Why we built Prismfolio

A few years ago I had brokerage accounts at both Fidelity and Schwab. Not unusual, a lot of people end up that way through old jobs, rollovers, or just inertia. The problem was that I had no clean picture of my combined allocation. I knew roughly what I owned, but I couldn't see stocks vs bonds vs cash as a single number without logging into two separate tabs and doing mental arithmetic.

So I did what most people do: I started Googling. Every result sent me toward one of three things, a robo-advisor that wanted to manage my money, a personal finance platform that wanted full read-write access to my accounts, or a spreadsheet I'd have to maintain manually forever.

None of those were what I wanted. I wanted a read-only, instant view of what I already had, without handing my credentials to anyone.

Why a Chrome extension made sense

The answer turned out to be sitting right there in the browser. When you log into Fidelity or Schwab, your holdings are already on the page, rendered in HTML, loaded into the DOM. A Chrome extension can read that data in your browser, with no login of its own and no standing connection to your account.

That's the architecture Prismfolio uses. It reads the portfolio data that's already displayed on your brokerage page and sends those holdings to our servers for the analysis. No brokerage credentials, ever. No account required to use the free tier. The analysis (allocation breakdown, fees, a Portfolio Health score) is computed on request from what the extension read, and nothing is saved to an account unless you sign in.

This isn't a workaround. It's the right trust model for this use case: your brokerage already authenticated you, and Prismfolio never needs your login to help you see what's there more clearly.

The thing about "account linking"

Most financial tools default to OAuth or Plaid connections. Those are legitimate technologies and we use Plaid ourselves, including in the Prismfolio web app. But for portfolio visualization, full account linking is overkill. It's a heavier trust ask than the job requires.

When a tool asks you to link your Schwab account, you're creating a persistent connection, a token that sits on someone else's server, refreshing periodically, with access to your balance and transaction history. That connection has to be maintained, secured, and eventually revoked. For a portfolio overlay, you don't need any of that. You just need the data that's already in front of you.

Prismfolio's free tier needs no account for a one-off look on a broker page: the extension reads the holdings and our API analyzes them. Sign in on the web app to save up to three accounts and connect one read-only Plaid sync (Plaid Link is web-only); Plaid access tokens are encrypted at rest.

What the web app adds, and why it's optional

The Prismfolio web app is where signed-in features and Plaid connections live. Free signed-in already covers Overview, Holdings, Accounts, Fees, Compare, and Trade Impact with one web Plaid connection. If you have accounts at multiple brokerages and want unlimited consolidation without visiting each tab, Plus adds unlimited web Plaid sync and the deeper Analysis dashboards (Allocation, Concentration, Performance). Google Sign-In keeps saved settings and target allocations across devices on Free and Plus.

These features are genuinely useful. But I designed the free tier to be complete for single-broker use: extension analysis on the broker page, limited signed-in web, one web Plaid connection, and a top insight on your portfolio, not a crippled demo. If you want unlimited web Plaid sync and Plus Analysis, that's Plus.

That was the product I wanted when I started. Nobody had built it, so I did.