing there.

Additionally, I am actively scoping out a more seamless integration and will be slowly enabling access for people, some ideas are:

• A connection widget and OAuth flow (no copying around API keys).

• Ability to cover costs for end users (pricing for apps is different from the end user pricing).

• Ability to track interest across banks that are not supported yet.

If you’re interested in this, simply hit reply and tell me more about what you’re building and where your users are 😄

Remote MCP with scoped permissions

After Smithery deprecated their hosted MCP service, I took this as an opportunity to build our own remote server, while improving the tools available (ensuring parity with our API), and also enabling specifying which specific accounts you want to give your AI client access to.

This opened up a world of possibilities since then! One of my favorite use cases so far has been using a scheduled daily task in Claude that gives me an overview of my bank balances and an analysis of all transactions that happened over the past day.

Excited to see what you come up with 😄

Enabling date filters for account transactions

Long overdue, I know 😅 but became especially important with the AI integration to avoid bloating the context window.

Limiting API keys to specific accounts

Many of you shared that they use Lunch Flow to connect to multiple destinations, and they wanted the ability to limit which accounts are available to each, so now, you can very easily manage this within the dashboard!

Looking ahead 🔭

• Quite excited about the potential for the improved integration with other apps. Lunch Flow started because someone built a great financial experience (Lunch Money) that I couldn’t fully experience because it didn’t integrate with my bank. I can see many others have great ideas that also die at the open banking hill. I’d love to solve that.

• I’m also investing a lot into our security posture and working with an external auditor on our SoC II compliance, more on that soon.

As always, very keen to hear from you on how Lunch Flow has been for you and what could be improved 😄 and if you’re liking Lunch Flow, a testimonial is always much appreciated!

Hey 👋

Hope you’re all having a great weekend!

The last 2 weeks have been quite interesting!

• Spending more time with family in Egypt.

• Trying to scale my productivity systems to handle the increased growth of Lunch Flow, work and life commitments (Advice welcome!).

• My son now has 2 teeth which he loves applying to my fingers, expect less frequent updates if I’m unsuccessful in distracting him.

Lots of exciting updates to share 😄

SnapTrade - Global Brokerage Coverage 🏦

As I shared with you before, Lunch Flow’s mission is to make your financial data a lot more accessible, and that goes beyond bank coverage. To build on top of our recent investment data support, I’m excited to partner with the SnapTrade team to bring integrations with brokerages to Lunch Flow.

This is particularly exciting because even though we had a couple of brokerages supported through MX & Finicity already (like Fidelity and WealthSimple), SnapTrade integrates with global brokerages, such as:

• AJ Bell & Robinhood in the UK.

• Bux & Degiro in the EU.

• CommSec & Stake in Australia.

• Upstox & Zerodha in India.

• Global brokerages like Trading212, Coinbase and Binance.

and more, you can find their full coverage is here.

The integration is now in beta, and would love your feedback on it!

YNAB Integration 🌳

A couple of years ago, I was looking for alternatives to my home grown spreadsheet as things were getting out of hand 😅 I came across YNAB and found it to be an excellent opinionated budgeting app! Even though they didn’t have multi-currency support, which was a key requirement for me, I ended up reading their documentation cover to cover, and going through all their Youtube videos!

I’m excited to be able to bring support for YNAB to Lunch Flow! Which would augment YNAB’s native bank coverage with more regions, or offer better support for US institutions like Fidelity through MX and Finicity. Again, thank you to all the early testers of this integration!

More Account Settings ⚙️

Easily, the most exciting update of all three 😛

More to the ‘last mile’ problem with financial data, where the data you get from open banking providers needs some processing before it’s usable to you, you can now do more of that processing inside of Lunch Flow!

You now can:

• Customize the merchant & description fields for all providers (previously only available for GoCardless) (Feedback post)

  • including access to detailed transaction information from MX.

• Override currencies for balances and transactions (Feedback post).

• Reverse sign on transaction amounts (Feedback post).

If there’re any additional controls you need, let me know on the feedback board 😄

In addition to these updates, I made a few fixes and improvements:

• Show pending transactions in the UI

• Switch default Sure integration to the new integration built into Sure (Feedback post)

• Fixed broken redirect URL for Finverse.

Top of mind

Lunch Flow is growing steadily, which is very motivating, I’m thinking of how to ensure this growth is sustainable and repeatable, by:

1. Enhancing Support Systems: Given the fragile nature of integrations, support can take quite a toll, so always thinking about the best way to streamline that. Currently working on a couple of exciting updates that I hope to be able to share soon.

2. Expanding Lunch Flow’s coverage: Be it more sources or destinations, I’m always exploring more ways to make financial data accessible to more people. If you have any sources or destinations you’d love to see integration in Lunch Flow, let me know on the feedback board 😄

That will be all for this update. Thank you for reading this far!

And as always, if you have any additional feedback or questions, I’m only a message away 😄