PageOnce is taking on Intuit (bothMint and Quicken) with an upgrade to its finance service that allows bill payment from your smartphone. Few other personal finance services offer bill pay, and none offer the detail that PageOnce does.
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What you get
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PageOnce dives into the detail on your bills to show you not just what you own on a bill, but for what: How many minutes on your smartphone bill; All your credit card charges. And this is without signing up for electronic billing at your bank or service provider, so you'll still get your paper bills in the mail as backup.
Another good feature: Every time you go to pay a bill, you can see how much money you have in each cash account, and select the account you want to pay it from.
The PageOnce mobile bill pay app gives you more data than you'll get from your bank (or Quicken) if you are accustomed to paying bills from there, and more control than you'll get from your billers if you've been paying your bills from their sites.
It's a great little app, and I recommend it--if you can get over the discomfort of having so much financial data and control funneled through one point. At least there are good security protocols in place. For example, there's a PIN on the app itself, and you can go on the Web to lock out access to a mobile device if it's lost or stolen.
I've been using both PageOnce & Mint to see my bills. I do like how they send you and email when a payment is due and also notify you on my phone.
PageOnce itself is free; the bill pay option is $4.99 a month, with no limit on the number of bills you can pay. I just upgraded to the Gold Membership which will cost me $5 a month. Let's see if it is really worth it. I think just having the convenience of being able to pay my bills anytime anywhere with just a touch would actually help me stay on track.
As far as the business of offering this service, that might be a bit more of a battle. While PageOnce offers convenience and strong features, the fact is it doesn't do much that users can't already do elsewhere, either for free or at a price that's buried in other fees (I'm looking at you, banks). It does bill pay better, but how much will people pay in order to pay?
PageOnce believes that mobile users will see the value, and that's why the company has made the curious decision to release this feature on the iPhone app well before they make it available on the Web version of the service. You can set up payees on the Web site, but to actually make the payment, you need the app. PageOnce COO Steve Schultz explained to be that the company is targeting the very busy user, or the traveling professional, who sees the value in being able to manage their finances when they're sitting down waiting for a plane.
I think this strategy will limit uptake on this feature, but I still like the app a lot and I can't fault the larger plan of bringing more control to users who pay their bills electronically.
Source: http://goo.gl/A0MsJ
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