SaaS Finance Stack
Plus, stop getting charged by dishonest vendors that don't respect cancellations.
Psst! Check out this AI Newsletter for sale, with 41k subscribers, $10k TTM revenue, and an asking price of $17.5k. We’re looking into acquiring it ourselves…
Let me tell you about a subject that’s near and dear to my heart: managing all of the revenue we earn :)
I grant: you probably don’t think too often about where your company banks. Maybe you already use some of the names in this email, maybe your SaaS banks with your local credit union, maybe you’ve been with Wells Fargo since 2002 and you’re never giving it up.
Either way, hear me out.
When you’re starting up a new entity, or if your current bank is being annoying and backwards and not tech-friendly, you’ll get to thinking: where is the best place to keep our primary operating checking account?
We’ll tell you about the two best financial tools we’ve come across. Both are not only free but actually pay you to use them, and serve slightly different purposes.
Let’s get into it.
Wildfront Banks With… Mercury
For years now, we’ve kept our primary operating checking account with Mercury. It rocks. Here’s what we like:
Just about everything is free: ACH, payments, domestic wires, QBO integration, API… and we only pay minimal fees for international wires
They pay you a $250 signup bonus when you open an account: you just have to deposit $10k+ for at least a few days, within the first few months of opening the account
Can bank and manage money via CLI, using their MCP or API. Very straightforward to tie into internal financial oversight dashboards, automations, and inter-company management
Overall, it’s been very smooth and easy.
Now, they have decent virtual card & spend management functionality and are working on improving it. But for provisioning virtual cards, setting limits per vendor, accounting automation, and ensuring your full credit limit is not exposed to the potential dishonesty of any one vendor, we prefer…
Wildfront Uses Ramp for Vendor Spend & Credit Cards
Ramp is the best corporate card and spend management platform we’ve found. Virtual cards for every subscription, automatic receipt matching, clean expense categorization, and free API access available with every account.
Wildfront is an official Ramp partner because we believe in it that much. Plus: just like Mercury, they’ll pay you $250 cash back when you sign up and put a thousand bucks of your normal spend, through your virtual cards.
Oh, and it’s free to do all the essentials: earn yield on your money throughout the month, provision unlimited virtual credit cards, sync transactions to QBO/Xero/Claude Code or whatever you use.
One caveat: since there’s no founder personal guarantee, Ramp won’t accept you unless you can link $25k+ of account balances to prove you’re not trying to take advantage of the lack of credit check. If that’s the case, you’ll have to settle for using Mercury for everything. Hopefully you have $25k lying around you can show to them for purposes of getting a credit limit :)
We also do keep a checking account with Ramp, but their banking UX isn’t as great as their credit card UX, so we’ve found it convenient to keep them separate vs consolidating everything with just one of these providers.
Have questions about our experience with either of these? Fire away.
Now go out and get some more customers.
-Alex & Mac
At first I thought the value was in the 1.5% cash back. But then I realized the value is in the card management and ability to stop hucksters from overcharging you for stuff. Boom.