Dear Final, Inc.

Every day, we get emails from folks around the country (and many outside the U.S.) who are excited about the prospect of using Final, patiently waiting for launch. These letters are always different, and many do a great job of illustrating exactly why we’re excited about what we’ve built - and because of that, I think some of them deserved to be shared.

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I’ve been a long-time user of an application called 1Password. It’s a password manager that makes it easy to manage your online accounts in a secure fashion. The idea should be immediately familiar to you. 1Password makes it easy to generate unique, strong passwords for each of your online accounts. Before 1Password, people would make up hard-to-remember passwords in attempts to secure their online accounts. However, people had a lot of accounts and it became very difficult to remember all the crazy passwords we’d make up.

To get around this, us humans would make one good-enough password and use that same password on many services. But we know this to be extremely insecure. What if the site where I bought some shoes got hacked and I use that same password for my online banking? Uh oh! Now as a breached user, I have to remember all the sites where I used that password and rush to update them. That’s if I even have the benefit of knowing the security breach happened, and in a timely manner… Often times it could be too late before other breaches occur or I might even be too lazy to worry about updating other accounts. 1Password fixes all of this, and adds other management/hygiene tools to make password headaches a thing of the past. To top it off, it can store software licenses, credit card information, bank accounts, servers, and more.

I’ve been a professional web developer for over 10 years. To put it into perspective, I have over 500 items in my 1Password vault. It gives me full control of my digital life and I know that it would be very hard for an attacker to attack to compromise any of my accounts.

Final is like this, except for credit cards. I can’t tell you how much it makes my skin crawl every time I have to type in a credit card number online knowing that it’s linked to a physical card. What if this site gets breached? Now I have to cancel that card and I have the hassle of going to update every site that uses that card. Holy hell, what a headache. Not to mention, many online vendors abuse their customer’s trust. They might store the cards against the customer’s wishes, they might make no option to remove a payment method, or might make it very hard to cancel subscriptions. Thus forcing you to either cancel that card, or just put up with their BS. If you cancel the card, you’re in the same boat of headaches dealing with updating any account that you wish to use that card for. I’ve had a credit card stuck on my PayPal account for 2 years that they will not let me remove. It’s my primary card and it’s linked with countless other accounts. I’m just too lazy to cancel/reissue it just to get PayPal’s grubby hands off of it…. I don’t have enough middle fingers to hold up to PayPal…

Anyway, Final to the rescue! And my god, I cannot wait. With Final, I get control of my credit card. My credit card is a private piece of information and there’s no reason I should trust any vendor with it. If I want to remove it from my account, or I want to stop a subscription, I don’t have to worry about the vendor honoring my wishes. Or if a site gets hacked, easy? Just cancel that number and re-issue a new one. I don’t have to go update every other service just because Sony or Adobe failed to handle my credit card details securely and responsibly.

Final is going to change everything for me. I just … ugh. Just writing this email has me so over-excited for it. It blows my mind that there’s nothing even remotely close to it. Final is going to kick serious ass when you launch.

Best of luck on a speedy and successful launch,

-Paul