I still miss MS Money. It did everything I needed and I didn't hand over my account passwords to a cloud service like Mint. It's kind of mindboggling that this got ever accepted as the way to do things.
YNAB decided to go to a subscription based model, which is fine, but the annual cost of this software service seem ridiculously high for how simple the software is overall. Applies to monarch money too... 100 USD is a lot for simple personal accounting software.
To me the value is in bank synchronization, which is a big ongoing cost for the service. I can centralize all my financial information across accounts.
The habit of checking my transactions in a centralized place and categorizing them has led to me catching fraudulent transactions multiple times. I might have never noticed them without YNAB. That alone has paid for years of the subscription.
I know some people find that manual transaction entry helps them control their spending better but to me that’s just not practical. I don’t have time for that, there are too many transactions.
I also value the mobile app and automatic synchronization. It’s nice to be able to share a budget with multiple people and not fiddle around with local files or having to get on my desktop computer. I use YNAB on mobile 95% of the time.
If I give it a negative it’s not really the price, it’s that I’d like to see more progress on the software. I know they are still a small company but I’d like to see more ways to visualize without needing rely on external tools, and I’d like to see an overall a faster pace of feature development.
I don't want to be dependent on TheCloud. I want my local device to communicate directly with each bank and keep my credentials and "tokens" on devices I manage. Is this so much to ask for?
1: https://www.quicken.com/support/how-quicken-connects-your-ba...