Price Increase for 2024

JKLines70

I've been loyal customer since early 90s if not before. Put up with abandonment of Mac development while PC version moved forward. Went with subscription when it was $50/year even though that was higher than upgrades at the time … and I had choice there as to whether new features justified increase. Subscription based, you have no choice. Last year was a 15% increase. Now I just got message about a 20% increase for 2024. So continuing with your trend … I expect you to try and mik a 25% increase out of us next year. I do appreciate you finally getting the reporting beefed up to about the level of the PC version … but I am having difficulty understanding why $50/year was not enough to essentially maintain the product and continue to do some development. I intentionally stay away from putting my financial info on-line where I can which seems to be the only alternative at this time.

flgimp

I have a similar complaint. My renewal message reads: On January 25, 2024, the price of Quicken Classic Home and Business will change from $9.99 per month to $10.99. Because subscriptions are billed annually, the new price won’t affect you until 04/09/2024 which will be your first renewal date after the change. I have also been a loyal user since the 90's. I am retired now and (still) only use Quicken for basic record keeping and account reconciliation. i feel taken advantage of with unjustified price increases passed to your customer base each year. Please give us alternatives or a discount for seniors.

volvogirl

You could renew for a lower version like Deluxe. Do you still need Home & Business? Or don't renew at all and keep your current version and enter everything manually. But then there will be an expiration banner asking you to renew taking up a lot of your screen.

splasher

You can renew (extend) up to 6 months before your current subscription expires. so renewing now (before the price increase) you could beat this upcoming price increase this time and in 12 months beat next year's increase.

I'm not saving it is a great solution, but it beats the increase for the near term.

Chris_QPW

And even if your subscription isn't going to expire in the next 6 months you could buy Quicken from a retailer, which gives you an activation code. That code should be good for up to a year, so you can wait until your subscription is within 6 months of expiring and then use the activation code to extend your subscription for another year past its subscription ending date.

Personally, I bought from Newegg last month when it was on a big discount. My subscription was due to expire 1/17/2024, and now it will expire in 1/17/2025.

dmenning

I too have been a long term user of Quicken for Mac, also primarily for offline financial record-keeping and reconciliation tasks, going back to before Quicken 2007, and all through its successors up to the current post-Intuit version.  During most of that time price wasn’t an issue, given the length of time a particular version might last with options and updates. But that has changed with the current subscription model, where year to year increases have had little predictive stability, other than being higher than the year before. Yes, improvements are made each year, mostly for the benefit of users of the online connection features, or to more closely match the Windows version (perhaps a matter of equity rather than improvement).  But as a user with the same needs from year to year, that doesn’t add up to an increase in value as measured by yearly price increases now up to 20%. It would be nice to have a “fixed” version of the app for local home use — and not just for seniors, but everyone who has come to rely on and value Quicken exactly for that.

jacobs

@dmenning said: It would be nice to have a “fixed” version of the app for local home use — and not just for seniors, but everyone who has come to rely on and value Quicken exactly for that.

I just don't think there's any chance that Quicken will go back to a buy once/use indefinitely pricing version. It's not the way their revenue model is built, and it's not the way the software industry has gone over the past decade.

The price increases since subscriptions began back in fall 2017 have actually been pretty modest, but the jump in 2024 — especially for the largest number of users who use Quicken Deluxe — is disconcerting. Perhaps they are emboldened by Intuit closing down Mint, and having less competition? Or perhaps it's just that the cost of living has jumped a lot over the past two years since etc last price increase, and their costs to hire and retain staff in the competitive Silicon Valley (at least for the US-based staff) have probably gone up quite a bit over that. But it seems that the numbers are based on nothing more than their marketing people wanting to keep keeing their nice round numbers for the cost per month — even though no one actually pays monthly!

So these are the increases coming in 2024:
  Starter goes from $3.49/month to $3.99/month (a 14% increase)
  Deluxe goes from $4.99/month to $5.99/month (a 20% increase)
  Premier goes from $6.99/month to $7.99/month (a 14% increase)
  Business & Personal goes from $9.99/month to $10.99/month (a 10% increase)

The much larger percentage increase for Quicken Deluxe users seems to be simply because they wanted to go up in $1/month increments (50¢ for Starter). If they didn't focus so much on the stupid monthly prices that no one pays, and instead just adjusted the annual membership cost, they could have made it much fairer, and less drastic for everyone. For example, this would have been better:
  Starter goes from $42/year to $48/year (a 14% increase)
  Deluxe goes from $60/year to $69/year (a 15% increase)
  Premier goes from $84/year to $96/year (a 14% increase)
  Business & Personal goes from $120/year to $137/year (a 14% increase)

– – – – –

I just did a look back in time at the pricing since subscriptions began in 2017, and you can see this is one of two large increases, and the biggest one ever for the largest number of users who use Deluxe:

Starter:
  2017: $34.99
  2018: $34.99 (0%)
  2019: $34.99 (0%)
  2020: $34.99 (0%)
  2021: $35.99 (2%)
  2022: $41.88 (16%)
  2023: $41.88 (0%)
  2024: $47.88 (14%)

Deluxe:
  2017: $49.99
  2018: $49.99 (0%)
  2019: $49.99 (0%)
  2020: $49.99 (0%)
  2021: $51.99 (4%)
  2022: $59.98 (15%)
  2023: $59.98 (0%)
  2024: $71.88 (20%)

Premier:
  2017: $74.99
  2018: $74.99 (0%)
  2019: $74.99 (0%)
  2020: $74.99 (0%)
  2021: $77.99 (4%)
  2022: $83.88 (8%)
  2023: $83.88 (0%)
  2024: $95.88 (14%)

Home & Business:
  2017: $99.99
  2018: $99.99 (0%)
  2019: $99.99 (0%)
  2020: $99.99 (0%)
  2021: $103.99 (4%)
  2022: $119.88 (15%)
  2023: $119.88 (0%)
  2024: $131.88 (10%)

With this price hike, Quicken jumps higher than the cost of inflation over this time period. According to the government inflation calculator, the $49.99 price of Quicken Deluxe in August 2017 would be $62.52 today, but Quicken is jumping past that with a new price of $71.88. There does seem to be a point at which some users will decide it's just too much to spend each year, and the executives at Quicken ought to be careful that they don't start a death spiral of higher prices driving away users, resulting in even larger price increases to maintain revenue, resulting in more people abandoning the product… I don't think we're there yet, but foisting a 20% increase on users risks starting a cycle from which recovery becomes unlikely.

Chris_QPW

@jacobs said:

According to the 

government inflation calculator

,

Who in their right mind believes the government numbers?

jacobs

Who in their right mind believes the government numbers?

Would you prefer if I gave you some other inflation calculator site which isn't government? 😂 It's simple math, really; not much wiggle room for error.

Chris_QPW

I know of no way to accurately assess inflation mostly because it is different for everyone, and I guess the government's numbers are what people are always going to use, but they fudge the number and are usually low. So, even when people say "in XXX year's numbers, which means using the government's numbers" they are really way off (usually but not always low). And in this case Quicken's price increases wouldn't look nearly as large as they seem with that inflation calculator.

Here is an extreme example of this.

Average price of a house in the US in 1920: $6296, and it states, calculator states: $100,165.45 for 2023.

Actual average price of a house in the US in 2023, $410,200.

Going the other way:

Price of 1 lb. of bacon in 1920, .52, in 2023 according to the calculator: $8.43, real average price 2023 $6.90.

Dozen eggs in 1920, .47, calculator: $7.48, real average price $2.09.

Average yearly wage in 1920, $3,269.40, calculator for 2023 $52,014.12, reals average yearly wage $53,490. So, that one is pretty close to the same.

I have to admit I'm surprised. I thought that the government numbers were always quite low until I looked these up.

But looking at the house numbers I think it is pretty obvious why we have a housing problem these days.

Jon

CPI is an average across all spending categories, if you try to apply it to specific items of course it's going to be off. It may not be perfect but I haven't found a better way to account for inflation - I use year over year CPI changes to increase my overall budget.

Jon

Also, for some of those categories you need to be mindful of changes in the standard of living. A dozen eggs now isn't much different from 100 years ago but a house? 100 years ago it had no insulation, no AC, single pane windows, probably no garage yet (but perhaps someplace where a horse could have been kept), and was a lot smaller as well.

I remember the first house my parents bought in the late 60s that was built in the 1940s and all off those things were true when they bought it.

Chris_QPW

I was sort of reacting to this statement:

Quicken Deluxe in August 2017 would be $62.52 today, but Quicken is jumping past that with a new price of $71.88. 

The main point is that whereas using the CPI numbers might help to put some perspective on the cost increase, by no means should it be thought to be "accurate" for any given item.

In the context of what you can "trust" about the CPI numbers I would consider $62.52 and $17.88 to basically be anywhere from a bit low to about the same, to a bit high. In science kind of terms there would be some error bars where anything in that range is "considered" as close as it is possible to determine.

Chris_QPW

 I use year over year CPI changes to increase my overall budget

I don't budget (create them based on the least year numbers, but don't really use it), but I tend to use the CPI number plus -1% for Social Security income and +1% for inflation in the Lifetime Planner that I just sort of just look at for amusement.

The biggest problem I have with using the Lifetime Planner is that it has no history. I could put in 0% for inflation and come the next year unless I went back to a backup a year ago, I would have no idea if that prediction was accurate.

There seems to be a lot in Quicken and personal finances in general that people go by the "feel" and not hard numbers, probably because it really hard to really get anything other than "ballpark" estimates. Is Quicken's increase in price "excessive"? Well, when someone says, "The new things they have added in the last 20 years are useless to me." then of course they few any change in price as excessive. And of course, there is a whole spectrum to this, but even when a lot of value has been added for a given person, I think the tendency is to dismiss it as "just a little thing here or there" and not even consider just maintaining the current features cost money. There was mention of the US developers, but no mention to something else, which is just as important. The Quicken servers are on Amazon Web Services, Quicken Inc pays Intuit for connection services, the Bill Management third-party is US based too, and what about the quote services? And on and on. And the US isn't the only country that has experienced inflation. In fact, in some cases the US has some of the lowest inflation.

I have found even trying to get my "personal inflation" number as being extremely hard because live changes and stuff. But just looked back at it since I have been "semi-retired" since about 2009 it is a bit easier to get at this. No "lifestyle/job changes", using the categories that I use for the Lifetime Planner to remove the taxes (which vary by income of a given year) and removing "one off items".

I get a pretty stable looking number up until the last 3 years, but there is no way I can use the CPI number.

Punching in the 2009 number:

dmenning

Thanks to jacobs for the analysis of the pricing issue. And I should have been more specific that by “fixed” I meant fixed functionality rather than fixed price — a version of Quicken that provides its framework of accounts, transactions, reports, etc. in a desktop app meant for limited home financial record-keeping and reconciliation.  Options such as connections to institutions, bill paying, and the like would still be available through subscriptions to Deluxe or Premier.  In any case, I realize no version could be at a one-time fixed price, if for no other reason than Apple now upgrades its OS every year. Even a limited home version would need regular price increases associated with the needed changes, though perhaps at a more stable rate.

Also, let me add the scenario for my use of Quicken Deluxe over the last few years to illustrate the cost problem I’ve been feeling, CPI notwithstanding.  In late 2016, I purchased Quicken 2017, a major upgrade, for the one-time price of $64.99.  That lasted for almost four years until I jumped to the new subscription version of Quicken in 2020 at the introductory price of $69.99 for two years.  My first renewal in 2022 was $51.99, and the second this past year $59.88, in total a 72% increase over the introductory two years.  And now I’m looking at $71.88 for 2024, which will bring the total price over the last four years to $253.74 — an almost three-fold increase over the 2017 version, for essentially (for me ) the same functionality.

jacobs

@dmenning Yes, one of the "hidden" price increases for many people is that they no longer get a steep discount like they did buying a new retail version every three years or so. There are still some discounts available for renewing customers, but Quicken has squeezed a lot of the discounting out of the retail channel. As a result, and as you illustrated, the price increases feel even worse than just looking at the full retain prices I posted above.

As I wrote above, I don't think there's any chance of Quicken going back to providing a buy-once/use indefinitely version of Quicken. And I don't think they're likely to split the base software product from online connectivity so that users like you who don't use connectivity could buy the product, even on a subscription, for less. (Among other things, that would mean they'd have to split the costs of connectivity among somewhat fewer users, and thus charge even more than they do now for the majority of users who do use connectivity.)

I think the issue comes down to looking at the value you feel you derive from Quicken. Don't look at the historic pricing, because that's what makes you feel the price now is too high. Look at the cost as if you were buying it for the first time. Do you feel it's worth $6/month for what Quicken does for you? (Every user may have a different answer, because we use the program diffidently as part of our financial planning.) Evaluate the monthly cost versus what you pay for cell service, cable/Internet service, streaming services, Amazon Prime/Walmart+ memberships, or routine purchases like coffee at Starbucks/Dunkin'. If Quicken feels too expensive for what you get from it, then it's time to look for an alternative way of tracking your personal finances; otherwise, don't look at the costs in the past, and feel satisfied you're getting a fair value for your money.

Chris_QPW

when people ask for a fixed functionality they think that that will save quicken Inc. money, it won’t. For each platform there is only one program. There are flags that determine the functionality based on edition you paid for. So it would actually take more work more cost to stop having added functionality as in they would now have to add more flags that say don’t add this new functionality for this addition level. So you’re basically asking for them to spend more money and time to save you money and cost them money. Not exactly a good business decision.

DaWeav

When I consider that I purchase the latest TurboTax Deluxe with State every year which is a 'one time use' application, it's hard to complain too much about paying for Quicken.

That is until these kind of price increases! As for me, I too will never use all of the online Web Connect features built into Quicken because I prefer my own security of downloading the QFX files directly from the financial institution and importing them instead of whatever Quicken (or 3rd party) servers they say are secure (ha). Not to mention that one of my primary financial institutions stopped supporting Quicken which is over half of my accounts that I'm now having to do 'manually'! So why would I pay Quicken for that!

I agree and also would like them to change their pricing business model that would allow me to pay for the Quicken features that I use instead of having me to pay for all the Quicken features that I do not use. For example, paying $30-$40 a year for the base Deluxe application with unlimited QFX file imports to my accounts. Then pay an additional $5-$10 per package of X number of online Web Connect enabled accounts. Just wishful thinking for sure…

Anyway, I just don't like sustaining their online Web Connect business when I don't use it, and probably never will.

Andrew

No-one likes a price increase. I wouldn't mind if it was in part justified by increased relaibility of the product. But no, the same old bugs keep irritating me each time I use it. Will you ever get rid of the "enter valid date" in investments?? [Removed - Rant]

Quicken Kristina

Hello @Andrew,

That issue was resolved by a recent update. If you are still experiencing that "enter valid date" issue, I would recommend first making sure your Quicken is up to date (Help>Check for Updates). If your Quicken is up to date and the issue persists, then please reach out to Quicken Support directly for further assistance as they can walk you through troubleshooting steps in real-time and escalate the situation as needed.  The Quicken Support phone number can be found through this link here. Phone support is available from 5:00 am PT to 5:00 pm PT, Monday through Friday.

Thank you!

jacobs

@Andrew You're not talking to Quicken executives here; they'll never see your commnets. This forum consists of fellow Quicken users and a handful of Quicken moderators. I don't know if you use Quicken Windows or Quicken Mac; I use Quicken Mac and haven't experienced and am not aware of problems entering dates for investment transactions.

As for testing and quality control, they do indeed have people who do that work. I don't know if hiring more people would help appreciably or not. Quicken's code is actually quite complex, some users have data files which go back decades through dozens and dozens of upgrades, and dealing with thousands of financial institutions on non-standardized downloading through a third-party supplier is far from perfect. Many problems which turn up would not turn up with more testing because the testers don't have accounts at every institution and don't have data files equivalent to all the variations present in users' data files. I'm not saying they can't do better, nor making excuses for Quicken. I'm only saying that they do have QC people who do internal testing, as well as users doing beta testing, and problems still turn up when updates are released to hundreds of thousands of users.