Early user of simple here and, while their design was excellent, there was little else to recommend them. Plenty of other banks offer no-fee atm access and have apps. Those banks, unlike simple, reliably process transactions. They went down more than once, which meant my card was declined. The customer service rep was nice when he told me their servers were down. No advance notice. It would be nice to have a bank that, you know, works.
It is reliable! Growing pains happen. Downtime happens. Expecting five nines from a little startup, even when it's out of beta, is silly!
I've built three companies now and it is really hard! Balancing up-time, product development, customer support, and bug fixing is difficult. I'm sure interfacing with legacy banking systems made it even worse. If it were down all the time (the way Reddit was during their major growth phase) then I would agree, that is an issue. But they are not and were not - insignificant downtime is not something to criticize, there are other more constructive things to criticize about the product which is consistently evolving anyway.
It upsets me to see people on HN get up on their soapbox and say demoralizing things about trivial issues (that are part of the life of a growing product) of little startups that are doing well, continuously improving, and doing their best.
