and they were more than happy to extend my free trial for a month! While it is just good business sense for them, not a lot of other companies would be quite so happy to give their product away for free any longer than they had to - even if it ultimately means giving it away for more later. I hadn't budgeted for it! D'oh! So, a quick glance through the helpd pages suggested that customer service was amazing, so, not expecting much, I dropped them an email. only to realise that I didn't have the money for it. and at the end of it I decided 'YES! I want to pay for the subscription!'. back when I first started, I use the 30-day free trial. As for the customer service, well, let me tell you a story. While you *can* get very similar results with a spreadsheet, having the ability to readily sync between phone and browser regardless of where you are is a godsend. I've been with YNAB for a good 20 months now and it is a truly useful application. It has continuously been the buggiest budget software out there, with no concern about fixing its own issues. And they really don't have any intention to start. They have never listened to their users' concerns in any of the fires they've had to put out over the years. The contempt of their customers was overt in answers to questions posed in an online forum. The entire debacle has been very telling in terms of how the company views its users.

The recent treatment of YNAB customers over the price hike really was just the icing on a very old cake. Testing before implementation feels good, man. YNAB didn't even know it was going on when its users first started complaining about it. The vendor change wasn't adequately tested at the time, and charges were not being imported correctly (Plaid had a little trouble with debits being credits for a while there). Appeals to fix the linking issues have gone on for years, with half-hearted fixes and a vendor change to Plaid.

The software has been buggy from the beginning.

The budgeting concepts are good and, I do recommend that you buy the book and implement the four rules in your budgeting process.

Ynab budgeting for the year