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There’s a chance they just needed to raise the price. I wonder how people land on something like $4. At that price your demand for something like this is not price sensitive. $5 and you have 20% growth, $8 and you’ve doubled. To the users it’s just a few bucks.

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The thing is, YNAB increased pricing recently and that didn't went well, it caused a pretty negative outlash... Actual was actually a pretty good alternative that was pushed by many people on Reddit, they got quite a bit of free advertising through that. Yearly YNAB is only 8.25$ a month and support syncing through Plaid (which add a few dollars per month for sure to the cost and it also add quite a bit of negative feedback sadly). So yeah he could increase the price for sure, but not by much, and his current customers wouldn't appreciate it that much considering they jumped ship to avoid a price increase in the first place.

I feel like Actual should have way more users, but people were waiting to switch from YNAB until it had every unnecessary feature added. If they knew that postponing their subscription would end in the service shutting down, maybe they would have chosen differently? Actual is completely usable, and reliable as it is. I'm sad that it ended in burnout this way, it is such a good product.

Moreover, everything on the website implies that Actual was a high-end, exactingly designed product for discerning, well-off people. But it was priced like general-audience commodity SaaS. My guess is that most subscribers would have been more than willing to pay, say, 20 dollars a month instead of 4, particularly for something that has "saving you lots of money" as a core value proposition.

It's open source... We could try. :D

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