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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.)

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?

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...

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