[tropshop]

I've been a mint user and YNAB customer with all bank accounts linked, but neither turned out to capture me. I've had some interesting ideas and conversations about budgeting and influencing purchase habits, so I looked into getting access to a real-time transaction log.

I started on your same path, email alerts per bank, but then found it was possible to jump up a level to the payment network using Visa Purchase Alerts. I signed up the alerts to an automated inbox that parses the content for the transaction name, location, amount, and last4. It's working with the first four credit cards I have tried, and I receive the notice generally within seconds.

This works out well for a product targeting U.S. credit card debt. Hopefully MasterCard will follow suit, which is then potentially 100% market coverage, if you can convince a user to signup with an email address of your service.