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Am also in maintenance mode with YNAB, and will be seriously considering other options. Kind of feel like this is the beginning of a downhill slide for the company; it feels like they made this decision to increase prices without thinking things through or taking the time to put together messaging + measures to keep legacy users happy. I find it really bizarre that the main way they've let people know about it is a pop up in the app, plus forum/web posts 99% of users will miss. I haven't been part of their true target audience for a while, but the way they've handled this makes me certain I'm even further away from the type of customer they want.
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Nov 3, 2021 18:38
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babydonthurtme posted:Am also in maintenance mode with YNAB, and will be seriously considering other options. Kind of feel like this is the beginning of a downhill slide for the company; it feels like they made this decision to increase prices without thinking things through or taking the time to put together messaging + measures to keep legacy users happy. Their main social media people have also been like weirdly hostile towards the people who erroneously thought the grandfathering was lifetime as well, and keep saying things like “we shared at the time that we couldn’t guarantee the grandfathering would be forever” like a bunch of folks don’t still have that email sitting in their inbox where there’s nothing like that in there. This definitely does feel like a re-org or a move to get acquired by Intuit or a competitor though.
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Nov 3, 2021 19:36
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Yeeeeeeeah, I don't think YNAB working wouldn't be worth the new subscription price, even as one of the users on the legacy payment plan. I think there's good reasons all the bushy eyed "I'll just make an open source clone" don't come to much. I don't think it's realistic to expect software to be a buy once and you have it like a towel or a book, because people don't treat bought software like a towel. They expect things to get updated when they get broken by OS or API updates. Software is an ecosystem and it takes maintenance just to keep it working the same and I understand resenting that and not wanting subscriptions but it doesn't magically make buy once software economically viable for most developers. And single developer projects mean single point of failure, too. I think my problem is: A. It's actually not working for me as well as it should these days? I'm always trying to chase down stray credit card stuff, some of which might be their fault and some of which might be the syncing service's fault and some which might be mine. I wouldn't mind so much except the interface makes it difficult to reconcile according to my statement end dates. If I could do that, I could reconcile in a reliable way month by statement month, and not just on the exact day my statement ends, like I did in YNAB4. I don't want to just say "whoopsie here's the actual balance" and just deal with an adjustment instead of having the correct information. Additionally, I have two credit cards with the same company and their payments always end up on just one of the credit cards. I contact support about this, they said to rejigger the connections, I did, and it still does it. And sometimes even though I'd swear up and down every purchase on a credit card is accounted for and categorized correctly, the amount set aside for paying the bill doesn't match up. (I know that I'm supposed to set up credit card accounts as bank accounts to avoid this. But ugh.) B. Punting the legacy users that dramatically feels like a warning flag. The marginal cost on this kind of service shouldn't require that kind of a move--the legacy users should be less likely to need support (though maybe they're total pains in the behind and this is a great way to shed the worst of them?) or any of the workshops. Is Plaid raking them over the coals? YNAB didn't have VC funding as far as I know so there's not as yet rapacious investors putting the screws to it. But in all the posts I'm reading, there's a new CEO for the company this year. And one thing punting a bunch of legacy subscription users could do is increase the metrics of Revenue Per User. Which means maybe the owners of YNAB are considering shopping it around to be sold. And then YNAB, instead of being a sustainable bootstrapped business with positive cash flow, would need to make up its purchase price. And once that happens a service can become antagonistic if it needs to squeeze more funds out of the same userbase. It's just a theory but it's not like they'd come out and tell us if that was the reason. All of which means that maybe I should be figuring out what alternatives I could live with sooner rather than later, autopilot coasting on the cheapness of my legacy plan. Not sure what that would look like yet--combining Tiller with one of the solutions that doesn't have automatic imports? Just rolling with Tiller and spreadsheets? Monarch? But it feels worth my while to at least figure out the landscape of alternatives.
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Nov 3, 2021 20:03
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Wow. Had no idea this was happening. Thank God YNAB4 still works.
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Nov 3, 2021 20:40
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DominoKitten posted:A. It's actually not working for me as well as it should these days? I'm always trying to chase down stray credit card stuff, some of which might be their fault and some of which might be the syncing service's fault and some which might be mine. I wouldn't mind so much except the interface makes it difficult to reconcile according to my statement end dates. If I could do that, I could reconcile in a reliable way month by statement month, and not just on the exact day my statement ends, like I did in YNAB4. I don't want to just say "whoopsie here's the actual balance" and just deal with an adjustment instead of having the correct information. Additionally, I have two credit cards with the same company and their payments always end up on just one of the credit cards. I contact support about this, they said to rejigger the connections, I did, and it still does it. And sometimes even though I'd swear up and down every purchase on a credit card is accounted for and categorized correctly, the amount set aside for paying the bill doesn't match up. (I know that I'm supposed to set up credit card accounts as bank accounts to avoid this. But ugh.) yeah the sync is to the point now where every ynab sesh involves me reconnecting 3-5 accounts, some of which get broken to the point that they don't work for months, also some of the transactions go to the wrong account or are duplicated - sync has never worked more than 80% of the time for me, i also just reconcile weekly against the online accounts because it's less work to do overall also, i went back to look at my ynab account and i'm kind of surprised how many of my favorite ynab features are actually from the community made toolkit for ynab it's not a pretty picture
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Nov 3, 2021 21:08
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Referee posted:Wow. Had no idea this was happening. Thank God YNAB4 still works.
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Nov 3, 2021 21:37
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I've been doing manual entry with nYNAB since the beginning. The sync never worked well enough and always required me to work out where it went wrong and then adjust, so I just do it right by entering it myself. So I'm saving them some money on their vendor service
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Nov 3, 2021 21:43
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Greed gets us all. Don't get me wrong, I always found many YNABer's a little to cult like, and there was always a bit of ignorane to poorer people (I was once super poor and got YNAB 4, and someone told to "just cancel your cable and you will save money" and other such advice that I never asked for when asking a question in the old days. I also had a YNAB staff member in one of classes asked if I had credit card, when I said no, they said "well you're lying because if you don't have credit card debt, why are you here?" I was in my ealry 20s and didn't have credit card yet. HOWEVER, YNAB has really helped me stay on track of money in my poor (and back to being poor) days and eventually I got ahead, even if it was just a month ahead. So I really think there is value to YNAB. It just a shame greed is getting the better of them and now it is showing. Also, apperently the YNAB Twitter was liking problematic tweets that said thigns such as "if you can't afford 100 bucks for a subcription, then that's you fault" and other priviliaged lines like that. Which caused even more drama on reddit.
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Nov 3, 2021 22:17
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Sockser posted:"Continue improving our product" --edit: Also, if Quicken gobbles them up, bye-bye international users. Combat Pretzel fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Nov 3, 2021 |
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Nov 3, 2021 23:14
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Referee posted:Wow. Had no idea this was happening. Thank God YNAB4 still works. Seriously. I've stuck with YNAB4 since I started using it in 2014 and it's been a massive help in getting my finances in order. Wasn't really sold on nYNAB but occasionally considered it before realizing I didn't like the idea of subscribing to a budgeting service and I should really just take the time to enter in all my transactions. Well, guess this settles it then. DrNewton posted:Also, apperently the YNAB Twitter was liking problematic tweets that said thigns such as "if you can't afford 100 bucks for a subcription, then that's you fault" and other priviliaged lines like that. Which caused even more drama on reddit.
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Nov 4, 2021 15:56
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There’s a (very, very) long thread on the official YNAB forums about price hike - https://support.youneedabudget.com/t/q6hg599/ynab-price-change-2021. Most recent post from a YNAB employee links articles on how to export your data and close your account.
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Nov 4, 2021 21:55
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Lol, export your data, does that mean they’ve actually made it spit out something better than an incomplete TSV?
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Nov 4, 2021 22:42
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I look forward to the AMA on Reddit tomorrow. Lmao
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Nov 4, 2021 22:57
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Just got a price change email. Pretty sure it’s just a copy/paste from the lovely app message 
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Nov 5, 2021 13:15
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Someone posted a couple of Google Sheets/Excel YNAB like spreadsheets. Worth grabbing and holding onto in any case. https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/ozz674/yabs_or_yet_another_budgeting_spreadsheet_modeled/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ynab/comments/qm3ney/i_have_spent_a_few_years_creating_a_ynab_google/ Though I'm hopeful this whole thing either spurs someone to start releasing unofficial support for YNAB4 or something.
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Nov 5, 2021 16:13
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nwin posted:I look forward to the AMA on Reddit tomorrow. Lmao so far it is uh... not going well
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Nov 5, 2021 17:31
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Henrik Zetterberg posted:Just got a price change email. Pretty sure it’s just a copy/paste from the lovely app message the funny part is the CEO just said in the AMA that "Brass tacks: We had originally planned to send the in-app message and then follow-up with the email the next day. When we realized the in-app message wasn't landing the way we hoped (that's our mistake), we pulled back to do better with the email. That obviously created silence, and I regret that." so you are looking at five days of "do better" in that e-mail
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Nov 5, 2021 17:33
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This AMA is a great example of how to not communicate to your customers.YNAB CEO posted:>Why did the increase have to be so sudden and implemented so fast? If you’re in any sort of financial problem A Reddit user posted:So you've known for a year and a half and STILL only gave one month's notice?
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Nov 5, 2021 18:01
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You Need a Budget more like You Need a Public Relations Manager.
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Nov 5, 2021 18:03
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I love this one. Someone asks if there are plans to reevaluate the price jump for legacy users:YNAB CEO posted:I want to be direct here: There are not plans to reconsider it. Yes, it absolutely would have been better to announce this with much more notice. Legacy users: you're lucky we didn't jack up your price sooner This guy is very bad at this. Edit: he's deleting his comments now lmao Sirotan fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Nov 5, 2021 |
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Nov 5, 2021 18:10
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Sirotan posted:I love this one. Someone asks if there are plans to reevaluate the price jump for legacy users: ...yeah, I'm gone as soon as I figure out a decent alternative. Not sure how dialogue like this is supposed to reassure me about the future of this company.
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Nov 5, 2021 18:30
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I can't fathom how a company can be so out of touch to not realize there an app for budgeting and getting out of debt and charging a ridiculous monthly price to do so. This should be a $5/month app. They haven't done anything additional since I signed up 2 years ago to add value.
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Nov 5, 2021 18:32
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I've been looking at other web solutions, and quite a few of them look rather terrible in regards to visual design, and I'm a stickler for form. All that remains costs about the same as the new YNAB pricing. All of this pisses me off. But considering that tone-deaf AMA, I guess imma have to switch to something. I still have a YNAB4 serial, but that application starts to get slow as soon a lot of data accumulates, but I want it for history.
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Nov 5, 2021 18:52
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Sirotan posted:This guy is very bad at this. he is getting downvoted so hard some of his comments are being auto removed and his ability to reply is getting limited i still can't believe how bad they are at messaging, it would be entertaining if i didn't love the drat tool (even if it fundamentally hasn't changed much from YNAB 4)
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Nov 5, 2021 18:58
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i think for me the worst revelation of the whole AMA hasn't been that i am losing my $45/yr legacy price... it's this statement in response to "how long until you will raise prices again?" "I can't say exactly how long it will be. I *can* say that the four years between 2017 and 2021 were too long, and that's part of what led to this being sudden."
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Nov 5, 2021 19:02
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Mad Wack posted:i think for me the worst revelation of the whole AMA hasn't been that i am losing my $45/yr legacy price... it's this statement in response to "how long until you will raise prices again?" "I can't say exactly how long it will be. I *can* say that the four years between 2017 and 2021 were too long, and that's part of what led to this being sudden." Don't forget the "we knew we were doing this for 18 months but decided best practice would be to spring it on all users a month before it happened" for an APP whose entire purpose is helping you budget out once a year expenses monthly to help better prepare lmao
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Nov 5, 2021 19:16
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Combat Pretzel posted:I still have a YNAB4 serial, but that application starts to get slow as soon a lot of data accumulates, but I want it for history. Have you tried compacting your YNAB4 databases? It’s [ctrl-alt-shift-c] on Windows and [Shift+Option+Command+C] on a Mac. Just make sure everything is synced up with any mobile apps before doing it.
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Nov 5, 2021 21:05
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Just chiming in to lol at that absolute disaster of an AMA.
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Nov 5, 2021 22:36
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Trying to read the AMA now and it's hilarious how all of his replies were auto-deleted from the downvotes
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Nov 5, 2021 22:58
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This is sad to watch. I just don't see the logic behind any of their choices other than 'more money for us, gently caress you', like there's no fig leaf they're hiding behind. Pure greed.
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Nov 5, 2021 23:11
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so I could say that I finally figured out what this god damned cube is doing. Get well Lowtax.
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At this point, YNAB just feels like dealing with a mafia. "Hey kid, got student loans, car payments, and credit card debt? I can help ya but it comes at a cost." DrNewton fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Nov 5, 2021 |
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Nov 5, 2021 23:11
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DrNewton posted:...The app was nice when shopping (I could look up how much I had).... YNAB4 has a mobile app too (YNAB Classic). It's a little trickier to get on iPhone these days but I have been using the Android app daily for years. Everything syncs via dropbox, no issues.
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Nov 5, 2021 23:15
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Teeter posted:YNAB4 has a mobile app too (YNAB Classic). It's a little trickier to get on iPhone these days but I have been using the Android app daily for years. Everything syncs via dropbox, no issues. Even in YNAb4 days, I could never get that app to work for me.
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Nov 5, 2021 23:22
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YNAB4 was great but my wife almost murdered me every time she would try to update her accounts and it would say "this change has triggered a re-sync on the desktop" and she'd lose like an hour of entering transactions. nYNAB cloud sync was WAY better for just not seeing that loving error every other week. It caused us so much rage.
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Nov 5, 2021 23:25
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Huh, so Todd did answer the "Why can't we have currency pricing?". quote:This is an especially difficult issue, but I want to respond. Our costs are all US-based, and so our prices essentially have to be as well. If we were to adjust prices for each country, we’d be creating a problem where we are spending more to deliver the service than we are receiving back. It's not sustainable. Meanwhile people in the Philippines are claimin that the cost of YNAB is 1 month of food and/or electricity, and someone from Brazil said that the cost of YNAB is 1 month income for many people in their country. The clap back is great. quote:As a Software Engineer, I'm honestly astounded that the additional costs to deliver services to the few people overseas (so bandwidth, storage?) are more than $9/mo.
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Nov 5, 2021 23:43
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Congratulations to all the up & coming budgeting apps who are about to get their shot.
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Nov 5, 2021 23:52
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Any new projects that arise from this, you may immediately disregard. Back when they announced nYNAB, a shitload of projects to clone YNAB4 sprang to life, barely any made it.
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Nov 5, 2021 23:54
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I made a clone myself. But I stopped developing it because I realized it would end up being almost identical to ynab. Don't I feel silly now!
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Nov 6, 2021 00:01
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you can see the rest of the answers that got zapped by the automod here: https://www.reddit.com/user/YNAB_youneedabudget all you have to do is take a look at their careers page and it's so obvious that all of the money is going into huge amounts of marketing and classes it kind of makes sense because the founder really loves crossfit, i think he's just trying to re-create the model for finances i hope they add tiered pricing but they never will lmao
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Nov 6, 2021 00:09
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I liked the idea of a cheaper less supported version with delayed feature sets. I don’t need classes and support I’ve been a user for 6 years now I get the system just fine.
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Nov 6, 2021 00:48
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