Last chance to buy YNAB before it moves to a subscription model

[tribpot]

Many of us are big fans of You Need a Budget and around New Year we tend to get an influx of new starters as people decide to take control of their finances - very sensible.

YNAB have just announced that YNAB 5 will be released tomorrow and via replies on Twitter have confirmed it will be a subscription-based program, so you will pay a certain annual fee like you do with Microsoft Office etc nowadays.

If you have just bought YNAB 4 and want to upgrade, they will give you a proportion of a year's subscription for free, but today is the last day you can buy a subscriptionless version of YNAB. If you were thinking about buying in January and don't fancy paying a yearly or monthly subscription, act now.

The subscription will be 5 USD per month, 50 USD per year or if you sign up before 31 Jan, a lifetime discount of 10%, i.e. 45 USD per year. At 30 quid a year, i.e. £2.50 a month, I'm happy that this represents good value for money for me, but I suspect this will be quite controversial and I wanted to give MNers a chance to avoid the charge.

I don't think the very short notice has been deliberate to prevent news of the subscription fee leaking out - when YNAB 4 was released they had a hell of a time as they released it before the iPhone app had been approved, and then had an agonising 10 days of Apple basically going tra-la-la what's that you say about a global launch until they finally released it. I suspect they have been waiting until the app was approved but then need to launch as soon as poss.

So, removing the turn to the right option not being available or handled properly messed up the import data. I'm not surprised really, although it's such a basic thing. Lots of people used that functionality.

Means I'm very sure that I won't even start a trial until this import stuff is sorted....

Yep - I think if they knew the new system was as incompatible with 'turn to the right' budgets as it clearly is, they should have offered a 'reference data only' import, i.e. you're going to have to give up your previous data but we will at least bring in your list of accounts and stuff.

Update: I have created an account using an email address that isn't one of my usual ones. I do like the application. I've managed to create an off-budget account, which is something. Haven't messed about with credit card transactions yet, might have a go at that now.

YNAB are now extending the lifetime discount of $5/year (well, 10% as presumably they could hike the prices next year) to all existing YNAB subscribers forever, i.e. you don't have to sign up before 31 Jan.

Thanks trib and cordelia!

I got in last night, ready to do some YNABing before bed and was met with the 'classic' banner across my app too. I've not gone into YNAB (getting itchy now) as I wanted to review options first. This thread has been so helpful.

I'm very tempted to upgrade. The subscription costs are fine (I was a bit at first as I had assumed my £35 for YNAB4 could give me lifetime use but yes, that's not very commercial). I like the idea of watching my pre-YNAB debt come down within the app. I appreciate I could do that currently but I actually don't know how to.

DH and I are both starting new jobs in the new year and will be using his redundancy money towards debt once we have our feet under the table, so I would welcome a change of format to go with our financial changes. That's an emotional reaction and no reason to hand over your financial data to a small company as seems to be the case here. I'm not really following how this will be secured, but it's still early and I'm sure the penny will drop for me.

Please keep posting as and when you can on your thoughts between old and new

I did read a post on the YNAB forums that seemed a good idea to me - that poster was adding a YNAB category to his budget, and saving the monthly subscription in it. Then at the end of the year he could make a choice between a fully featured and tested nYNAB and YNAB4 which will just be coming to the end of official support, and checked that the subscription was doable ongoing.

Lazycoo if you're in the UK, you can't hook up to your bank anyway. The data that troubles me is the authentications that are possibly being added and stored to allow importing financial transactions, rather than the transactional data itself iyswim. As Tribpot says YNAB has just made itself a target. It's possible that they don't save any of that authentication data, and it's all done on the Finicity servers, but I'd like to see a bit more about how that works before committing.

cordelia thanks! Even without my bank details, they still have my personal details attached to my mountain of debt financial details. I'm a little bit uncomfortable about that but appreciate (and hope) I'm misunderstanding or overestimating the risk. Loving that one dedicated YNABer will budget for the new version over the next year!

Of course, it's hard to budget for next year's subscription costs when we've no idea what they are going to be! I'm reminded of the dreadful Bitcasa, a cloud storage provider like Drive, Box, etc. They charged $99/year and literally overnight announced the new pricing plan was $999/year. People had two weeks to download gigabytes of data before they would start being charged the new rate. Now, I know that YNAB would never do this, but I'm going to try and push them to offer longer pricing plans - I'd rather pay for three years up front and be guaranteed no price hikes in that time.

Securing the data using email address and password alone is just asking for trouble. You will recall when Jeffrey started publishing passwords he'd gained from the MN hack, how many of them were easily crackable like 'password123' and 'ilovemydog'. There are some measures to prevent you from choosing the ridiculously obvious ones, but as evidence of YNAB's understanding of security it's not good enough. When you register, you give them an email address but it doesn't have to be real, there's no verification step where you have to click on a link sent to that email address to confirm you authorise its use in the app. This second aspect might resolve itself once you buy a licence key, as that presumably does get emailed to you. But again, everything I'm describing is bread-and-butter security for websites holding personal data. YNAB does lock your account if it's brute forced, i.e. someone has tried to gain entry but used the wrong password. Even that in itself can be a denial of service attack if it happens too often.

So if a hacker manages to get some passwords, they can then start messing with your budget data and you might never know. Or threaten to do it, or say that they've done it to a thousand accounts when they haven't. The last thing you want in a cloud application is for your customers to stop trusting the integrity of their data.

In summary, therefore, two factor authentication is an absolute must for this kind of application. Not to mention the ability to back up your data to a separate data store.

In terms of where the data is being held, it isn't on someone's laptop in a potting shed or anything like that. They have gone with one of the biggest players in cloud hosting in the world - Amazon. But if a developer can leave his laptop open in the potting shed whilst logged in to the database, all the security in the world has just been neutralised. So that's why YNAB had a full security audit done before they went live, but so far they expect that we'll just believe them when they say they did it. Needless to say, various people on Twitter are asking for the results to be made public.

Finally of course - availability. The entire BBC domain was down for several hours yesterday, normally one of the most reliable there is. A reminder that any website can become unavailable, or you can be unable to connect to it (various Silicon Valley hipsters on the YNAB forum have been like 'who doesn't have permanent, fast access to the internet these days?' Er, most of even the Western world you muppets). So - offline data replication is an absolute must.

That said - I think if you are planning to start fresh anyway, lazycoo, it's worth having a play around with. I still don't really get how it handles pre-YNAB debt. The concept seems to have gone. But if this is really true, as I mention above, some YNABers will be permanently in the red. You can minimise any sensitive personal data by not using real names for things if you want, e.g. if you donate (as I do) to the Abortion Support Network, I'd be tempted to call it ASN. The app looks great, and has some good new features like goals. But as various people have said on Twitter, it's decidedly still a Beta, some key functionality is missing. If you're already using YNAB 4 in earnest, it might be worth sticking with it at least until they implement bank transaction import, which might make it possible to run both YNABs in parallel for a period of time, while you make sure it does everything you need.

They don't send an authorisation link to your email?!? Even when I worked for a very small educational software developer we sent account authorisation links to emails. It was such a standard, obvious thing to do.

Thanks for all the info on this thread. Like others, I only discovered the change when my phone app got the"classic" badge.

One thing is like to correct, though, is that it's perfectly possible to import automatically from UK banks.

MoneyDashboard were doing it a year ago. I was a bit creepy, though, as they are obviously screen scraping the online banking websites, and you have to enter all your authentication details for the various banks you use. I tried it, it worked, but I didn't like the budgeting, so I deleted my account (I hope - but nothing has gone awry yet)

Also, googling "Envelope budgeting" (which I didn't even realise was a thing until this thread....) brings up a few alternative online services, all at similar price points to YNAB5 subscription.

It's frustrating, as I ended up in the same position with Microsoft Money being discontinued, and now I feel like I've just got to grips with YNAB4, and that's going, too.

There is certainly an argument for the creation open source envelope budgeting software. Even creating the bulk of YNAB4 functionality in Excel wouldn't be too hard.

Looks like the nYNAB mobile apps don't work if there's no wifi or mobile data signal. That's far more common for me than an internet outage at home, especially as I add transactions as I do them.

Thanks Sherborne - yes, I hadn't realised that auto-import was back in the UK, did you have to give it not only your username and password but all your security info, whatever this may be, memorable date, favourite band? I have a feeling this would be against the banks Ts and Cs even if it might work technically.

Yes, envelope budgeting isn't a YNAB concept, although they have really taken it to the next level. My introduction to YNAB was evaluating various options like iBank and so on when I wanted to get back into budgeting and realised MS Money was gone, will try to dig out the old post to see what other options I evaluated.

I do think I will end up writing an Excel version of YNAB. I think my usage is pretty basic, and I enter all transactions manually. So the only tricky bit would be import from the phone, but there are plenty of ways of sorting that out if it's only for private use.

I hope the open source initiative gets off the ground, there are a lot of people unhappy to have no alternative to the cloud.

Cordelia - agreed. I've just looked and there actually is an authorisation email but my failure to click on the link doesn't seem to have prevented me from using nYNAB since yesterday. The app itself isn't reminding me of the need to authorise the email.

Cross-posted with you Cordelia - so it doesn't even cache info to send it up to the server next time it gets a connection? That is pretty poor.

Apparently not - some people have been testing, turning the data connection off on their phones.

Tribpot Have you seen the issue raised in this thread? forum.youneedabudget.com/discussion/46111/overspent-overbudgeted-its-not-obvious-in-nynab#latest

It seems the way we've been handling salary, or recommending handling salary to MN users, won't work so well in nYNAB compared to YNAB4. There's the potential for a lot of confusion. I used to tell posters to split their salary into income for this month and next month if they were paid mid month, and I always budget DH salary to next month as he's paid on the last day of the month. If an overspend quietly gets taken from next month, without a massive great big flag, or the ability to view multiple months, I can see that causing issues. On the first of the new month all of a sudden you've got a lot less money than you were expecting....

How does it look in your trial version? I'm a bit reluctant to use up my trial right now, without the reports features etc.

@OP - Yes - it was the entire set of security info.... - I was very hesitant a couple of times at doing it (for exactly the T&C reason). I don't know why I did in the end, but nothing bad has happened yet...
According to their FAQ's, they use a financial aggregation platform called Yodlee, rather than storing my bank details themselves (sorry, off topic a bit).

Cordelia - yes, I saw this question asked on Twitter as well. I always set my salary to 'income for next month' as I get paid towards the end of the month but other income I might well split between this month and next month. If you can't ring fence next month's money (bearing in mind you can't see two months in one view in nYNAB) people have recommended a category of 'Income for Next Month' and budgeting the amount to that this month, then doing a negative amount in the category one the first day of next month.

Will do some screenshots of this in nYNAB and play around - of course, you can have multiple trials, esp since you don't apparently even need to give them a real email address! Hence why I used an account that isn't my 'main' one.

Sherborne I think Yodlee is like Finicity, which YNAB are using to do their bank integration. Xero (business accounting software) use Yodlee. I can't find the list of banks which support Finicity, they say they have 16,000 partners but all the logos on their website are for US banks.

That would be a good workaround. I do something a bit similar as DH gets paid a lot on commission, and there are some months that are a bit lean. I keep an amount in a "living expenses savings" category, so that we're not caught short a few months of the year. I'd just need to add a category for salary. It doesn't feel quite as elegant though.

It's definitely not as elegant. I already use the workaround because I'm a contractor, so I have some months with a lot more billable days in them than others. I budget say 4 or 5 months ahead with amounts for salary, dividends and all my business expenses, and then everything else goes into a 'future income' category until I need to draw it down.

Well I'm trying to set up my budget afresh in YNAB5 - it is driving me crazy! I get paid monthly (last working day of the month) and DH gets paid weekly on a Monday. In the old YNAB once I entered all of the upcoming salary payments for the month into the Account section it would then become available for budgeting.

In YNAB 5, it's only accepting my current balance as budgetable income, and so as I am entering all bill payments for the month it says I'm over-budgeted I'm assuming that any salary is only going to show as it arrives in the account?

Think I may go back to the old one...it's not terribly inspiring seeing a big red flag at the top of the page!

Hi all, sorry to ask some basic and probably dim questions!

We used ynab 4 and stopped a,few months back but plan to start again this week.

1. will we still have permanent access to it, even though it's now gone subscription only?
2. will it have automatically updated to the new version or can we continue with the old?
3. will our data transfer automatically to the new version?
4. someone mentioned that ynab 5 doesn't use Dropbox....how does it automatically update from different devices?

Many thanks

furry - I think this is to do with future-dated transactions. I think it won't let you budget money that is shown as arriving in the future (particularly annoying as the server probably works on a US time zone quite a long way behind ours). Strictly speaking, you are trying to budget money you don't have. Are you trying to put your salary in on 31 Jan? That's money you really don't have Will have a look on the forums.

krisskross -

1. you will have permanent access to YNAB 4. YNAB 5, or nYNAB, is a completely separate product, there's no cross-over between the two. The subscription model is for nYNAB.
2. There's no auto-update. YNAB4 will continue to be supported until the end of 2016, although YNAB will likely answer support questions about it beyond that date, there are no guarantees.
3. Ha ha ha. Unintentionally hilarious question as it's virtually impossible to get your data to transfer into the new version even when you're trying :) Short answer: no.
4. nYNAB is stored on servers owned by the YNAB company, you use a web browser to view the data stored there, so syncing between devices is no longer really a thing. Even the mobile apps appear only to be a view of the online data, which is why they don't work if you're not connected to the internet, we think.

furry, do the transactions show up in grey when you look at the account register? That's definitely a sign of a future-dated transaction. You could date them today but leave them uncleared, so your cleared balance still matches your bank.

Thank you tribpot for answering my questions.

Can I ask.one more please... I thought the one off payment was for permanent access to ynab... If they're only supporting it til end of 2016 doesn't that mean we've been conned? Thanks

ooh trib that's a good idea (dating them today but leaving them uncleared) - am going to give that a go!

Yep, I've never been successful at getting a month ahead of myself so I put the entire month's payments to come in at the start of the month, and thats my money for budgeting with! Is confusing though because in old YNAB I just used to enter it as 'income for January' and it would automatically become money for allocating?

krisskross - it is a perpetual licence to a particular product version. The same was true when they released YNAB 4. If you already owned YNAB 3, you had to pay to upgrade.

There are many people still using YNAB 3, so it's likely that YNAB 4 will keep running for years to come. The trouble is, unlike 3, 4 relies on external components (Dropbox) and so at some point, Dropbox will change the way its interface works and YNAB 4 will stop working. Possibly before then, the 'Classic' apps (very reminiscent of New Coke for anyone who remembers that fiasco) will no longer be supported by the latest mobile operating systems, Android and iOS. So over time it's likely to degrade to the point where it's desktop only, possibly desktop with the old legacy way of synchronising using your own Wifi. And we don't know when this is going to be.

So I don't think it's dishonest really, no-one could sell a perpetual licence to every version of the software they ever made, they'd never make any money. If you recently bought YNAB 4 you are entitled to a discount off nYNAB, i.e. some free months of subscription. However, the product is still so beta and half-finished that I think this actually is dishonest of YNAB. Until it achieves a reasonable amount of equivalence with YNAB 4 I don't think they can say they will honour recent purchases on the old platform.

Incidentally, I think I've got YNAB to admit on Twitter that there are no plans to support UK bank integration. They have been very cagey on this point up til now.

furry - you must be going into the red during the month if your wage doesn't come in til the very last day but you've already spent it? I personally would consider budgeting everything into the red as a way of focusing the mind, or at the very least having a 'Buffer' category (not that the Buffer exists in YNAB any more) to sweep up anything left over on the final day of the month. You've basically always been breaking the system, which is to only budget the money you actually have.