Big-five bank plus a credit union, and roughly every six weeks one of the connections drops and needs re-authenticating, sometimes losing a few days of transactions on the way. I'm already on a paid app so this isn't a free-tier problem. I'm willing to switch or go fully manual, I just want to stop discovering three weeks later that data is missing. CAD 150 a year is fine.
The silent-gap part is what I'd chase rather than the reconnection frequency. Some apps warn you loudly when a connection has been stale for more than a couple of days and some just quietly show you a smaller number. That single behaviour is worth more than any feature list.
I went manual for exactly this reason and it's been better. Weekly CSV export from both banks, drop into the app, ten minutes. No re-auth, no silent gaps, and I read the transactions instead of trusting a chart built on top of them.
Manual also means you notice the subscription you forgot about, because you're reading every line rather than skimming a summary.
Credit unions are consistently the worst for this in my experience, regardless of app. If yours only holds a small balance, consider not connecting it at all and adding one manual entry a month instead.
Whatever you land on, export your history before you switch anything. I moved apps and lost three years of categorised data because I assumed the export would be complete and it wasn't.
@coast_fi_casey · 4w ago · 3 replies
The re-auth churn is mostly upstream of whichever app you use, because aggregators are still scraping a lot of Canadian institutions rather than using a sanctioned API. The framework meant to fix that was legislated in 2024, oversight moved to the Bank of Canada in the 2025 budget, and read access was targeted for early 2026 with payment initiation later. It has slipped, and the big banks are the mandatory participants, so a credit union is likely to be last in line regardless.
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@late_stage_phd · 4w ago
So the honest answer is that this is structural and switching apps moves the problem rather than solving it. Depressing but genuinely useful.
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@pressure_tank_pru · 4w ago
Not entirely. Different aggregators handle specific Canadian institutions better or worse, so which app you pick does change which bank breaks. Just don't expect any of them to be clean.
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