Penalty for Loyalty

user17881

I am paying about $60 to renew my Quicken Deluxe

Classic. If I let my subscription lapse, and sign up as a NEW customer, Quicken discounts it to about $36 per year.

This PENALIZES, instead of REWARDS, loyal continuing customers.

Bad policy, Quicken! Please reward me for my loyalty (Quicken user since 1995!)

splasher

Watch out for what you ask for, they are liable to raise the base price to offer the loyalty discount.

MHSwizzleStick

For the last 3 years, I bought a one-year Quicken Deluxe subscription for about $40 from Staples on a black Friday sale.

BK

This topic comes up very frequently on this forum. Vast majority of subscription businesses operate the same way where they offer discounted rate to attract new customers only. Think ISPs and cable TV where a new customer can save over $100 per month over an existing customer! As well as magazines, streaming services, antivirus products, etc. And as the previous comment mentioned, you can also find good Quicken deals for existing customers a few times a year.

user17881

I appreciate the comments from all you.

My rebuttal is that just because many companies do this "discount for new customers, no discount for loyal customers" doesn't make it a good business practice.

As you are aware, for ISPs and cable companies, many have a loyalty department where loyal customers can call in and ask for promotional or discount rates. Although I resent having to call in to get what my loyalty should have earned me automatically, at least there is some benefit there for me when I ask. I haven't found that department at Quicken.

Thank you all for your courteous and thoughtful comments.

Chris_QPW

Whereas I do agree with you that I consider it a bad business practice, I also recognized that for most part the people that would be compelled to use Quicken really don't have much choice in the market, and so they can get away with such practices, and they don't see much benefit in changing that.

But here is another way to look at it. They want new business, so they give a discount to new users. They want to keep existing customers, so then give them a discount. That would result in everyone paying the same amount, so no one would really get a discount.

Ps56k2

also be aware - that those discounted prices are only for a NEW USERID (new email address never registered with Quicken)

So - even if your subscription expires - you will not be considered a "new" customer, unless you use a "new" email address User ID -

Chris_QPW

For what it is worth, for a while now I have been using TurboTax which has the "free Starter edition 1 year subscription" included. At times I have wanted to use this just so that I could test what was available in the Starter edition to help people here. Well, what they don't tell you in the TurboTax blurb is that it is for "new users". So, it is the same game. And what I did is just use a different email account, and when opening the older data file, just log out and back in with the new email address that is connected to the new free subscription. What is the result? Basically, one should assume that you will be resetting up all the connection services, even though you might get lucky and some just work.

Given that this was just a "test file" it wasn't much of a deal for me, well until lately.

The system has gotten a whole lot more complex and fragile. I'm getting more and more gun shy on testing anything outside of what I would normally do, because I'm seeing things that I wouldn't think should interact, affect my main data file. I'm thinking that I won't do this with the Starter edition this year. Most likely nothing much has changed in what is available anyways.

Quicken is no longer the "vital" software it used to be for me. This is mostly because of my current financial institution and not really any change in Quicken. So, in reality I probably shouldn't worry about it messing up my data file test/help people, but it does still "bother" me a bit when these things happen.

BK

Or you can simply purchase the frequently discounted offers at Staples, Newegg, OfficeDepot, BestBuy, Amazon, Walmart etc. When you combine all these, you can find a deal once a quarter. And I am not referring to the package/fine print labeled "for new subscribers only", rather the one available to anyone.