Plaid vs Tink

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.

Tink

OAuth client credentials with per-endpoint scopes, token-paged data endpoints and a published MSA, DPA, SLA and sub-processor list. No price is public, live access needs a sales contract, and the API reference has no downloadable spec or published rate-limit numbers.

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

Tink

1. Request a client token at https://api.tink.com/api/v1/oauth/token, create a user, request an authorisation grant for that user, then exchange the code for a user token.
2. Renew tokens on a timer. Client tokens last 30 minutes and user tokens two hours, and the client credentials flow returns no refresh token.
3. Send the account holder through Tink Link in a browser. Bank consent cannot be completed by API calls alone.
4. Read transactions from /data/v2/transactions with pageSize up to 100 and follow nextPageToken.
5. Send an Idempotency-Key header on consent and payment writes. Keys are kept for 24 hours.