I use Quicken to keep track of my finances. I have Quicken 2001. Intuit (the vendor of Quicken) today updated my copy of Quicken when I updated my security prices online so that as of April it will no longer support any online services. If I wanted to continue using any online services, then I had to buy Quicken 2005.

First of all they withdrew function that they had sold me. I can understand withdrawing support from an old product (I’ve done it myself) and even for Quicken to withdraw their online price updating service. I have no problem with that, basically, although I think three and a half years is pretty short. I do have a big problem of disabling the functionality in the program so that I can no longer download from banks, etc. who choose to continue to support me. In my opinion, this is extortion. Obviously there’s not much I can do about it, although I think some enterprising lawyer might find grounds for a lawsuit. What I can do, though, is commit that Intuit will never get a penny from me using these tactics. They have lost me as a customer, permanently. And as a recommender. If they had said, online services and support are $15/year (which is what it amounts to) then I probably would have been OK with that. But these deceptive tactics are too much for me.

I have purchased a product called Moneydance to replace Quicken. It is not nearly as pretty as Quicken, but it does have the huge benefit of an open API and the ability to add functions using Python (a popular scripting language). It also has multi-currency support, which Quicken 2001 does not. It downloads quotes from Yahoo!, which is also a benefit because I can now easily download quotes for various obscure Canadian securities that I own, but which I could not get through Quicken. So far (1 day) it has been fine. I will be running in parallel for the time being with a subset of accounts. Conversion is by exporting QIF files from Quicken and then inporting them into Moneydance.

Hopefully folks will start to contribute extensions. If I find the time, I’m thinking about doing one to calculate portfolio deltas and other greeks.