[DEAD] Astra Finance – Automate Transfers Between Accounts

Update 11/2/22: Astra is closing down soon – no transactions will process after December 14, 2022. Here is the email they sent out:

We founded Astra in 2016 to bring automation and ease to our collective financial lives. Along the way, we ended up building a powerful payments platform that helps consumers and businesses move money to the right place, at the right time, as fast as possible. Last year we made those capabilities available to developers through our API and have grown the Astra ecosystem to an amazing set of partners and fintech customers – you can now leverage our automation and transfer technology through your Astra profile in dozens of applications and products, with many more still to come!

This evolution of our business, has also meant we have had to shift our priorities from providing transfer capabilities through our beta application to enabling other companies to successfully leverage that technology through our API. As of January 4th, 2023, we will no longer support our existing mobile application or any transfers originating from the beta app. As this change approaches, there are several other applications that include similar functionality that you can check out:

• Fold
• Ugami
• Enzo
• Daylight

Thank you for being a part of the Astra journey over the last six years – we sincerely appreciate you trying our beta application and for all of the feedback shared with us. We look forward to supporting you even more in applications that now utilize that same technology in their own products.

We will send monthly reminders as we sunset the beta app, but please start to take steps to remove any active transfers or balances you may have currently with the application. If you have money stored in a savings goals in the mobile application, please send those funds to a connected bank account at your earliest convenience. If you do not have any money stored there, no action is required from you, and your account will be placed in deactivated status on January 4th, 2023.

To update the Astra app, please visit the App Store or Play Store to get the newest version of the app.

Thank you!

IMPORTANT DATES

Dec 14th, 2022 – All existing Routines will be deactivated, and all mobile app users will be unable to create or edit routines.

Jan 4th, 2023 – Users will no longer be able to login into the mobile application

Original Post 4/26/22:

A few readers reached out and let us know about how they use Astra Finance as a way of automating transfers between their various bank accounts. Astra works with any bank on Plaid and is free to use.

Examples of where this can be useful for our readers:

• If you have a savings account which earns an increased rate on balances up to $5,000, you can set a rule with Astra to transfer out any balance above $5,000 to your regular checking account each month.
• Similarly Astra can make sure that there’s always a minimum amount in an account with a monthly transfer. E.g. if there’s an account with $1,000 minimum to remain fee-free, Astra can automatically check up once per month to ensure there’s $1,000 in the account and to transfer over what’s needed to bring the balance up to $1,000.
• You can use Astra to hopefully trigger direct deposits.
• You can use Astra to automate a certain number of transfers in/out of an account each month. (Not all banks have great ACH transfer support, especially on the way out.)
• There are lots of other automation options that Astra has as well which can be useful to some.

Note, there is a $1,000 transaction limit with Astra by default, though it might be possible to contact and get it manually removed.

Hat tip to readers fearthez, Dheeraj, L, E

Related: Hub Accounts – ACH Transfers: Capabilities, Fees, and Limits Across Financial Institutions