Both Quicken and MS Money sneak these “sunset” clauses in their end user license agreements, giving them carte blanche to completely disable major parts of their functionality if they feel like it. These features include online bill pay, downloading any financial information, portfolio tracking, and more. Basically, all the cool stuff.
Intuit’s rationale is that Quicken ’07 has more advanced features than Quicken ’04 , and disabling ’04 will help them roll the features out more fully.
Quicken only lets you save data in their proprietary format. Otherwise, you can only manually cut and paste 3 years worth of financials into another system, a method they advise in their help documents.
The transaction info doesn’t flow through Intuit’s servers. It’s only between you and the institutions. Not disabling the software wouldn’t incur Intuit any costs.
These types of clauses are made in bad-faith, are extortive, are not legitimate ways to recoup costs for the company, and should be illegal.
As an alternative, here are 7 Free Personal Finance Management Programs. — BEN POPKEN
RELATED:
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MS Money 2004 Expired… [My Personal Finance Blog]
Intuit Pits Its Customers Against Its Partners [InfoWorld]
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In general this is a problem with proprietary software — the software owner has complete control over the software, and you have no control. Maybe what Intuit is doing is illegal, or maybe it’s not, but they have the technical capability to keep doing it at least until someone takes them to court.
That’s also true of the various proprietary alternatives other people are suggesting above — Moneydance, Microsoft Money, and various web sites. It’s a dumb idea to entrust your personal financial data to software like this, and this Quicken debacle demonstrates why.
Use a free software alternative instead; that gives you an ironclad legal and practical guarantee that nobody is going to make your software stop working, and you can audit it to make sure it’s doing what it’s supposed to. Myself, I manage my money with pencil and paper, but I have friends who have been using GNUCash for years.
I agree with the majority of folks here that the 3-year rule is garbage, and way too restrictive.
That said, I have to defend Quicken making it hard to move the data to other products. It’s their way to create “switching costs” and defend their business, which sucks a bit for consumers but is pretty foundational to most capitalist enterprises.
@Theseus: It’s true that capitalist enterprises tend to try to create switching costs that defend their business, but this is a failing of market systems, not a virtue. In fact, it’s widely cited as a reason for what economists call “market failure”, where markets fail to function.
(I don’t think this is actually a switching cost, though. This is a cost imposed on those who fail to upgrade, not those who switch to a competitor.)
You’ve pointed out that it’s unsurprising that Intuit (there’s no such company as “Quicken”) treats their customers in a way that, as you acknowledge, “sucks”, essentially because it might be in Intuit’s best interest. It may be unsurprising — I don’t know that much about Intuit’s history — but that has no bearing on whether it is right or wrong, or whether it should be defended. On that principle, you could argue that auto glass shops should be defended if they hire hoodlums to break car windows on the street, because it increases their business.
If you really think that it’s unsurprising that Intuit would abuse their power over their customers’ computers in this manner, you shouldn’t even consider installing their software and putting it in a position to control both your computer and your bank account. They could do anything, and there are things they could do to create far greater costs to their customers.
As long as you’re stuck in the proprietary-software world, the best that you can hope for in this matter is to entrust your bank account to a trustworthy company — one that won’t steal from you the software that you have bought, or steal money directly from your bank account. But if you use free software, which anyone can study, copy, modify, and redistribute, you don’t have to worry about it.
If someone were to insert such a theft feature in, say, GNUCash, other people would read the code and denounce them. Then any one of them could remove the problem and redistribute their fixed version. Anyone could look at the fixed version and see that the change was what they said it was. And anyone looking for GNUCash would find both versions, for a while, and would be able to choose the one that doesn’t stop working.
After a while, of course, there would be many people recommending and improving the reliable version, and almost nobody working on the unreliable version, so it would begin to be hard to find the unreliable version.
This is called a “fork”, and it has happened to many free software projects, although usually not because of deliberate vandalism of the kind Intuit is accused of here.
So with GNUCash you don’t have to depend on some software company not to vandalize your software or steal from your bank account. The software companies that work on it are not in a position to do so, because everyone has the freedom to prevent it — because it’s free software.
I can’t believe that almost everyone is missing the point.
I don’t think anyone can reasonably expect lifetime support for a product that costs $30-$70.
It would be nice, but it’s not reasonable.
If intuit wants to limit support to 3 years from the initial release date, then so be it.
They can even choose to make Quicken available with no support whatsoever.
The real problem isn’t discontinuing support, but rather going out of their way to disable features that are currently working.
I don’t expect them to provide support, but I do expect to be able to use their program for as long as I am able to get it to rum on my computer.
If I somehow managed to disable a program on someone elses computer I’d probably be arrested for hacking and end up in jail.
I know there was at least one case where a software developer disabled his code when the company using it failed to pay the annual lease/support charges (I can’t find a link to this or I would post it).
The company sued the developer in civil court and won.
I don’t recall if any criminal charges were brought.
If I find the link I will update and post it.
In my view Intuit is hacking my computer and committing extortion.
I’m still using Money Deluxe & Business 2003 well past online feature shutdown date of 3 yrs / Sept. 2006 with full functionality – stock quotes, importing financial data, online financial imports, etc … .
I always uncheck the money updates box when doing internet updates because there was one time where it did stop working after an update and I had to use a system restore point to undo the changes microsoft money made to disable the online services. Money has not been allowed to checked for updates since Feb. 2006 and the online services still work.
If you want to keep using the online services in money, don’t let microsoft money update the version as it get close / beyond the expiry of the online services. Make sure you uncheck that box everytime you get internet updates.