The secure bridge between BalVault and your bank — without storing your credentials.
SimpleFIN Bridge is an independent third-party service that connects to your financial institutions, handles authentication (including multi-factor authentication), and provides a clean, read-only data feed that apps like BalVault can use.
Think of it as the plumbing between your bank and your budgeting tools. Instead of every app having to figure out how to log into every bank website — and instead of you having to trust every app with your bank passwords — SimpleFIN does the heavy lifting once, and apps consume the standardized output.
SimpleFIN Bridge is not made by BalVault. It's a separate service from a different company. We chose it because it's the most privacy-respecting, developer-friendly financial data aggregator available.
This is a separate subscription from BalVault. BalVault itself is a one-time $29 purchase.
Web scraping is fragile. Banks change their login pages, add CAPTCHAs, require 2FA codes — and each of those breaks a scraper. Maintaining scrapers for dozens of banks is a full-time engineering job, and it still leaves you with a tool that quietly stops working overnight.
SimpleFIN Bridge handles all of that:
By building on SimpleFIN, BalVault stays small, reliable, and focused on what it does best: getting your balances into your spreadsheet.
Go to beta-bridge.simplefin.org and create an account. You'll need an email address and a payment method for the $1.50/month subscription.
Use SimpleFIN's interface to search for your bank and link your accounts. You'll go through your bank's normal login and 2FA process — this is the only time you enter bank credentials. SimpleFIN stores them securely so apps don't have to.
In your SimpleFIN dashboard, find the "Setup Token" or "Bridge Token" section. Copy that token — it's a long string that looks like a password. This is what you paste into BalVault.
SimpleFIN Bridge provides read-only access to your account data. It cannot move money, initiate transfers, or make changes to your accounts. This is by design — it's an aggregation service, not a banking service.
Your SimpleFIN token is stored only on your computer, inside BalVault's local SQLite database. Neither BalVault nor SimpleFIN uploads your financial data to any cloud storage you haven't explicitly chosen (like if you choose to save your CSV to Google Drive yourself).
For SimpleFIN's full privacy policy and security details, visit beta-bridge.simplefin.org.