Banktivity
I’ve been using an application called Banktivity since early 2016 to track my personal finances. Apparently I paid AU$83 for it back then, and another AU$50 in October 2018 to upgrade to Banktivity 7, and that’s the version I’ve been using ever since.
Then in mid-2020, and with great excitement, IGG Software announced that the next version of Banktivity would be switching to a new pricing model…
…a subscription 😡
They tried to sugar coat it by explaining you could subscribe then unsubscribe, and still be able to use the software. “A subscription unlike any other”. I absolutely get it - subscriptions are a great way of ensuring developers receive a predictable income, and customers receive continual updates. And don’t get me wrong: I rarely hesitate to plonk down money for software that makes my life easier or better, and I have several subscriptions for software.
But Banktivity just wasn’t - and still isn’t - worth another AU$50 to me. I only use it to track where money comes from, and where money goes. I don’t use any of the bank integration stuff, budgeting, or investment tracking functionality. I just like to be able to see how I’m doing, and have a good history of my spending. It’s a great life-journal too (“can you remember when we went to see that show?”) and it’s how I was able to open this post with exact dates and numbers.
So I stayed with version 7.
Right up until I got a new M1 MacBook this week. Banktivity 7 is old enough that I’d need to install Rosetta to use it and that, I’m afraid, was the straw that broke the figurative back.
So here we are. Another blog post where I state a problem, don’t have a solution, and just kind of wonder aloud what I should do about this. As I’ve alluded to I don’t want to stop recording this information, and I have a lot of history that I don’t want to throw away. But it doesn’t feel like a big enough problem that it’s worth paying for? Pre-2016 I just used a spreadsheet. Could go back to doing that? Or I could use something like Beancount which combines the beauty of plain-text files with the nerdiness of Python? I briefly tried GnuCash but it’s ugly and difficult and does way too many things I’d never touch.
Ah well, something else to add to my growing list of projects I really need to give my attention to.