Remember when Apple did manuals? They were beautiful.
Looking at the original Quicken letter; Is the renewal date 9 October 2024 or 10 September 2024? American companies should always spell the month to avoid confusing us non-Americans. If my comment confuses Americans, then be aware that the rest of the world (most of it) uses the dd/mm/yyyy date format.
There was a time with Quicken when the software would not recognise the dd/mm/yyyy format for Australian users. I had to find a way of purchasing the Canadian version from overseas. I ended up switching to MoneyDance and have not had anywhere as many issues as I had with Quicken.
BTW we also do not use US Customary Units to measure things.
Quicken Cloud is a little like Apple’s defunct Photo Stream feature:
- It’s partly a way to sync data between devices
- It’s party a way to get access to some of your recent data from the web
- It’s NOT a backup since it’s just a portion of your most recent data
Maybe that helps explain!
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Thanks, Dave. A participant in this conversation on the Quicken Community discussion board explains it this way: “Quicken Connect allows Quicken to indirectly download transactions from your bank from within Quicken. It’s indirect because once setup Quicken will summon the data from your bank, usually during the middle of the night, and store the transactions on their server. When you initiate downloads, that data will get downloaded from that server to your data file.”
Unfortunately, another participant dashes my hope that I might be able download and import QFX files independently (as I do for half my accounts now, see above) after my subscription ends–it seems that they’re designed to call home: “QFX is a slight tweak of the OFX standard specifically for Quicken. . . .[a] QFX file includes an ID code to identify/authenticate the financial institution."
Manual entries, as noted by Quicken here, will remain possible, but only for Deluxe and higher versions.
O well.
Yea, and that is consistent with downloads breaking after you stop paying. I’m pretty sure this is a departure from the earlier model where Quicken would download directly from banks. At least that’s how I thought it worked. I didn’t think “back in thuh day” that cloud proxy servers were required, and you could keep doing direct Bank > Mac downloads long after your support expired.
Cloud-based proxy solutions are invaluable for many software services. I build them for a living. They solve many problems: proxying adds an essential security boundary. The proxy / gateway can also handle NAT traversal, IPv6 / IPv4 translation, DOS mitigation, traffic aggregation, and lots of other things. It also factors bank-specific logic out of the desktop code, making the software solution more modular and maintainable.
So in some ways, this is me playing my own devil’s advocate, and explaining the value of Quicken’s fees. But forcing users into that model if it’s not essential is not ideal.
I’d have to better understand the technical and business considerations to really evaluate this well. But given that:
- to download from your bank, you already have to supply your credentials for each bank within Quicken, and
- your bank already lets you download transactions directly from their web site if you prefer to do it outside Quicken
I see no reason why the “old model” of direct downloads from Bank > Desktop couldn’t work using Quicken desktop software as the tool (no Cloud involved). But Quicken has little incentive to maintain the “direct” feature when the “indirect/proxy” solution is both more elegant from a maintainability point of view and also ensures a recurring revenue stream for them.
My goodness. A dollar a month or $12 per year is a "massive " increase!?! I must say that I, for one, appreciate that the present developers rescued this application from oblivion and offer regular updates. I have also used Quicken for more than 25 years and am happy to pay this massive increase. To say that it has “not changed substantially in 30 years” is not exactly accurate, really, unless one is still using System 6.0.
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I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one with this reaction. Classifying increases by percentages can be very misleading when you’re talking about small amounts to begin with. It’s important to keep perspective by considering the actual amounts as well.
For example, I built myself a spreadsheet that I use each week before doing grocery shopping, to compare prices across the five stores available to me within a few miles radius. One thing my spreadsheet does is calculate the difference on each item between the highest and lowest prices. I have it calculate the difference by both percentage and quantity, because while it may look alarming to see that one store is selling X item for 50% more than another store, it’s not nearly as significant when you realize that it’s a 50-cent item that one store is selling for 75 cents—a 25-cent difference is not large enough for me to make a separate trip, no matter what percentage that difference represents.
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Ah, December, the month of my annual promise: “I’ll switch from Quicken!” Yet, here I am, stuck in the familiar embrace of Quicken, blissfully unaware of alternative software. Is the price increase due to a supply chain issue or an electron scarcity conspiracy? Who knows! My commitment to change rivals a squirrel hunting for acorns—determined but clueless. In this digital age, I remain loyal to Quicken, like using a flip phone in a smartphone world. Cheers to another year of financial software monotony and inexplicable price increases.
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I switched to SEE Finance two years ago, after trying out Quicken in 2017 or just. I think it was just before they went to a subscription model and that was kind of the nail in the coffin for me (it was also painful to use at that time). I went back to Quicken 2007 until 2022 when I bought SEE. SEE had its quirks for me (mostly reports but I stopped getting responses from the developer too). I just bought Moneydance last week (which is on the Tidbits benefits list). Mondaydance lets you test it for quite awhile. I’d downloaded it back in October and finally hit the 100 transaction mark where I couldn’t enter anything else.
There were issues with my imports but I am pretty sure SEE didn’t import perfectly either. Mainly MD didn’t handle transactions well when they included a transfer from another account. So I had a number of double transactions but they weren’t too difficult to delete.
Diane
That was quite poetic.
While my primary software PocketMoney hasn’t seen an update in over ten years due to the untimely passing of Hardy Macia, I use for backup both iCompta 6 and iFinance 4. Oh, and I still use Quicken 2007 for Mac LC, as a quaternary.
It turns out it’s a little more complicated now: currently MD does offer subscriptions, but only if you want to get their aggregator service, Moneydance +, too. The aggregator they use is Plaid, and they have an interesting discussion of “The State of Online Banking” (including the perils and gradual disappearance of OFX downloads), and of the issues and costs involved in offering aggregator services here.
I don’t know whether Quicken is an aggregator but it certainly resembles one, and if you want that sort of thing (and if you think you don’t the MD post cited just above might change your mind) you pay extra, and probably by subscription. Quicken, it seems, offers me the most for the least; your mileage may certainly vary.
Thanks for sharing this. They confirm some of my hunches about why Quicken has shifted architectures.
I use MoneyDance. The cost of MoneyDance is onetime $65 or $39 if a TIDBIT member for the complete program (not a subscription) and $2-$4 per month for downloading from Plaid. Some banks may include a nominal additional download service charge which they charge from any App including Quicken.
So Plaid is not only a conduit for financial service logins and data transfers, but also provides a centralized personal finance “dashboard” or “portal” to consumers? I don’t follow the personal finance aggregation service sector (Yodlee, Quicken, Moneydance, etc) closely but I thought the reason Visa tried to acquire Plaid was for its abilities as a connector, not as an endpoint, for individuals’ banking, retirement, and asset management data.
(not trying to troll, I’m merely interested in finding out if I have an incomplete view of Plaid’s business)
Certainly no offense taken here, it’s a perfectly reasonable question. In Investopedia’s account of things it does sound like MD is using only Plaid’s aggregation service. Perhaps someone here who knows more about them can chime in.
Quicken, on the other hand, seems to have decided to develop its own aggregation capability instead of involving a (fourth?) party. If aggregation is what they’re doing.
So many servers, so many interests served . . . Perhaps someone should Take Control.
MoneyDance can use Plaid, a popular aggregator via MoneyDance+, or OFX QFX or QIF for automatic downloads. Other than Plaid there is no fee from MoneyDance. MoneyDance refers to the free protocols as Direct Downloads. Transactions can also be downloaded from a finance site as CSV text and imported into MoneyDance. With CSV files the data separator can be specified by the user, be it comma, period, space, etc. The issue with the OFX and its cousins is that many institutions no longer support it for either downloads or bill pay as these protocols do not support 2 factor ID.