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Comment by Jtsummers | Hacker News Reader

YNAB isn't too expensive though I don't like that they went to an annual subscription. It does sync with most accounts (I don't use that feature but it seems to work well for others, pretty sure the same syncing backend as Mint and others use).

GnuCash can sync with some banks but I only had luck with one of mine, and never tried with other account types like investment and retirement accounts. If you're willing to do a bit of work, your banks will provide CSV or other export options and you can download that and import it into GnuCash. Doing that, I had to tidy things up a bit but it wasn't awful if I did this somewhat regularly so the number of transactions to examine wasn't high (like once every week or two, versus once every few months).

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I'm a massive advocate for YNAB and it has improved my financial life so much. Definitely worth the subscription.

But if it didn't have the syncing feature, it would easily be one of the first subscriptions I would eliminate. Instead of being a chore I do once or twice a month, I instead check in on all my accounts for a couple minutes every morning and know exactly where my finances stand. It allows me to have multiple credit cards and bank accounts for various different situations and not have to worry. Budgeting only money in my accounts is such a better system than trying to guess how much money I think I might have later.

Accounts that do not work with it usually actually aren't worth using. My Apple card is a massive manual pain with YNAB, but with my other cards it is only ever worth using for interest free and 3% back on Apple purchases, which aren't that often.

I can't process how $100/yr for a static accounting program isn't severely overpriced. Do banks and credit cards charge for API requests? Is the compute necessary to balance your books require leasing A100s to crunch your numbers? A terabyte of rack space to store my transactions?

Before the MBA enshitification of software, you would buy an accounting program for $60 and use it for years. And it would work great because accounting is well established and hasn't really changed in the last 100 years.

I'm just so fucking sick of SaaS and peoples total complacency with it.

The idea of YNAB (I'm a paying user) is that learning to budget your money effectively with their app and methodology pays for itself tenfold.

Think about it: if you are from the Western world, how many $10 do you waste each month? I spent $20 for pizza yesterday. How much money would you save if you could budget effectively (and get yearly discounts to all your subscriptions instead of paying monthly, for example?) How much is it worth it to you to get out of debt and increase your net worth by avoiding surprise bills?

I gladly pay the $100/yr to deal with my finances, especially now that I'm broke and with negative income.

If only plumbers could charge to keep a toilet in your house...

I generally agree, but presumably features are added to it, integrations with all sorts of banks, markets, payment processors, crypto(lol), etc, etc. People probably also want mobile apps, which is an ever-moving target as mobile OSs change SDKs every other release.

If you wanted basic accounting functionality, could just use a spreadsheet. Plenty of free spreadsheet software out there. Why spend $60?

Account connection services are insanely expensive and you don't want to create all that yourself. That would be even more expensive to maintain. That's why there's services like Plaid. For every user it costs at least 1$ a month per user per connected account. That alone creates a huge amount of ongoing expenses.

That's why we don't offer the ability to connect accounts within our app. Users don't understand or don't want to understand that such a feature alone would easily double the subscription price. Without VC you cannot give users the ability to connect their accounts for free without losing lots of money.

> For every user it costs at least 1$ a month per user per connected account.

Then how is Quicken Simplifi, mentioned by some other folks in this thread, able to offer it for $2.99 per month? Volume??

I work at Plaid. The basic, non-discounted rate for the Transactions API is like 30 cents per connected account per month (or 45 cents per month if you're buying some optional add-ons to go with it), and any customer the size of Intuit would definitely be getting some kind of huge volume discount. I can't speak for other companies in this space, but I assume they have similar pricing.

I work at Plaid and I think that pricing info is a bit off — assuming we’re talking about just the APIs for transactions data (which is what the budgeting apps typically use) and these prices are in USD, even customers who don’t qualify for any volume discounts are paying closer to 30-45 cents per month per connected account. (Volume discounts then can start to kick in starting at a total API spend of $300 / month -- the higher the monthly API spend, the greater the discount percentage.)

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