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.

Trib, maybe they left an intern on it as it was the holiday week. An agency up its own arse might have come up with this strategy and copy - looks like they have an employed director of marketing and perhaps a digital marketing person. That's not enough for an international product launch.

I'm sure they have hipster marketing agencies in Utah - there's huge numbers of them over here, all with smoothly wacky ironic websites about how cool and different they are. It's probably a worldwide trend.

The change log for nYNAB is quite interesting. I'm pleased they dropped that stupid Laser sharks thing quite quickly. www.youneedabudget.com/release-notes

Oh good, I'm glad they've accepted the need to publish that. Now if they would only admit they need to do the same with the product backlog (i.e. the upcoming changes).

Update: there's now a section in the user guide talking about how to budget for reimbursed expenses. As you may imagine, the options aren't great:

• simply save up the money you're lending to the company so you can afford to do without it if they inexplicably failed to pay you back (put it another way, fund it out of your buffer)
• overspend on your credit card. A possible variation (not suggested by YNAB) might be use a fake account (set up as a credit card) to allow overspending.

There has been a tone change in the last few days from YNAB, less of the uncharacteristic arrogance and more 'we are listening'. I've had a response to my complaint about the behaviour of the Twitter account and the feedback has been passed along.

That's the guidance I found a while back and thought was bollocks.

Have you seen Jesse is back in the forums?

Oh sorry cordelia, I didn't realise it was the same one, I thought maybe they'd expanded it slightly in light of the MANY comments about it.

Yes, I saw Jesse had made a welcome return. The forums have quietened down a lot as a result, I hope he's learnt a lesson about leadership as a result. The worst thing a leader can do in times of crisis is be absent.

In unfortunate-yet-hilarious news, the Finicity link seems to be playing up for a lot of users today - of course, they're saying nada on Twitter, just letting YNAB get it in the neck for something they have no control over. And they thought Dropbox sync was a pain!

And sorry for being brusque. Had a trying evening.

Sorry Finicity aren't totally reliable? And Jesse said in the AMA they were the easiest guys he'd found to deal with....

Autocorrect fail there....

I wonder if 'easiest' equated to cheapest? I haven't found anything that gives market share for Finicity vs Yodlee, but it would appear Yodlee are much bigger outside the US but have a healthy market in the US too. Hmm.

Perhaps they are all Mormons? That's half serious, but they are both Utah based companies.

Just found this - maybe you can still get a licence key for YNAB4 after all?

purchase.youneedabudget.com/

Eep. Take 10 points and have a cigar, cordelia - they are. At least Nick Thomas, who founded Finicity, tweeted from a Mormon conference in October (including retweeting summat about apostles 98, 99 and 100 being called this weekend).

The forum has been speculating that the partnership is step 1 in Finicity acquiring YNAB to replace Mvelopes.

They better not turn YNAB into a MLM!!

My sister spent a year at the University of Utah, and wrote her dissertation on Mormons.

Her impression of meeting lots of them (students) was that they were generally nice, hard working, serious sort of people, but they weren't really interested in socialising with non Mormons. Unless she'd expressed an interest in converting of course....