Why the price increases?

wrpowers51

I'm a decades-long Quicken user. I originally paid $31.19 in 2022 for my current Quicken Classic Deluxe. The 2023 renewal price was $51.88 - an increase of more than 66%!. The 2024 renewal is $71.88 - an increase of nearly 72%! The overall increase since 2022 is more than 130%. So, I am seriously considering other alternatives. I can cancel the subscription and order Quicken on Amazon for $36. [Removed - Disruptive]

Ps56k2

just be careful with discount pricing - as a lot of times it is only for NEW USERS - look carefully on the box image

splasher

Your $36 price for Quicken Classic Deluxe isn't available to you since you are not a "new user", so your price comparison is not valid.

I won't discuss the price increases, but lets at least compare apples to apples and not to oranges.

Palace

Try and check all retail stores online, and in your area as well, a few months before you decide to reup or not. You 'sometimes' can locate lower prices. Sam's Club few days back had Quicken Deluxe Classic for $10 discount; think over by now though? As mentioned above, be sure to read the 'fine print'. All kinds of 'stipulations' with current retailers this day & age 😉

jacobs

@wrpowers51 First, it should be noted that on this site, you're talking to fellow Quicken users, with a handful of Quicken moderators, but not Quicken executives.

I had typed out a long reply about the pricing history, and stupidly wiped it out by going to Amazon to check the current price and accidentally not clicking on a new tab. Oh, how I wish this site auto-saved text, like Gmail, for those of use who make such mistakes! Sigh.

The shorter version of what I had written is that Quicken offering teaser introductory rates to attract new users is very typical marketing; they offer a great rate to entice people to try the product, with the hope that they will remain as an ongoing customer paying the regular rates.

And it's also pretty typical for many subscription products — think magazines, newspapers, Internet/cable TV, satellite radio — to have a base rate they charge customers who want the ease and convenience of auto-renewing without doing anything, and to offer discounts to customers who ask or shop around. I get significantly discounted rates for products in each of those categories because I track when my subscription is scheduled to renew, and either contact the company to seek a discounted renewal rate or shop around to make a new purchase rather than auto-renewing. So Quicken is happy to auto-renew people at their list price, but also offers discounts in different amounts and through different channels at times during the year.

So on Amazon, for instance, while you can't get the new subscriber deal, you can purchase a subscription for $56.95, a 21% discount off the list price. That's not bad, but back around the holidays, we saw some retailers sell it for as little as $35; one even had a Black Friday price of $30.99, which is the lowest I've seen anyone sell Quicken in years. If you're willing to spend the time hunting for discounts, particularly around holidays, you can find cost savings. But many people would rather not spend the time doing the searching, and they just go along with auto-renewal at a higher price.

I had previously looked back on the Internet Archive to check the list price of Quicken going back tot he start of subscription pricing in 2017, and here are the results for Quicken 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%)

So it's undeniable that this year's increase is the largest in Quicken history. It seems that the marketing minds at Quicken are fixated on showing a price per month — probably because some of their competitors do it that way — and when it came time for this year's price increase, they decided to go from $4.99/month to $5.99/month, a clean $1 monthly increase amounting to the significant 20% increase. We'll never have any insight into their logic or reasoning. Perhaps they felt they could increase their prices relative to what their perceived competition has been doing. Perhaps they just liked the clean $1/month number. Perhaps they felt they hadn't increase the price enough to keep up with rising costs over the past 5-7 years. Perhaps their modeling projected that a steeper increase would cost them some customers but would make more money overall. Who knows?

But if you don't mind shopping around, you can certainly find deals to pay less than the full price if you auto-renew with Quicken. If your subscription is up for renewal now, my suggestion is to take the Amazon deal, or the best price you can find today. Then, around Black Friday and Christmas, look to see if you can find a better deal. You can buy a new subscription at that time and either wait o use it until your subscription is going to expire, or just apply it at the time to extend your current subscription by a year (as long as you're within 6 months of the end of your current subscription.)

Brian112

[Removed - No Soliciting]

jacobs

[Removed - No Soliciting]

Well, this is Quicken's forum, and their rule is that we can't discuss competing software products… which seems fair since they pay for the platform and the people to keep it running.

But you can just do a Google search for something like "programs similar to Quicken" and I'm sure you'll find some other programs and articles about Quicken alternatives. I'm a very long-term Quicken user, so my knowledge of what else is out there is limited and not up-to-date, but there certainly are other products from spreadsheet templates to online platforms to desktop software. Many now use subscription pricing that's similar to Quicken. I think you'll find that almost none of them are a feature-for-feature match with Quicken, so you need to determine which areas of Quicken are most important to you: is it tracking accounts across different financial institutions? maintaining long-term history? budgeting? reports? accounting-like features? web or mobile app access? Are you using it to manage a checkbook and perhaps a credit card account, or do you have investment accounts, loans, or other assets you need to track?

I think Quicken maintains its large user base because (a) some people are completely happy with the product, and (b) some people find it's the best fit for their needs, even though it has some shortcomings. There are definitely users who have posted about looking for an alternative and coming to the conclusion that Quicken is their best option, even considering the cost or shortcomings with some features. And there are doubtless people who have left Quicken for another product or platform that we don't read about here because, well, they've left!

Greg99

Same comments from Canada re price increases. In addition to user cost increase, now they've taken away the dividend / dividend yield update from the stock update function. So increased cost and reduced functionality … shrinkflation at its best!