When I see a well-designed, feature rich web app that fills a specific niche, I get a glowing feeling in my being. I spend a lot of time using it, tweaking it, and altogether having a ball. So when I stumbled on Mint (www.mint.com), I marvelled at the Ajax goodness and fluid responsiveness of the user interface, and above all, how customers can for the first time see their financial status in technicolor charts. This had to be good, as I for one was very unaware of my spending trends at best of times. Then, like most beautifully crafted web services, Mint did not cross the American border. And, Mint would not allow manual upload of a statement downloaded from my bank either. So, I was stuck.

On further research, I came across Kublax, a UK based service. Though I signed up and connected to my Natwest account promptly, I quickly became disillusioned with the buggy data processing. Even after two years, they are no better. And their customers are tearing their hair out.

Then came Buxfer (www.buxfer.com), with a fluid Ajax UI, and ability to semi-automatically upload bank statements using a Firefox plugin. I used it extensively, and it helped me manage my finances much more effectively. However, after over a year of using it, I began to get tired of its cluttered and dated design. I began to look around again. I revisited an old site I had seen some while back, Wesabe (www.wesabe.com)

To my surprise, they had rebranded and created a great and fluid UI. Still no support for Natwest in the UK, but the design was enough to make me change to wesabe. One bonus thing however was the App’s ability to automatically parse a combined download of all of my different Natwest into different accounts. For now, I am as happy as I would be if using Mint.