GoCardless Bank Account Data vs Plaid

GoCardless Bank Account Data

UK plus every PSD2 country, up to 24 months of history, one API shape for all of them. No public price and no confirmed free plan.

Plaid

Public OpenAPI file, llms.txt with about 250 entries and a Markdown twin of every docs page. No prices before a Production application, and Transactions, Liabilities and Investments bill per Item each month until removed.

GoCardless Bank Account Data

1. Cache the access token for its 24 hours and use /api/v2/token/refresh/ rather than minting a new pair each run
2. Create the end user agreement before the requisition when you need other than 90 days of history or access
3. Read the per-account rate limit headers; on 429 wait for the account reset time, since some banks allow 4 calls a day
4. Poll /api/v2/accounts/{id}/ until status is READY before asking for transactions
5. Call the REST endpoints directly; the Nordigen SDKs still install but get no fixes

Plaid

1. Point calls at https://sandbox.plaid.com until you hold a Production secret; request shapes are the same
2. Create a sandbox Item with /sandbox/public_token/create and ins_109508, then /item/public_token/exchange, no Link UI needed
3. Use /transactions/sync with its cursor and back off on 429 RATE_LIMIT_EXCEEDED yourself, since no Retry-After comes back
4. Call /item/remove when the user is done, or subscription products keep billing
5. Send an idempotency_key on /transfer/authorization/create so a retried request can't authorise twice