Despite Confusion, Quicken Online IS Free
Monday, 20th October 2008 (by J.D.)This article is about News, Tools
Quicken Online recently ditched its monthly subscription fee to become a completely free service. Over the weekend, however, GRS readers reported seeing alarming messages about possible charges. I contacted the folks at Intuit to find out what was going on. Here’s their response:
Due to regularly scheduled maintenance of the Quicken Online connections to several financial institutions, the former paid subscription screen was inadvertently inserted prompting some customers with messages around a free trial or paid subscription. This issue was fixed Monday and is no longer occurring. Quicken Online is now completely free, and we apologize for this confusion and assure any Quicken Online customer they will not be charged for access to their accounts as of October 13, 2008.
I still haven’t set up my own Quicken Online account, but I intend to give it a spin soon.
I will have to try it out.
Does this work with quarterly taxes?
What is Quicken Online?
Would it be useful for me living in Australia and running an entrepreneurs blog
Good thing I waited awhile to try Quicken Online to see what others are saying. Thanks for the update!
Quicken for Mac is rather horrendous, so I need to try this online version.
Also, not to fan the Mini flame J.D., but have you seen this?
http://www.motortrend.com/roadtests/alternative/112_0810_mini_e/index.html
@Slowth
You are evil. That vehicle would be perfect for my current driving habits…
Their response is unsatisfactory to me. The entire weekend Quicken Online was completely inaccessible. The confusion from the subscribe screen was bad enough, but nothing you did would let you access your Quicken Online account. If you were brave enough to hit “subscribe” it varied from “page not found” to asking you for $2.99 to giving a free two months. No option anywhere would allow you access to your account.
Folks in their support forums had brought up the issue in several threads and there was no response from Intuit regarding the issue. It would have been very easy to put up a “down for maintenance” page until the issue was resolved, or at least address the issue in their support forums, where Intuit employees were actively posting.
The whole mess probably helped Mint.com out a little bit, though. In a couple of the support threads people mentioned how cool Mint.com was.
I was finally able to access Quicken Online late this morning, but by then it was too late. I’d already decided that I’d stick with Mint.com
Nice to see they recognized the max exodus and ill-will their bait and switch was going to generate. I might just log into that account again.
I guess I am still phobic about this. I have problems centralizing all of my financial info on my comp much less on a website database.
I know all about firewalls, spyware, and anti-virus protection. But this still scares me.
We shred everything that goes in the trash (You are shredding aren’t you?)yet we are OK with putting our life online…..still scary….
Hey JD,
Off topic, but did you every come to a conclusion with the COSTCO AMEX credit card you were looking into? My wife and I just joined COSTCO and curious if worth the investment.
Thanks!
I love my Mint.com account. It doesn’t provide all of the features that a full version of Quicken might, but I can access it anywhere. I doubt I will switch.
I love my Quicken Online account. I’ve had it for a few months now and like it better than Mint.com by far. I’d compare it to Wesabe as well but I can’t since Wesabe was never able to add my Bank of America accounts to their system.
I have used Mint for a while and only just started with Quicken online. I like the interface of Quicken online better than what Mint had and liked the customization. I
I think that Quicken recognizes my transactions better…but it is a simple task to use both of them….just log in and hit update.
I use both because they have pros on either side.
I got the subscribe error message too, but when I refreshed the screen it went back to my account so that was not an issue for me.
I was pretty annoyed all weekend at not being able to access my account, and even suspected it might have all been some sort of massive bait-and-switch (I only signed up last week, once I heard it had become free). I’m glad to hear it was only an honest mistake on their part, and will continue enjoying my account.
I actually kept checking this blog all weekend, hoping you’d comment and shed some light on the situation. Now it’s Tuesday. A little late!
I use Mint too, but after the input from WiseMoneyMatters and lulugal11, I might have to give Quicken a try. Esp. since it’s free, and I love free!
http://renaissancetrophywife.wordpress.com/2008/09/12/minty-fresh/
Unfortunately, the quicken website has lame password checking code. For instance, say I use bank ABC and my password for that bank contains what some may deem “non-standard” characters (”(” “>” etc). When quicken asks me for my login credentials for bank ABC, it can’t handle the non-standard password even though bank ABC does. This prevents quicken from being able to access my account details.
Until they fix this, I’ll stick with mint.com.
I tried the free Quicken Online and was very irritated when it wouldn’t let me log in, saying that I now had to subscribe and pay. I selected “cancel” hoping that I could reregister and get back into my acount, but it deleted me.
After spending so much time setting up Quicken and having it fail within 2 days, I tried Mint. It was exactly what I had hoped Quicken would be and more. And it’s still FREE as it has always been. Mint also had my local bank (a must) as well as some other financial institutions that Quicken could not add. I’m glad for the Quicken failure now because it let me to check out Mint.
@ C Nott - Have you thought about using a flash drive? Install Quicken to a flash and store your financials there, then you can unplug it and lock it up when you’re not using it.
Alas, I tried Quicken Online but neither it (nor Mint) do some basic things I’m looking for. Like let me add a CASH account to track cash spending (currently you can’t add any accounts that aren’t connected to a bank). A quick spin around the forums showed that lots of people were looking for this functionality.
Also I appreciate the RealBalance feature with QO, but unfortunately it was showing my credit limit (not my balance) on a credit card with a zero balance — thus throwing off my total net worth by thousands of dollars. Annoying!
Why would anyone give Quicken (and thus, any entity that has the authority to subpoena their records for whatever reason or any marketing firm willing to pay for information about your spending habits) full access to their entire financial picture?
Bad, bad, bad idea.
@Kimberly: I’ve also been frustrated by the lack of a cash account.
@JD: So you know, Quicken online also lacks the line-item possibility, which I miss from my Mac version. I liked being able to have a transaction split into more than one category (eg. groceries and household).
I went and set up Yodlee, and it’s not bad. One thing I like better than Quicken is that I can update all my accounts at once. Quicken is certainly brighter.
It is of course, a lie to call this situation a misunderstanding. They very clearly wanted to start charging. There is no doubt about that.
I’ll give Mint a try. Lot of you seem to like it.
“It is of course, a lie to call this situation a misunderstanding. They very clearly wanted to start charging. There is no doubt about that.”
Read James’ post above (which matches my own experience):
“If you were brave enough to hit “subscribe” it varied from “page not found” to asking you for $2.99 to giving a free two months.”
If they wanted to do a bait-and-switch, they’d have made the ’switch’ part a whole lot easier to follow. Go look up Hanlon’s Razor.
@FekketCantenel:
Exactly!
I described it on another forum as complete incompetence.
I don’t buy the “regularly schedule maintenance” line, though. If it’s regularly scheduled, it must happen regularly, so there’s no way this random thing happened during a process they’ve run before.
Here’s what I think happened:
On October 7 Slate.com ranked various personal finance software. Quicken Online was the top scorer, and Mint.com was one point behind. That point was lost because Mint at the time wouldn’t let you do custom categories. Well, three days later Mint allowed custom categories. So anyone that reported on Slate’s article mentioned that, AND the fact that Mint was free, and Intuit decided that Quicken Online needed to be free, and fast.
So in the rush to make the announcement that Quicken Online was free, someone probably copied a bit of code over from when they were in Beta to go around the subscription screen, figuring they could clean it up later. Well, then that created a big mess and they had to spend the weekend doing it right.
This didn’t help Quicken at all, because the weekend after they announce they’re free, the weekend various blogs and even newspapers printed the news, all the people that wanted to try Quicken Online at that point couldn’t. So it was a massive clusterfudge.
The Quicken online has in the past been a paid subscription service. They have just switched from charging to allowing users to use it for free. So the whole bait and switch idea is actually wrong. It was, as someone mentioned, just a stupid coding error that got rolled out without being tested. If they “wanted to charge” you for it, they would have kept charging like they were doing. I tried it a few months ago on a 30 day free trial option but stopped using it when I found out that it does not handle split transactions. I actually love Quicken on my PC at home and wish they would make the online version more like the regular version with split transactions and ability to have a cash account like someone also mentioned here.
JD,
thanks for getting that cleared up - a bunch of my readers were having issues with it as well…