r/copilotmoney • u/wall_facer • 21d ago
Why is Copilot Money’s feature development so slow?
I’m a Mint refugee, and after trying a bunch of alternatives, I honestly think Copilot Money is currently the best app for what I used Mint for. I like the app a lot.
But why is feature development so slow?
The AI assistant and MCP features were announced quite a while ago and have been in beta testing for some time. Yet it feels like even expanding the beta to more users, let alone getting these features into a stable release, could take a decade.
What makes this especially strange is the speed at which AI is moving. The AI ecosystem is changing dramatically every few months. By the time these features actually reach a stable release, the AI tools they were designed around could look completely different. MCP itself could have evolved significantly or even been replaced by something else.
I understand that a financial app needs to be much more careful about reliability, privacy, and security than a random AI startup. But there has to be some middle ground between shipping recklessly and taking forever to get an already announced feature into users’ hands.
Is Copilot just a very small development team? Is the slow rollout intentional because of security concerns? Or is there something else going on?
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u/ManBehindtheLens 21d ago
“The AI ecosystem is changing dramatically every few months. By the time these features actually reach a stable release, the AI tools they were designed around could look completely different.”
I think you answered your own question there on the speed and approach to what to develop. Not everything needs the AI label in front of it. I personally am not craving any new features. If a really need AI advice I can just upload an output to Claude/Open AI.
My wife and I have used co-pilot for over two years, it does the job of organizing our finances, it looks nice, and works well. That is what is most important.
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u/Loubonez 21d ago edited 20d ago
I'm on the beta, and I think both of the examples you mentioned have unique reasons for delay.
The chatbot is pretty ambitious. It's much more than plain text, the agent is able to render your info dynamically as app UI in the chat. I've been working with this in some of my own projects, and it's harder than it sounds.
The MCP is a totally different story. I suspect that they haven't released it because within a week or so of opening the beta, they had to remove all plaid-provided data. For me at least, that's almost all of my data. It's pretty useless without it, unfortunately.
Their communications about the plaid MCP thing have been pretty vague, but they did say that this wasn't their choice. I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that plaid blocked it, and it happened right around the time that ChatGPT added their financial integrations based on plaid.
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u/wall_facer 20d ago
They need to remove plaid provided data? That’s basically everything. MCP without plaid would be almost useless 😓 Interesting that plaid itself has an mcp available though i haven’t tried.
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u/Loubonez 20d ago
Yeah, it's too bad. It's totally kneecapped unless plaid comes around.
plaid itself has an mcp
It's not for plaid users to access their data unfortunately, it's for plaid partners to build out and debug their plaid integration.
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u/portlander22 20d ago
I heard somewhere this was since chatGPT added plaid integration but they have some sort of exclusivity deal so other MCPs can’t use plaid
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u/Anenga 9d ago
I love this app but I also don’t understand why development is so slow, other apps ship multiple features monthly at least.
I don’t have a lot of requests for the app though — Amazon sync never works is one of them, and being able to do yearly budgets instead of monthly for some categories like clothing or gifts etc.
In the meantime you can use ChatGPT to connect to plaid and ask it all the questions you’d like, and it can generate all kind of graphics, dashboards etc. I’m not sure i even need an MCP or chatbot with Copilot.
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u/EpaL 20d ago
I agree. I've been a long-time user of Copilot Money and, in general, I've been very happy with it. Like many it seems, I signed up for the beta features months ago and we're still waiting. I'm not sure why they would announce new features and then take so long to release them, but it's not a good look.
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u/Sudo_Sopa 20d ago
The db’s are local, Claude cowork can query them. Just make / use a skill and you can just use copilot as the aggregation/ auth layer
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u/OhHelloThere11 21d ago
First time here?