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.

I knew mn would have the answer, though

So the YNAB twitter account is taking pot shots at existing customers again - I don't think I've mentioned this on here. Twice over the last few days the account has retweeted someone saying nYNAB is fabulous and people who don't think so are idiots. I'm paraphrasing, this time it was 'some people will never accept change'. The time before, rather more spectacularly, it was 'haters gonna hate'.

I've written to complain now - never seen anything like it. MN's Twitter response during Jeffreygate may have been amateurishly casual (50p in the meter and all that) but not 'why are these whiny bastards complaining about this'.

I'll add any more choice messages to this as a handy public record, should anyone start to get busy with the delete button.

Btw, madwoman, I agree - it does feel a bit pious doesn't it? I think in return for removing 'Tithing' from the standard list of categories that shipped with YNAB 4 (I mean WTF) their religious zeal has instead taken hold of the application's workflow, not a positive step forward.

One of the posts on the ANA made it click with regards to their strategy...
YNAB5 for the new users Jan 1st, with the aim of reaching at least feature parity with YNAB4 by the end of 2016 so that the existing users have something at least equal, if not better, to move to then.

The way they've dealt with it, though is pretty poor. They'd have been better off calling it iYNAB or something other than a version number increment, as that set existing users expectations incorrectly.

Tbf, they haven't called it YNAB5 in official stuff. It's just YNAB or nYNAB, and YNAB4 has been renamed YNAB Classic.

In fairness they haven't called it YNAB 5, they just call it YNAB. It really is 'Classic Coke/New Coke'.

I call bullshit on the post-hoc 'oh this isn't for existing users .. yet' excuse:

• If they had intended it only for new users, why (initially) offer the lifetime discount solely for January? (Since reversed, will now be available to existing YNAB4 users whenever they want to exercise it)
• Why try to go live with YNAB 4 migration, which essentially doesn't work? (They re-enabled it briefly this evening to get more log files to analyse, it's offline again - they have admitted they will extend the trial period for anyone affected by migration).
• Why not tell existing customers anything yet rebrand our apps? Were we meant not to guess nYNAB existed?

I think they are right in retrospect, they should have offered it only to new customers or without a migration option, so you could start fresh if you wanted to. (Maybe a basic migration that would take in reference data including accounts with their current balance). Despite drinking the Agile kool-aid they forgot the point of minimum viable product. Reports aren't MVP, migration definitely isn't. Manual import should have been higher up the list than data migration.

So - yes. Right in retrospect, but I dislike the dishonesty and lack of humility implicit in saying 'oh yeah we TOTALLY meant to do it like this, der'.

I think that I I totally missed that this wasn't YNAB5 is just indicative of the poor communication so far!

I don't disagree with anything in your last post, trib.

Which post was it on the Reddit discussion that suggested this was the strategy, Sherborne?

Agile kool-aid haha!

You've articulated some of my discomfort with the new product trib thanks. I found them a likeable bunch with an excellent product and so I really want to like the new product. Ynab 4 saved me from financial ruin. It has kept the roof over our heads and made me the most confident and relaxed I've ever been about money. Part of my total 'buy in' was definitely related to them being a company I want to be associated with, that and the feeling I had the bargain of my life in getting ynab 4 . I could go with another product as the market has developed since then, but I want to give these guys my business.

Backtracking isn't good. I'd much prefer they were more honest, although some of the heat on Twitter would likely make me turn into a defensive arse too.

@trib, it was the question thread asked by pyr0_vision, starting with "What's going on with YNAB?". Probably a bit of reading between the lines on my part, but it was Jesse's statements:

We sacrificed many-a-feature to hit a ship date that was pre-2016. That was strategic and man, not without its costs

and

We would have loved more time. For new users that are just coming in, it's been mostly fine. For experienced users that had features they missed, it's been tough. It was a tough call

And then in an earlier thread, this quote

This has been a tough launch for us, because we hit our ship date with the new user in mind. YNAB 4 is not going anywhere any time soon, and will certainly be overshadowed by the new YNAB (immensely overshadowed!) before the official updates to YNAB 4 end.

So nothing explicitly, but I can imagine the meetings when these things were probably discuss.

Like Kriss I only signed up recently. I was doing fine ish but it was hard to get my husband on board initially and then when I persuaded him, his phone wouldn't download the app so he had to keep telling me what he'd spent and forgetting and it all went wrong. He's just got a new phone. So my question is, will he still be able to download the app for 'classic'? I am so desperate to get our finances in order and feel like I am being thwarted at every turn!

Kathy, the classic app will be in the app stores for at least a year, and probably beyond that.

KathyBeale - yes, the app is still available, YNAB4 still works. So never fear, you can get on with the business of budgeting and ignore all this stuff about nYNAB for now! Does your DH make a lot of cash transactions? If he could turn most of those into card ones, you could import the transactions or enter them manually, since you're still dependent on him remembering to enter them on his phone.

Sherborne, those quotes were telling for me too.

It's interesting how the communication on the Facebook page has changed, especially regarding the red arrow. It's gone from a paraphrase of "deal with it" to "we're listening, we didn't expect this reaction, bear with us while we look into it". That second response is far more YNAB than the first, much more in line with how they have reacted to feedback from users before.

I wonder if they outsourced a lot of their communications and marketing strategy. A lot of the copy feels like it, in particular this horror of a blog post - www.youneedabudget.com/blog/post/new-years-resolutions-dont-work.-until now - which manages to be patronising and insulting to new and old users.

It all reads like hipster agency stuff, where the agency got carried away and didn't understand the target market.

Link didn't work. Let's try again....

www.youneedabudget.com/blog/post/new-years-resolutions-dont-work.-until-now

Fab, thank you.

He uses his card a lot so I was importing stuff from our bank account (manually) but always firefighting and having to move things between categories when he unexpectedly spent £100 on football tickets or whatever. I really want him to be able to enter his own transactions so fingers crossed this will work.

Is he doing the setting of the budget with you Kathy? I am asking because that's an important thing too to get buy in. It's very motivating for him to see something like "if I put £100 towards football tickets, that leaves me short in the money for our holiday/food/going out/swimming lessons. Where do you think I should take the money from?" Hopefully it might set off a lightbulb for him.

Not so far but I will get him involved. Hopefully! He is very resistant to budgeting and genuinely can't understand taking from one pot to fill another. I'm getting there but it's a slow process!

Tribpot I thought you may find this interesting. I was talking about this mess to DH last night, and mentioned that I wasn't too worried about the data being in Dropbox and in nYNAB because it was just transactional (I wouldn't enable direct import even if it was available).

Anyway, his job involves selling and arranging finance for big ticket items. There's a trend amongst finance companies to change security questions away from date of birth, place of birth etc to transactional questions, eg what was the last thing you spent on your credit card? What's your mortgage payment? etc. You're allowed to get so many wrong, and the questions are differently weighted so that you get a point score. Too few points and you fail the check. This trend is accelerating in the UK next year, with a major finance house going to a ten point questionnaire instead of a signature as part of the finance arrangement process.

So transactional data does have more of a value than I thought.

lazycoo without wishing to bang on about Agile too much, this is one of the points where (in my experience) it nearly always fails. Not because the method is wrong but because people are still people. The mantra of Agile is 'fail fast' or 'fail forward', i.e. get it out there when it's 80% done rather than wait forever for it be to 100% done. It never will be. But that means you, and your customers, have to have a mature and collaborative relationship that allows them to expect and tolerate failure and trust you when you say 'okay that didn't work, is this better?'. So what you absolutely cannot do is go on the defensive (or indeed take no mitigating action to prevent your customers going on the offensive). But this is where egos come in and ultimately ego is what stops Agile from working.

So, long story short I don't think YNAB were necessarily wrong to ship nYNAB at the point when they did, what they catastrophically failed on was the non-technical part of the project - the customer engagement, the comms strategy, the adoption strategy. They could have informed the existing customers - look, it's there but at the moment some of your key features haven't been delivered. Don't worry - you can adopt it later in the year when more of the YNAB 4 functionality has been delivered. If you do want to go, and you've got a YNAB 4 account to migrate, we'll put you in a queue and advise you when your migration date is coming up. Instead, finding out what it does and doesn't support has been way too hard. Way too many gaps in the documentation, and no pre-prepared answers on questions like how to handle arrow to the right, future-dated income, income for next month. And clearly Finicity have been MIA over the holidays as they haven't replied to any query about which non-US banks they support.

(Furthermore I get the impression all of these concerns were raised and dismissed during beta testing)

cordelia that is interesting, although overall I still think Dropbox has better 'security through obscurity' than YNAB, which is a sitting duck.

Kathy I think the Budget Meeting is going to be more useful than him entering the transactions at the time he makes them (since it's unlikely to have any influence on him in terms of not buying stuff randomly). This is where you sit down and draw up the budget for the month ahead, and agree whether or not there actually is £100 for football tickets. Now, the only person I know who holds a monthly Budget Meeting is the guy who owns YNAB, he recorded it one month for the podcast and his wife sounded utterly bored throughout, so even the people who own YNAB clearly don't really enjoy the monthly Budget Meeting! But if nothing else, you'll be able to show him a screenshot of the budget, pointing to the 'Available to Budget' being zero, so if the football tickets aren't budgeted for, the money has to come from somewhere else. (Preferably, to drive the point home, from a category that causes him pain).

We have the odd budget meeting! They are tedium personified. DH adopted ynab and got me involved. The first budget meeting was hard. I was defensive and hostile but ynab makes it clear you can't spend the same dollar twice. Irresistible logic set out in an easy to follow way. I've been driving it for the family ever since.

I sometimes fling the iPad at him once I've done it and say 'speak now or forever hold your peace' and that gives him a chance to review the month ahead. I am looking forward to adopting nYNAB just for something new to do. I feel I'm ticking along too easily with the old YNAB. I feel that things should be a bit more uncomfortable than they are (maybe that's my Presbyterian upbringing).

YY trib - spot on re agile and failure of comms strategy. Trying to entice us to migrate now feels close to dishonesty when so many features are missing.

lazycoo funnily enough I had a similar conversation as your feeling about budgeting .. on an Agile training course. A colleague said they were so expert at Agile that they didn't bother with retrospectives because everything always went right. I gently inquired if they had considered whether they could have delivered more, or delivered the same in less time, which was met with utter confusion - do what? More? Why? Anyway, the term for this being stretch goal, maybe that's what you need to think about for the budget - yes, you have reached a steady state but what could you achieve with just a bit more stretch?

We have a budget meeting occasionally, usually when some crisis happens, like our boiler failing in October. However, as I'm very much the driver and controller of our finances it is usually more of a briefing than a meeting. DH spends very little, and as long as he has personal spending money every month really doesn't care about the individual amounts or goals.

For example, I want to buy a tumble dryer. I've informed him I want a tumble dryer, and am going to do what's necessary to make that happen. He understands, and just accepts it when I say - no we're not having a meal out, because of the tumble dryer. Perhaps he's very easygoing!

Trib I still think they outsourced comms. Whoever they outsourced them to has done a poor job. How you're saying they should have done it is more how I would expect the YNAB I thought I knew would do it.

Stretch target! That's the phrase I was looking for trib thanks. We are still under a mountain of in debt and we both want to clear it ASAP. I'm sure there's more we can do. Laughed at your story there. What a lack of imagination that character has.

I mainly consult with DH when I need to borrow from his pot of capital from a house he sold a couple of years ago - this is held separate from the the rest of our money although a lot of it is earmarked for big projects like putting in a disabled bathroom for him and stuff like that. Other than that, he spends almost nothing (one advantage of being too ill to shop!) so only gets involved when, e.g., the boiler blows up in November.

cordelia I kind of half hope they did outsource the comms, but I just don't believe a professional PR firm would have retweeted 'haters gonna hate' from the official YNAB account.

lazycoo I think the goal feature of nYNAB will help you focus on debt reduction, but even without it you can set yourself a stretch target of chucking another x quid at the debt monthly? I'm sure in the YNAB podcast one week they talked about a nice website where you could track progress towards goals, will have to see if I can find it in the archive. It's obvious in hindsight that a lot of the recent podcasts have been trying to introduce the new ethos behind the nYNAB method.