Quicken Starter Personal Finance – Start taking control of your money – 1-Year Subscription (Windows/Mac)

Although documentation is not clear, my impression was that I could continue to use the Starter version after my 1-year expiration as long as I only needed to enter my deposits and checks. I have never used any of the on-line services. As it turns out, unless I renew, I can no longer use the product and all of my history is not available. Tech support chat confirmed this today. Not happy with these folks.

In the info for this product Quicken says: Youll always have full access to, and full ownership of your data. That is a lie, You could work around the large banner ads that you need to renew that take over the screen, but After your membership expires you will get a pop-up message that you cant complete that action without renewing for every single action you perform. You need to click through the message each time and in entering one split transaction you have to click through it ten times or more. That is hardly full access to your data, it is unusable.

I thought I was buying a permanent checkbook program. Instead, I received a one year subscription.

Excellent software, easy to use.

This company is trying to get to a full subscription model -- they are working with banks to ensure that banks only keep 90 days of transactions available online. You need to use Quicken to download the complete historical record of your transactions. What a complete shakedown. Then there is the whole issue of version and password which is horribly broken in bizarrely confusing ways. Do everything you can to avoid this product.

How is a program thats been around this long so bad? Buggy, inconsistent, complicated. Why do I have to type in 3 passwords every time I sync a bank account? Why are there ALWAYS missing transactions so I have to go over everything with a fine tooth comb to fix all the errors. Right now it just wont sync 4 months of my credit card data in the middle of the year for some reason that I just noticed, and when I try importing a QIF or QFX it just flashes Importing but its still not there. Overly complicated. Hate it.

Doesnt work with Windows 11 and tech support is non existent on the weekend

After our prior budgeting software became subscription based, we figured if we had to subscribe to something we might as well go with the most well established option. Couldnt go wrong with Quicken, right? Could not have been more wrong. Fortunately we were able to cancel during the first 30 days for a refund. The PC version of the software is outrageously buggy. Theres a handful I can easily reproduce using the build I downloaded from their website in Jan 2020: * Randomly after syncng to the cloud and exiting the program, when I come back in, certain budget categories have had various months budgets overwritten by the latest months budget value (ex: starting a fresh budget in Jan 2021, I edited the Dec 2020 budget values to show the amount carried forward from own old budget, and then would randomly find other months in 2020 overwritten by other values). * If I filter the transaction view and theres a small number of transactions, one of the displayed totals is wrong. It leaves out the last transaction. Thus I cant trust the totals - a pretty serious issue for budgeting software. * Also in a filtered view, if I edit a reconciled transaction and then click no to the warning about editing it (to cancel the edit), the entire transaction becomes invisible (looks like it was deleted, but if you reset the view it comes back). * Also in filtered view, occasionally upon editing, the transaction overwrites either the first transaction in the view or the transaction immediately before or after the edited one, replacing it with a copy of itself. * And, also in filtered view, the last transaction in the view sometimes does not show the correct flag for manual entry, cleared, reconciled, etc... We also tried the Mac version, and while we didnt try it long enough to know whether or not it had the same bugs, we quickly discovered it wasnt usable for us either as there was no way to roll one months budget surplus or shortfall in a given category into the next month automatically (what Quicken calls rollover - a PC only feature). Other crazy things... If you have both the PC and Mac version, you cant delete an online copy of a budget created by the other platform. You also cant delete the online copy of the currently open budget. There doesnt appear to be a way on the website to delete online budgets. And online you dont seem to be able to edit account sync configuration for your bank or credit accounts. If you review their release notes for the software, they often have multiple releases per month which include bug fixes, and some of the fixed bugs are even more outrageous than the ones we experienced (one recent one involved syncng causing categories to get deleted and require you restore from backup). This doesnt give me a lot of confidence there arent many other bugs waiting to cause issues. Not sure how Quicken, which has been around for so long, can be such incredibly bad software, but it is. So very disappointed. Maybe something that happened when Intuit sold it back in 2016. Either way, avoid it like the plague. We went with You Need a Budget, which is a considerably better experience, though they are a bit rigid with their methodology (things like you cant roll forward a negative amount in a budget category... something we used to do all the time to track IOUs where we were owed money).

Decreased flexibility of use. Can no longer file-save with a new filename (retaining previous file and name). Tech support was good talker, but poor listener. Lost previous version when helped me save with a new filename. He then insisted that I wanted a new filename. Talked to supervisor. Showed me a clumsy workaround. At least he understood the issue.

Ive been using quicken for 10+ years and it used to be the de-facto go-to product for tracking your finances and downloading transactions from online. Since Quickens sale from Inuit to HIG in 2016 (not many users know about this), this product has been driven into the ground by agressive attempts to monetize the userbase without providing new features or values. They added a buggy online sync system that frequently corrupts your historical data causing you to go to backups and have to re-enter data. Even if that system is off, new patches will actually corrupt your historical data causing you to have to chase down 1yr+ back in historical data to find a random transaction that is corrupted/buggy. Worst part, HIG switched Quicken into a recurring subscription model for online services, but if you let the subscription expire to use the tool offline, they fill 20%+ of the application with red and yellow nag screens. Since being sold to HIG, its clear that Quicken is now just trying to squeeze every last dollar out of its userbase before enough people leave the tool and the product ultimately dies. Recommend everyone stay away from this tool.