Why a subscription.

MaryJaneLK

If you buy a disk, you own the program don't you, so why are we being made to "subscribe" year after year. The financial people are the ones who download "my information". I just purchased another stand alone copy of quicken. I do not want "online access, I do not want online backup. I want to own my program, and be able to download from websites whenever I want - not just for a year.
[Removed-Disruptive]
MaryJane

Quicken Paloma

Hello @MaryJaneLK"

Thank you for reaching out to the Quicken Community. To clarify, a subscription allows the user(s) to download transactions into their Quicken (express/Quicken connect & Direct connect), obtain updates/latest releases, and use the mobile & web features. The "stand-alone" products needed to be purchased the following year (s) to obtain the latest release, but that is no longer needed with a subscription. 

In addition, the Quicken cloud is not an online/cloud-based storage. We do not have access to your files or information since that is yours, as stated in our data-access guarantee. 

For more information about the benefits of a Quicken subscription please refer to the link below. 

https://www.quicken.com/why-quicken

Hope this provides clarification. Let us know if you have any other questions or concerns. 

-Quicken Paloma

splasher

You can't afford to truly buy your own software.  If you owned the software, you would have the source code and could make changes to it.  It would also cost you millions of dollars for a a program like Quicken.

It doesn't matter if you buy a download or a CD, you are purchasing a license to use the software under the conditions spelled out in the User Agreement (used to be End User License Agreement) and to use Quicken, you have to agree to the User Agreement, otherwise the software will not install.

jacobs

MaryJaneLK said:

If you buy a disk, you own the program don't you

As noted above, no you don't. When you buy software on a disc, you're only buying a license to use the software. That's noting new; it's been that way since the earliest days of personal computers.

MaryJaneLK said:

I just purchased another stand alone copy of quicken.

There is no such thing. If you purchased something within the past 4+ years, you purchased a subscription to use Quicken software for a year.

MaryJaneLK said:

I do not want online access, I do not want online backup. I want to own my program, and be able to download from websites whenever I want - not just for a year.

Your statement contradicts itself: "I do not want online access" followed by "I want to... be able to download from websites whenever I want". That's what online access is: the ability to download from financial institutions, either directly into Quicken, or to download a file to your computer and import it into Quicken.

There is no online backup service. There once was, but not for many years. Users of Quicken software can backup to their local computer or to cloud backup services of their choosing. 

As for wanting to use the software "whenever [you] want, not just for a year," Quicken gives you somewhat of a way to to this. If you are willing to enter your transactions manually, and if you can live with losing roughly a quarter of your Quicken screen to a permanent ad to subscribe, you can use the current Quicken software indefinitely for not cost after your subscription expires. But if you want the ability to download/import data into Quicken, then you have to pay for an annual subscription. The choice is yours.

Ps56k2

MaryJaneLK said:

If you buy a disk, you own the program don't you, so why are we being made to "subscribe" year after year.

Simple - just like cable, cellphone, internet, magazine, Microsoft, Adobe, etc -
You are paying for any ongoing "service" -

and that service is the ongoing support for the company to financially exist ....

For me, I am more than willing to support Quicken to help manage all my financial accounts at Chase, Schwab, Ally, PNC, Fidelity, Vanguard, and TRowe.  For some that only use it for banking accounts, its probably overkill, and other solutions might be better.  That is also why Quicken has - https://www.quicken.com/simplifi/ - as a simple web based solution.

NotACPA

MaryJaneLK said:

If you buy a disk, you own the program don't you,

NO, you own the disk and the right to use the contents of the disk subject to the license agreement.

AND, if you truly don't want to download (in spite of your contradictory earlier statement) you don't need to renew the subscription.  The program (except Starter) will go into 100% manual mode and about 1/4 of your Q screen will be taken over by a "nag message" to renew.  Starter will go into read-only mode.

Your choice.

cudell

Why a subscription? Once Quicken split off from Intuit, they wanted to generate more money. With the old "model" you only were forced to upgrade when communications technology changed. With the subscription model they don't need to count on new customers (growth), now they just charge the old customers every year. They make more money, you pay more money. Once the customers start complaining loud enough, someone else will create a competitive product and many customers will switch. Then they will do the same thing. Wash, rinse, repeat...

jacobs

@cudell I both agree and disagree with your comments.

You seem to feel that it takes nothing just to keep the program functional, and that's not true. There are operating system changes which require programming work just to keep the program doing what it has in the past. Changes by financial institutions are constant and never-ending, so it's full-time work just keeping the program compatible with thousands of banks and brokerages.

And then there's the fact that users want new or improved features, sometime driven by technologies Apple or Microsoft have brought out. Take "dark mode" as an example of something which became an option in both macOS and Windows; Quicken users who like dark mode want Quicken to offer ark mode as well. But it's not easy, because unlike many program, Quicken has hundreds of screens, panels, pop-up windows, etc.; worse, those have been developed over many years, using a variety of programming tools, so they don't all work the same, and making them compatible with a new operating system feature like dark mode requires anything from a small tweak to a major revamp. (Quicken Mac now has this feature, although it's still not 100% perfected; the feature is still under development for Quicken Windows.)

And that's all not to mention developing new functionality. For Mac users, where the program was re-created from scratch last decade, that's crucial, because the program doesn't yet have all the features of its predecessor Mac program, nor the Windows version. For Windows users, the program is more mature because it's had three decades of continual development, but it still needs to have old parts re-written to keep up with other changes in the program and replacing obsolete technologies.

All of this takes teams of designers and programmers and testers, and all of them take money. The subscription fees users pay support all of that. In the past, the company subsetted the online features after three years, which got users in a cycle of upgrading everything three years, or more frequently if a new feature was particularly attractive. It was really a pseudo-subscription, because if yo wanted to use the online features, you had to pay at least every third year. But this approach forced the company to hold back new features in order to have something new to market for each annual version release. Under the subscription model, customers pay more frequently, and the company pushes out new features more frequently, which benefits both the company and customers.

That brings us to total cost of ownership, and here is where they absolutely did increase the out-of-pocket costs for users as part of their switch to subscription pricing. (1) They probably needed more money to invest in the program; they had probably under-priced it for years. (2) A private equity company paid to rescue Quicken from neglect under former patent Intuit; they injected more money to add programmers and expand the product offerings, but over time the company needs to generate enough money to pay back the investors. Add those together, and they decided they needed to, and could, raise the price, so long as they made the products and service better.

So I don't think it's purely a case of corporate greed and milking consumers; it's more complicated than that. But the bottom line is that what you need to spend for three years of Quicken today is more than what you paid for three years of Quicken in the past. And users decide whether it's worth it to them or to move on to something else. 

BK

This is perhaps the most eloquent and effective response I have seen on this topic and deserves to be praised.  Thank you @jacobs .  I'd strive to communicate like you when I grow up!  Cheers.

Chris_QPW

cudell said:

Once the customers start complaining loud enough, someone else will create a competitive product and many customers will switch.

What naive statement.

As if it is the "lack of complaints" that has kept competitors from trying to produce a product.
Quicken users have always had a love/hate relationship with Quicken.  There has never been a lack of complaints, and certainly not for when the subscription was first started in 2018.

There aren't comparable products because first off it is very hard to create one, Quicken Mac started from rewrite from scratch in 2006 and isn't "finished" yet.  The integration with trying to get transaction downloading is another big barrier.  And then on top of that is how to do this and make a profit large enough that a company will continue to do it, with more than a half a dozen employees.

Microsoft got out of this business because of they didn't find it profitable.  Intuit sold off Quicken because it was a drop in the bucket of their revenue, and a BIG source of complaints.

Boatnmaniac

The thing about wanting "the good old days" to return to when Quicken was part of Intuit and we needed to purchase a new stand alone program every 3 yrs instead of needing to renew a subscription every year is that it fails to recognize that Quicken was not profitable.  If a private equity company had not stepped in to purchase Quicken from Intuit and implemented the annual subscription model the odds are that Quicken would have been shut down and ceased to exist.  Intuit came to the same conclusion wrt Quicken that a few years earlier Microsoft had come to wrt MS Money...the business models weren't working and weren't profitable enough to justify maintaining them.   I for one am happy that someone thought Quicken was important enough to save, even if it does cost more than it used to.  There is not another competitive program available that has all the features and functionality that Quicken has at this low of a price point.

rbonin

My wish is that there was a simpler version of Quicken that was a stand alone not requiring a subscription or much less expensive subscription version for simple offline check balancing and account reconciliation. I do not and have never used the online functionality. When in the past I had tried to, it really messed up my quicken check register For the amount of time I currently use Quicken, I cannot justify spending $60 per year just to balance my checkbook. I will likely try another less expensive software package to install on my new computer, which is sad as I have been a loyal Quicken user since 1996 and would have liked to continue to use the product on my new computer

Greg_the_Geek

Just find a copy of Quicken 2017 or 2016.

Ps56k2

rbonin said: My wish is that there was a simpler version of Quicken

There is a simple web based product from Quicken - https://www.quicken.com/simplifi/

but even that has gone from $39 - to now $47

jacobs

Ps56k2 said:

rbonin said: My wish is that there was a simpler version of Quicken

There is a simple web based product from Quicken - https://www.quicken.com/simplifi/

but even that has gone from $39 - to now $47 

But Simplify is entirely online. So perhaps not a suitable replacement for someone who doesn't want to do everything online. Since it's now close to the price of Quicken desktop, there's not much reason to switch from Quicken desktop to Quicken Simplify unless someone expressly wants (a) to be rid of desktop software (e.g. using a tablet or Chromebook) or (b) to be able to access all their data online from anywhere on any device. 

splasher

Back in 2012 & 2014, Quicken had an edition called Checkbook, they gave it away and people didn't go for it, they wanted more bells and whistles, it was never offered after that.