Quicken Deluxe 2017

Retired 09

I would like to update but I don't want a monthly fee, just buy the program and be done. Is that possible?

volvogirl

it's not a monthly fee. It is an annual price. You need to renew each year. They only show it as a monthly fee so you can compare prices and see how low it costs. Just marketing. If you upgrade you will have to renew each year or there will be a big banner on your Quicken screens to renew.

Retired 09

I never had to pay any fee before. I don't like that, maybe I'll look for a different program or go back to notebooks. Just to know, how much is it for the year?

volvogirl

Well you had to buy it once originally. And then every 3 years if you wanted to use any online services like downloading transactions. I'm staying on 2013 since I don't do any downloading and enter everything manually.

Retired 09

I never did any downloading either, but my program started to run slow, so I thought that it was the program, none of my other programs are running slow.

jacobs

@Retired 09 Of course, no one likes paying a recurring fee. But if you look at if from Quicken's perspective, if they only made money from selling to new customers, they wouldn't be able to stay in business investing in the software and providing customer support because the market for such software is finite. So they need long-term users to be long-term paying customers. It used to be that users needed to buy a new versions everything three years to maintain online services. It changed 5 years ago to an annual subscription so they didn't need to support multiple old versions for several years, and they could release new features as soon as they were ready instead of waiting for one big new annual release. What's in it for us as customers is (at least theoretically) improvements to the software, with new features and bug fixes, and at the most basic level, the ongoing health of Quicken, the company, so that the software will continue for many years into the future and not be abandoned as other money-losing competitors (Microsoft Money, Mint) have been.

On the Windows side, users can choose to stay with a decade-old version because the software was already quite mature then, and Microsoft doesn't often update the windows OS in a way that breaks older software. On the Mac side, it's different: (a) Apple aggressively updates macOS each year, and software needs to be updated every few years to keep up with Apple's underlying changes, and (b) the modern Quicken Mac was re-created from scratch a decade ago, and there are still many features being added to it year after year, so sticking with an old version indefinitely would result in users missing out on all the new functionality.

My program started to run slow, so I thought that it was the program, none of my other programs are running slow.

If the combination of your computer hardware and operating system isn't causing your other software to run slowly, but Quicken has become slow, it seems unlikely that simply upgrading to a new version of Quicken will solve your problem. There might be something with your data file that's caused the slowdown. If you've allowed your data file to be stored on a cloud service (Dropbox, OneDrive, etc.), that can be a cause of slowdowns and other performance problems. I'm a Quicken Mac user, so I'll bow out of any further discussion of Quicken Windows performance slowdowns, but hopefully some of the windows experts can chime in on things to check or try.

As mentioned above, you could buy a subscription for one year in order to jump six years forward from your current version. If you then let the subscription expire, you can continue to use it, but the right roughly 20 percent of your Quicken screen will be hijacked for a persistent ad to renew; if you can live with that annoyance, then you can continue without paying. The folks at Quicken apparently believe it gets enough users to eventually renew to be worth annoying people who have already chosen not to pay to be an ongoing customer.

Retired 09

And if I pay all these recurring fees, I'll soon be broke on a limited income.

jacobs

I'm guessing that $50 a year won't make you broke. But if that's too much for you to pay for the value you'll derive from it, then you can either stay with what you have or look for a no-cost alternative. But as I mentioned, if your main concern is that Quicken 2017 has gotten slow, I'm doubtful that updating to the current version will solve that problem.

My suggestion is to create a new post in a Quicken Windows category of this forum with a heading like "Quicken 2017 running slow". Provide the specifics about nothing else slowing down except Quicken on your current computer/operating system, and ask for suggestions for things you might try to improve your Quicken data file. This would include things like running the database repair utilities, and possibly exporting your data and importing into a new Quicken file, but because I'm a Quicken Mac user, I don't want to get into details here; the Quicken Windows experts on the forum will likely be able to offer you some solid suggestions.