Mint, other budgeting services - safe without API?

[Julien Reaux]

I notice several members here use account aggregators like Mint. I'd like to begin doing the same, but my concern is that many banks don't support 'screen-scraping', and they warn customers not to give softwares access to their bank logins. American Express is one example of a company whose terms of service forbid this. Clearly, people do it anyway. But is it entirely at their own risk? If Mint were compromised and your Amex account hacked, would you have zero recourse? 

[Soh Tanaka]

With virtually anything online, there's a risk. That said, I heard an interesting thing on BiggerPockets Money Podcast the other day, and that is it might be riskier NOT to have an account like Mint, as with Mint, you'll have a one-shot access to all the accounts, and you are more likely to check more often and catch suspicious activities, while if you have to go to multiple websites, you are less likely to check that often and may take longer to find out suspicious activities. 

The only issue I have with Mint is that not all the accounts get connected all the time. For different reasons, it gets disconnected, so some level of maintenance will be required.