Quicken switching to subscription model

I guess this was inevitable: Quicken has switched to a subscription model. They’re charging $45/year for Deluxe, which is the version I use. Here’s an article about it, from MacRumors. (Weirdly, I found several articles about the change on Mac web sites, but none on Windows sites. The change applies to both Mac & Windows, and the pricing is pretty much the same for both.) You can currently buy a 2-year subscription from Amazon for $90, which isn’t really saving you any money, but they include an additional three months, so I guess that helps.

Lately, I’ve been upgrading Quicken every year anyway, but I think I’ve usually only paid about $30 for it, getting it from Costco or Amazon. So this change looks like it would make it a bit more expensive for me. (And I’d lose the option of skipping a year, if I didn’t want to upgrade that year.) So that’s something to think about.

I’ve been using Quicken for a long time. The first version I used would have been under MS-DOS, back in the early nineties, I think. Switching to something else would be a big change for me. And there’s not much else out there that compares well to Quicken. Moneydance, maybe. That’s a one-time $50 purchase (though I could probably get a discount on that). I’m not sure how often they release new versions or what their upgrade pricing is, but it would probably work out to being a little cheaper than Quicken.

I’ll probably bite the bullet and buy that 2-year Quicken subscription from Amazon. I’ll wait a bit, though, until I get a chance to run out to Costco and see if they’ve got it cheaper. (I’ve been paying for Office 365 by getting it from Costco, and that’s saved me a few bucks over buying it directly from Microsoft, so maybe they’ll have something for Quicken too.)