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The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

(www.honest-broker.com)
451 points imartin2k | 2 comments | 06 Jul 25 06:19 UTC | HN request time: 0.661s | source
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linsomniac ◴[06 Jul 25 14:42 UTC] No.44481196[source]▶
My fintech bank, Qube, is running some sort of croudfunded investment round to add AI. It's super interesting to me in a number of ways. https://www.startengine.com/offering/qube-money

The top of the list has got to be that one of their testimonials presented to investors is from "DrDeflowerMe". It's also interesting to me because they list financials which position them as unbelievably tiny: 6,215 subscribing accounts, 400 average new accounts per month, which to me sounds like they have a lot of churn.

I'm in my third year of subscribing and I'm actively looking for a replacement. This "Start Engine" investment makes me even more confident that's the right decision. Over the years I've paid nearly $200/year for this and watched them fail to deliver basic functionality. They just don't have the team to deliver AI tooling. For example: 2 years ago I spoke with support about the screen that shows you your credit card numbers being nearly unreadable (very light grey numbers on a white background), which still isn't fixed. Around a year ago a bunch of my auto transfers disappeared, causing me hundreds of dollars in late fees. I contacted support and they eventually "recovered" all the missing auto-transfers, but it ended up with some of them doubled up, and support stopped responding when I asked them to fix that.

I question if they'll be able to implement the changes they want, let alone be able to support those features if they do.

replies(1): >>44481971 #
1. djrj477dhsnv ◴[06 Jul 25 16:14 UTC] No.44481971[source]▶
Your personal bank has 6,215 customers? How could they possibly cover the costs of even 1 employee?
replies(1): >>44490610 #
2. linsomniac ◴[07 Jul 25 14:16 UTC] No.44490610[source]▶
With ~$600K/year of subscription revenue? I don't know how much they make on other bank-like functions, but I assume it's not nothing because other banks seem to survive without charging subscription fees.

I was hoping that, after going through a number of other "advanced money management" fintech banks over the years and them selling out, that going with a place that I directly paid to use would allow it to sustain independently and add features, but it seems like the other scenario I worried about became the issue: The subscription fee severely limited their membership pool.