It is complete rent-seeking and gets worse the further up the tiers you go. Ongoing code maintenance is necessary for even the most basic "make it continue to work", to say nothing about doing stuff like implementing new device APIs on the yearly OS cadance. Which is why it's impossible to say "get it working reliably", because there's reliance on outside sources and those are not only eligible but likely to change. If you follow the link, there were a few lines about Yahoo dropping the developer API for access to stock prices. Now you have to pay $70 a year to get stock prices? Maybe Banktivity 8 will be more reliable about getting the LATEST fund prices, which can't be said for Banktivity 6.įortunately, my Google Sheets document of my investments have all the accurate prices. You can get those prices from many sources, Google, Yahoo Finance, the fund company, etc. No I'm talking about basic stuff like getting the latest price of funds right. As if the APIs on both sides stay the same, as if there's never any edge case issues to fix that take an enormously out-sized amount of time and effort to pin down compared to how often they occur, as if the whole design can stay fixed in perpetuity. That word summons up an immediate fiery rage when it comes to software development. Just get the software you have working reliably. Turbo Tax is the same way but I don't have a choice because my returns are a PITA without being able to process the number of accounts and transactions. Sorry it's a bit rent-seeking, as it was for Quicken when they broke off from Intuit. But a continuing $50 or more (almost the full price of the standalone) every year? Yes the convenience of aggregating all your accounts and producing an integrated view is worth something. But it's easy enough just to go to the brokerage site to look them up, to download and archive them. What I won't have are the records of each transaction, though I could probably import them to a spreadsheet. I can do investment tracking on Google Sheets for free, with much more reliable securities prices updating than Banktivity. I don't think that justifies a annual $50 and above continuing charge. But the bulk of the development work has been done. Yes they can deliver incremental features and bug and security fixes. I'm not against paying subscriptions for sustaining development but I question whether there's much innovation left to bring in personal finance software. I generally don't like subscriptions, though I've been paying for Adobe Creative Cloud. Nothing about them is changing now, but they will no longer be developed and support will eventually be phased out. You can continue to stay on your current version of Banktivity if it is working for you. What if I want to stay on Banktivity 6 or Banktivity 7?
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