Hi, all. Charlie, from PearBudget. Wanted to thank Mark for the post, and wanted to quickly comment to post #1 (and a little to #11), about the difference between PearBudget and Mint.

First, it's not a zero-sum game; it's not like once you sign up with one service, you're committed forever. You can sign up for Mint (or Wesabe, or MoneyCenter, or other free services), and try PearBudget out for free, with very little hassle. Try them out. See how they meet your needs. It's quite possible that one of the other services will be better for you. Ultimately, we want you to find a tool that works best for you, whether that's with PearBudget or with someone else (or with some combination of different tools). Remember ... it's free to try them out.

While most of the other online personal finance tools are trying to be a replacement for Quicken, PearBudget's sole focus is on expense tracking and budgeting. That's it. It's possible you need a full-on home accounting application, with investment tracking, net worth calculations, debt paydown calculators, et al. But all we want PearBudget to do is to give you a simple tool for budgeting and expense tracking. If you're new to personal finance, PearBudget's a good place to start. Also, interestingly, we haven't seen a budgeting tool at any of the other apps that begins to compare with PearBudget's ease of use.

Finally, about the auto-categorization. We've seen in our own use of Mint and other sites (yeah ... we have accounts there), that auto-categorization only works about 75-80% of the time. And we don't know which 20-25% is wrong. So we still have to go through, line by line, and make sure it's accurate. It's easier for us (and most people, it turns out) to handle it all by hand. Even if that seems like a burden, it's not much of one: 15 minutes a week or so. Getting back to what we wrote in that note to Mark, we wanted to be in control of our finances.

Sorry that went on so long. Please feel free to shoot me an e-mail if you have any other questions (charlie [at] pearbudget [dot] com), and I'd be happy to answer them. And, of course, it's easy to create a free account at PearBudget and see how it works. Thanks for reading this, and, again, to Mark for the post.