Quicken sold to another private equity firm

"Since the H.I.G. buy, it appears that Quicken has grown quite a lot. It currently has 2 million active users, which Dunn said is ?significantly higher? than what it had at the time of its spinoff from Intuit. "

What exactly do they mean by "active users"?

Presumably those with current subscriptions. I suspect they can also look at those who are uploading transaction data to the Quicken cloud, as well as those downloading from financial institutions and using Quicken Billpay.

It doesn't surprise me they are profitable. They've essentially converted to a subscription model and can easily match costs to revenue.

The sales volume going up can be interpreted two ways - one is that they are expanding their user base (unlikely) or the other is that in a declining market you raise prices as those who continue to use the product will clearly pay for it.

I am surprised that number is so low, but not if they mean active subscriptions. I would think there are many, many more users who are using their product on a stand alone, subscription basis. Which always made me question the subscription model. I am hanging on to and using my pre-subscription version until the day I die. I am sure that I am not alone. Of course, if they had newer versions that didn't nag you to death and hog your screen with advertising, I might consider updating once in a while.

You are not.

Molly Mockford

I see very little difference ... except in the description of the model. The previous model also required paying, what was extremely similar to, a subscription fee.

Maybe not so unlikely. Dunn says they have "substantially" more "active users" than they did at the time of the spinoff: I don't find that hard to believe.

I believe over time quite a few Quicken users have made it clear that they have purchased Quicken at greater than the cheapest price available (myself included) in a small effort to help keep Quicken alive. To me, the worst outcome is not higher prices, it's Quicken going out of business.

At the time of the changeover, I believe a one-year renewal with Intuit cost basically the same as a new subscription with Quicken (two and three year renewals were somewhat cheaper). There's no way to compare any Quicken-to-Intuit prices since then, but some subsequent Quicken price increases should probably be expected: there's no way all the changes and feature additions that have occurred were going to happen without some additional cost to the users wanting those changes.

It's possible that some increase in price coupled with some increase in capability has contributed to the increase in active users.

And users should still shop for bargains; when I have looked, there have been sources with cheaper prices than Quicken, Inc.

Not sure exactly what that means.

Do you mean users who still use the subscription version of Quicken, but have let their subscriptions lapse?

Those users would be of no use to Quicken (hence the nag to renew), and would be essentially impossible to count.

stand alone NON subscription basis.

either that, or the old versions that were not annual subscription versions.

They may be impossible to count, but they could be estimated. And they are not of no use to Quicken. While they may not get annual renewals from every user, users would, each on their own schedule, update their Quicken versions for new features. That is revenue. With the nags, I imagine MANY Quicken users will no longer buy upgrades at all.

Not sure what the value of such an estimate would be in the context of my reply to Taxed and Spent. See below.

Except that users who "update their Quicken versions" are, by definition, not users who have "let their subscriptions lapse". So specifically not the users I was talking about.

A self-defeating approach, since buying the upgrade removes the nag ... and gives the user access to any new features and bug fixes, continued ability to download, and free support. But to each his own.

I doubt anyone (especially anyone outside of Quicken) who knows how well the Quicken nag will work in the long run - there certainly is no useful information in the subjective notion of, "MANY Quicken users" who won't upgrade BECAUSE of the nag. How will you determine which users stopped using Quicken because of the nag (which they wouldn't have seen if they had not already let their subscription lapse), and which users stopped using Quicken for all other reasons (and may have never even seen the nag).

At the end of the day, there might be "many" users who stop using Quicken because of the nags; but all that's necessary for the policy to be a success is that "many" not be "enough" to make the nag a bad idea: if more users re-subscribe with the nag, than would have re-subscribed without the nag, it won't matter whether "MANY" users did not re-subscribe. Only Quicken will be able to judge that, and if Quicken comes to believe the nag is a bad idea, they'll do something about it. But question begging statements by users are not likely to have much effect on their decision. [If you believe otherwise, I believe there is an "Idea" discussion in the Quicken Community where you can vote to reduce or remove the nag.]

And there is a third group - those who use an old non-subscription version (I use Quicken 2017 very happily) but don't like being nagged. I have taken two actions:

1. In my firewall, I blocked qw.exe outgoing. This prevents Quicken from "phoning home".
2. To fix the error message "Unable to check for updates. The server file failed to load", I altered the following line in the quicken.ini file in C:\Program Data\Intuit\Quicken\Config:

Original line = "Periodic_update_period=4" Changed to = "Periodic_update_period=0"

I've not had a single Server File Failed to Load error since.

Hope this is of help to somebody else who does not want to move to the subscription versions, but just wants to be left alone to use the software they have paid for.

Your post seems to suggest you think I'm advocating something: to be clear, I am not advocating anything, just trying to insure that Quicken users base their decisions on the facts. And I don't like nags either, though my preferred way to avoid them is to use a current version of Quicken (because I want much more than to just avoid "nags": I want virtually all the capabilities Quicken offers ... many of which no other software that I am aware of, offers).

All the issues you had problems with can be easily overcome, as your post demonstrates (as have a ton other posts - many of which can be found in the Quicken Community).

I was addressing the issue experienced by those using a Subscription version of Quicken, since those users have no way to avoid the nag. Indeed, it seems pretty clear to me that the nag-avoidance mechanisms you employed are likely a major reason for the nag implementation in the Subscription version of Quicken.

Eventually older versions of Quicken will no longer be usable (through no effort on Intuit's/Quicken's part). Operating system changes are one way that old versions of software can become unusable. Given the importance I place on my financial condition, I am not willing to wait around, using increasingly obsolete versions of software, that will eventually become unusable ... and in at least some situations, have data that can not be used by the currently available versions of that software (or, for that matter, any software).

If you are happy with your current Quicken situation, I have no intention of trying to suggest you are wrong, or that you should do anything different than what you are doing now. My comments are intended for anyone who might be drawn to your approach because they did not understand the issue. I'm just hoping that Quicken users make informed decisions.

I am sorry if you have interpreted my post in that way. I hoped I had made it clear that my intention was to be of help to anybody who did not want to move on to a subscription version, but also did not want to be nagged to do so.

That may have been the case in America; I have no idea about that. It certainly was not the case in the UK, where I started using Quicken in the last millennium, and have never had a subscription version; it has always been an one-off purchase. Eventually Intuit withdrew from the UK market, and it is presumably from then on that they moved entirely onto a subscription model.

And I also hope so; being aware of the basic facts is very important.

It was never called a "subscription" product until the Quicken version following Q2017. But it worked conceptually pretty much the same as today's acknowledged "subscription" product. Prior to Q2018, you paid for 1, 2 or 3 years of unrestricted use - meaning you could download transactions using data in OFX format, and download security prices using Quicken's quote servers, get free software updates to correct bugs and introduce new features, and get free support from Intuit, during that period. Once the term you paid for was up, you either paid for a new version (again with 1, 2, or 3 years of unrestricted use), or you lost the benefits of downloading, free software updates and free support.

It's possible that the product sold in the UK did not work that way, but I don't see where that changes the logic of my comments. Intuit/Quicken has always wanted (and needed) users to re-subscribe: if users could just purchase the product with all its benefits that would last forever, Quicken would soon cease to exist. The vast majority of Quicken users want the features that come with a current subscription (though too many of them complain about having to pay for those features); so the relatively small number of users who are content to get along without those features don't have the clout to get their complaints addressed.

There has been no UK product since Q2004, and most all the complaints that I have seen in the past 3 years or so (and I have seen plenty) are from U.S. users, complaining about the U.S. version (perhaps the Canadian version should be included here too, I can't recall) - and the overwhelming majority of those complaints are about the in-product nag (first introduced in the true Subscription Quicken version that began with what might be called Q2018) which takes up approximately 1/3 of Quicken's screen space, and can only be avoided by re-subscribing.

I believe that the pseudo-subscription versions I referred to above (pre-Q2018 versions) began around the time the OFX specs were introduced, and Quicken and M.S. Money started using OFX data for receiving downloaded data in Quicken. Downloads - especially downloads which did not require the user to manually logon to their financial institution's web site - became much, much, better with the advent of OFX - but OFX downloads require work (thus costs) on the part of Quicken. I only started using Quicken with U.S. version Q2000 and the pseudo-subscription model was in effect then in the U.S.

But regardless of the model in effect, I don't believe you ever actually legally "owned" Quicken (in order to use Quicken, you should have been required to agree to the Quicken EULA (end-user license agreement) - that agreement should have spelled out what your "purchase" entitled you to). You certainly should have had no expectation of not seeing encouragements from the manufacturer to buy again. Back in the day, I suspect that Intuit assumed most users would not figure out how to disable those "nags": today, it appears that Quicken has discovered that users have learned how to disable those nags .... and has upped the ante, to use a nag that (apparently) can't be disabled without re-subscribing.

--Maybe you can check to see if this might work. With Quicken 2017 Home and Business, that came from former owners Intuit. New Owners bought it out, and went to annual subscriptions. I don't want to save my files on a cloud. I never use the download options either. New owners seem to give it updates and then winter of 2021-22 started telling me my Quicken 2017 "subscription" was expired. 2017 was not sold as a "subscription", but it had the download period, that I never used anyway, and that had expired long past, but this new warning of expired subscription, which was likely coming from new owners updates to 2017, started blocking Quicken 2017 Home and Business from doing my books. And with all this Covid nonsense to shut down businesses, it is not easy getting by either. This worked for me to stop that so I can continue to use my 2017 software: While holding down the Ctrl and Shift keys, click "Tools" in the menu then "One Step Update". You should get a window that says "You will no longer be prompted for registration" and Okay that. That has stopped the unneeded Intuit ID login for me, and the subscription ended blocking.