An Open Banking API for Personal Use: Meet Endute Connect

Your bank knows everything about your money, and it will show you any of it, whenever you like, in its app, on its terms. Ask for that same data as JSON, something a script or a spreadsheet or a weekend project could actually use, and you hit a wall. No export endpoint. No developer page for customers. The closest thing on offer is a CSV download, assembled by hand and stale the moment it lands. For years, an open banking API for personal use was something plenty of people wanted and almost nobody offered.

We've just launched one. Endute Connect is a read-only API for your own bank and investment accounts, built on the same engine that powers the Endute app. Before the details, it's worth being clear about why this gap existed at all.

Bank data APIs were built for companies

Open banking itself is a success story. Banks across the UK and Europe are required to expose account data through regulated interfaces, North America has mature bank data networks of its own, and millions of people already rely on this plumbing without ever thinking about it. We've covered how it all works in Open Banking Explained.

But access to that plumbing was designed with one customer in mind: companies. To read bank data you either become a regulated provider yourself, an authorisation process that makes sense for a fintech and none at all for a person, or you go through an aggregation platform. And aggregation platforms are business products. Sales conversations, contracts, volume pricing, onboarding calls. If you're building an app with fifty thousand users, that's Tuesday. If you're one person who wants your own current account as JSON, you were never the customer anyone had in mind.

Developers have been pointing this out for years. Terence Eden's 2023 post asking why there's no open banking API for personal use put it plainly: the data is yours and the rails exist, yet there was no sensible way in. A small wave of tools has recently started closing the gap, which we think is exactly the right direction. Connect is our contribution.

A read-only API for your own bank data

Endute Connect gives you one REST API for the accounts you actually hold. Balances, account details and transactions from thousands of banks across the UK, Europe, the US and Canada. Holdings, cash positions and activity history from a growing list of investment brokers. You authenticate with your bank directly, over the same regulated connections the Endute app uses, and from then on your data is one authenticated HTTP request away.

The surface is small and deliberate: accounts, balances, transactions and connections on the banking side, with connections, accounts, positions and activities for investments. Transactions go deep, too. When you link a bank, Connect captures as much history as the bank will serve, often around two years, and the feed only grows from there. Each account tells you how far back its data reaches, so your code never has to guess.

Read-only is the design, not a setting. Connect can see accounts, balances and transactions; it cannot move money, initiate a payment, or change anything at your bank, because the connections it is built on do not allow it to. Keys are scoped to you and only you. We store a hash of each key rather than the key itself, so the secret never sits in our database.

Everything is served under a versioned contract with a published OpenAPI specification, so you can generate a typed client instead of hand-writing one. The endpoint reference shows the exact shapes before you sign up for anything.

What you can build with it

Small, personal, useful things. The software nobody ships as a product because the market is exactly one person.

A dashboard on the kitchen tablet showing every balance you hold, across four banks and two brokers, refreshed while the kettle boils. Or a script that appends yesterday's transactions to a spreadsheet before you wake up. Maybe a net worth tracker that finally includes your investments, since brokerage positions arrive through the same API as bank balances. An alert when a particular direct debit leaves. Some people will pipe their transactions into an AI assistant and ask it what happened last month. Whatever your spreadsheet does today, fed by real data instead of Sunday-evening copy and paste.

Transactions arrive enriched. Alongside the raw bank text you get a merchant name and a category, so you work with clean names rather than writing regular expressions against strings like CRV*4429 STRBKS LDN. It's the same enrichment pipeline the Endute app runs on every import, included in every Connect response.

It works with Actual Budget out of the box

You don't have to write code at all. Connect implements SimpleFIN, a small open protocol that budgeting tools use to pull bank feeds. Any app that speaks it can read your Connect data from a single pasted token, and we verified the flow end to end with Actual Budget, the open-source budgeting tool with a devoted self-hosting community.

The setup takes about a minute. Generate a token on the Connect portal's bank sync page, paste it into Actual Budget's bank sync settings, choose your accounts. No server to run, no scripts to schedule, no CSV exports. Transactions land in Actual with merchant names attached, from UK, European, US and Canadian banks alike, and you can revoke a token from the portal at any time.

Self-hosted budgeting has always had a data problem: the software is free and excellent, and getting bank data into it is neither. That's the exact gap this closes. The bank sync guide has the full walkthrough.

Start in the sandbox, pay per account

You can try the entire API without connecting a bank. The portal provisions a sandbox bank on request: deterministic fake accounts with realistic, slowly changing data, served through every endpoint with exactly the same response shapes as live data. No card, no cost. And the sandbox doesn't expire; it's a standing free tier for tinkering, not a trial with a clock.

Live usage is priced per connected account, bank and investment alike, with no API call charges and no tiers to decode. Deactivate an account and it stops billing while its history stays available, so an experiment never turns into a standing cost. Current prices are on the Connect page.

That per-account shape keeps Connect what it's meant to be: a personal finance API in the literal sense. Every key and token is tied to your own accounts. It isn't a platform for serving other people's bank data, and it doesn't try to be.

Getting started

Three steps. Create a free account on the Connect portal. Provision the sandbox and create an API key, which is shown exactly once, so copy it somewhere safe. Call the accounts endpoint and watch your JSON come back. The quickstart walks through transactions, pagination and linking your first real bank from there.

If you already subscribe to Endute, API access is included with your subscription, and you'll find key management inside the app itself rather than the Connect portal.

We built Endute because seeing all of your money in one place changes how you manage it. Connect takes the same idea one step further. The data was always yours. Now you can build with it.