Login automation as a product?
Hey everybody,
I recently created a login automation script in Ruby/Selenium to automatically login to my online bank accounts and paste the balances to Google Sheets via their API, freeing me from manually login in and checking balances each month. After telling a few friends, they all said they wished they had a script that could do the same as web login's are a nuisance for them as well.
This got me thinking, could this actually be turned into a product? And does a product like this already exist? (I didn't find anything on Google). Would this be considered web scraping and violate their ToS or would it legally be in the clear?
Seems like it would be hard to find a large enough market. For all the people who think a script like that would be useful there are 1000 more who would rather just sign into a service that does it for them (e.g. personal finance software like YNAB).
And then for all the people who think it sounds useful, only 1:10 would actually use it on a regular basis. And probably fewer would be willing to pay for it.
And then there is the discoverability issue as well. Are people actively looking for that as a solution?
I don't mean to throw a damp towel on your idea, but it sounds like you have some very useful skills. I think that if you applied those to a different area you would see a lot more (and easier) success rather than trying to make this one work.
One such idea might be to teach people how to create scripts like this. Depending on how you did it, it might be one step above the no-code solutions that are really popular right now. So having a course around this type of material maybe useful. (I'm saying this with zero knowledge of what that market looks like right now.)
Thanks for your reply.
I agree that it would probably be a hard sell to any potential users since its functionality is covered by personal finance software.
Regarding teaching others how to create scripts like this, there's actually quite a lot of free tutorials on Google already doing just that, but good idea nonetheless.
I'll keep exploring other areas that might be a good fit for this.
Right, I remember apps like Yodlee/Mint had that functionality. I forgot to mention another feature with my implementation is you get a glimpse of the past month's charges to check if theres anything that shouldn't be there since the page is kept open for a few seconds.
I actually tried to go the API route at first since most of my financial institutions do have an API, however its only available to their partners, not to Joe-account-holder. But good to know the accepted way that personal finance software does it.