I'm starting to feel conflicted about these YC deals for priority API access. Yodlee is notoriously expensive and not particularly developer friendly. It's great YC is lessening that burden for their companies, but it's starting to create a competitive advantage that undermines core hacker ethics.

What I'd like to see is YC working with the Yodlees of the world to make their APIs more available to all startups.

Don't turn YC into the next Harvard.

This deal will tend to make that happen. A lot of companies have such high thresholds to use their APIs that they prevent potential customers from getting off the ground. But if deals like this can show them that lowering the thresholds is in their interest, they'll lower them for everyone.

Angels/VCs are about return on investment, not making it easy for other other startups to compete with their portfolio companies.

I like how we can have this comment on the same day as a post titled "Ask HN: Is Y Combinator basically just communism?".

I think it's fair from a hacker ethics perspective as long as it doesn't make it directly harder for others to do the same thing i.e. by being exclusive in some way.

Why is it in YC's interest to do so?

If everyone has access more people will play around and/or be able to create things. Having an idea and applying to YC with "I want API access" probably won't work too well, even if they do "invest in people".

Access to all those otherwise unavailable, expensive or hard to get data and APIs seems to be the second biggest benefit of applying to YC. The first one would of course be access to know-how and network of VCs.

I use an online account aggregator with a large financial institution, which uses Yodlee technology. Does this mean these startups have access to my financial data? What financial data are they sharing?

Does anyone know what this actually means? Yodlee seems to already have a beta of their API available for developers (http://www.finappstore.com/howTo.html). However, it's unclear whether they charge for API access. Perhaps this is a price break for YC companies?

Yes they do. We had a meeting with them and they were looking at around a £10k setup fee along with a separate charge per user per month.

I wonder the same thing. I was considering developing an app for the finappstore but I just don't have time at the moment. Currently all apps plugging into Yodlee must be built on the Adobe flex platform.

One interesting thing is that the developer forums on Yodlee site like pretty desolate. Here is part of a message posted on 8-26-2010 which has zero responses.

"There are almost 200 of you that have gone through the full developer registration process and have access to building and testing applications inside of Yodlee.

There are five applications that have gone through full certification and are available in the Yodlee FinApp store in BETA with another six applications in the process of certification right now.

The forum has been quiet with questions recently, so what are people working on? What's blocking you from moving forward?"

I wonder if people just don't know about this or if the flex platform is deterring developers. It seems pretty cool.

Although these are both turns off for someone using the API, I don't think it's the empty forums or the flex platform that are deterring people. It's the expensive pricing.

I figured something like this would happen soon. Yodlee did it right. When I was doing my own Googling for "bank account API" they quickly came to the front.

This will give future finance-based YCombinator start ups a magnificent head start.

Please tell me that the headline is not accurate -- I hope that they gain access to the APIs/tech, and not to any actual personal financial data.

I highly doubt mint.com's userbase really wants their banking data shared with new startups.

Yodlee already provide a lot of backbone support for a lot of banking institutions, they decided to also make a product out of this ability.

But you as an account owner have to allow access to each individual account, what yodlee do is provide a way do use this account authorisation and pull some or all transactions

Yeah that's what I thought by reading the headline. "I'm really going to see the financial's of a startup in my industry?"....not

this will probably make the next batch of YC applications more finance focused

Maybe YC W11 has some finance-oriented companies in it and YC's taking care of business ahead of time. No doubt this would've been helpful to InDinero over the summer.