I just got the email from Onedox confirming it’s all stopping. I’m guessing that most people just stopped using the service as soon as they said they would start charging. And that was the beginning of the end. Shame as I found it useful.
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Yeah real shame. Glad I didnt invest!
Ah, now that makes sense of the second paragraph of the Starling email.
Wonder how it felt for the Onedox team to sit there and watch virtually nobody subscribe?
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I had to go and check if I went through with the investment or not. Luckily I passed at the time. It is a shame though as it tracked the types of bills that open banking just doesn’t cater for (car tax, utility bills. Etc)
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Received an email from Onedox saying their closing down - I’m gutted and was thinking about using their paid for service but they’re pulling the whole service
Documents => ? => Profit
Sadly it has not worked out for them (not that I myself ever got to using it)
Hopefully some of the tech, and rather more importantly the people, gets picked up
Sad, but not unexpected.
Here’s what they say:
It was back in 2015 when myself and the team set out with a simple but ambitious goal: to improve the lives of families and households by easing the pain and cost associated with household management.
This led us to build the Onedox digital personal assistant and evolve it into the service you know and use today.
Even though the service is being used by tens of thousands of families and households we have hit a roadblock.
Despite being steadfast in our belief that millions of households could benefit from technology such as Onedox, it is with a very heavy heart that today we announce that the Onedox service is being discontinued.
You may recall I was in touch towards the end of September with an update on the future of Onedox, and I talked about our planned transition to a paid-for service to help us evaluate whether we could continue providing the Onedox service, and what you could do to help.
We’re extremely grateful to all of you who have provided messages of support, who have referred the service and who have signed up for the Onedox subscription service.
I’d also like to extend my apologies to those of you left frustrated by these developments. I’m sorry that we’ve not been able to achieve everything we set out to, and to continue developing the service.
The purpose of introducing a subscription fee was to leave no stone unturned and evaluate whether this would give us a way to continue providing the Onedox service.
The team have been heartened by how many of you have subscribed but what we have found is that even with a paid subscription model, it isn’t viable for us to keep providing Onedox as a service, and so it must go.
What this means in practice:
For those who have subscribed to the paid-for service: Thank you. We’re especially sorry not to be able to continue providing the Onedox service to you. You have not been charged and you will not be charged. The card details stored by our payment provider will be deleted.
Onedox will continue to be available to all existing users until 1st December 2019.
From 1st December the accounts linked to Onedox will stop automatically updating and no reminders/notifications will be sent.
So that you have sufficient time to export/download any data/documents that you wish to retain, we will provide you with a mechanism with which to do this until 1st March 2020.
After this time, your Onedox account and all associated data will be automatically deleted.
We’re working with a reduced team so please accept my apologies for delays in dealing with customer care enquiries. If there’s anything you urgently need from us; please bear with us and we’ll come back to you as soon as we can.
If you have set your Energy Switching Preferences within Onedox, please note that we plan to provide a simple migration to a new standalone service that we are launching. We will be in touch with further details soon.
If you wish to delete your Onedox account and the data contained within it, you can do so now by closing your account within your account preferences here.
Thank you for all your support over the last four years.
With best wishes,
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It was very good. If Monzo could emulate it, they’d be one step closer to becoming my financial hub.
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I like that,
Maybe monzo could snap up the tech from them.
Obviously I have no insider knowledge on this but its one of those where because open banking has only really taken off perhaps it was the right idea just bad timing.
I think the cost to replicate what they do/did could potentially be alot less for monzo to do themselves in say a year or two than to buy out the onedox way of doing it now
Sad that this has gone as I had only just discovered it! And it was a great idea and was well executed. Financial aggregation services are ten a penny, but utility aggregation seemed fairly unique and innovative.
Does anyone know if there is anything similar out there?
Monzo should buy their codebase and integrate it.
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No. Being in the position of having designed their own services from the ground up, trying to embed other people’s stuff at this stage is surely asking for trouble.
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Wonderbill really isn’t the same.
Most of rhese services a OK at energy, mobile phone auto linking.
But what I really loved is that you could link in council tax, car tax etc into it. Obviously you can’t make any money out of switching with car tax so the others haven’t focused on this… But onedox seemed to think what do people want rather than only focusing on what they could monetize.
I really think Monzo should buy them and this is an exclusive feature to monzo users. It’s all about making the monzo app your financial hub.
If they don’t buy them, then I do hope they relewse something as good as this soon.
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I agree. Onedox was an extremely useful and unique product.
I get that the issue is profitability and imagine that the Onedox offering being simply reading and updating your accounts was too limited in terms of revenue.
The addition of utility switching where a commission presumably is paid would have helped but clearly this was not enough.
Monzo on the other hand could offset the costs.
R-
I’ve used Cleo, Chip and WithPlum now that they’ve brought out an App on Android. Not really that impressed with any of them really.
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Oh yes good point, had forgotten about WonderBill… having signed up though it’s… average! It’s similar, but it feels more explicitly geared towards getting you better deals* than helping you manage your utilities and their associated documents… The interface is not as polished as onedox’s was…
*yes I know that is their revenue stream and was also meant to be onedox’s revenue stream also. Maybe the fact that wonderbill is more geared towards ‘selling’ might make them stand the test of time, I dunno…
I really liked OneDox and have been using it from very early after they launched. It’s a polished product that has improved with time.
They did have a funding round, briefly, on CrowdCube and I signed up to invest. But it was withdrawn. I know not the reason why?
I was willing to pay them £3/month for the service as I found it very useful. I can see the issue being their monetising the product. After all, in all the time I used them I never switched energy companies with them.
It was a very professional service and the customer support was excellent. I’m sorry to see that it proved not to be viable for them. A great idea. Maybe at the wrong time?
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