You Need a Budget has long been one of the most popular personal finance tools around, and now it's launching a new web app that comes with a new pricing model. The new version of You Need a Budget is a web app, meaning that it will run in any browser without needing to install additional software. It also means a new subscription model for pricing: $US5/month or $US50/year. As far as features are concerned, there's a ton of differences, including new features like age of money and direct imports of transactions. The web app format also means syncing is taken away from Dropbox and works directly with YNAB's servers. There's so many changes in how it works that YNAB created a transition guide and is giving away a 34-day trial to check it out while also offering up classes to walk you through the all the changes (or just check them out on YouTube). In short, it's an entirely different approach for YNAB, but thankfully the company's doing everything they can to ease the transition for users.
If you're not a fan of the web app format, YNAB 4 will see support through the end of this year, and a desktop version of the new You Need a Budget is supposedly in the works.
Oh, finally! I have a Chromebook so I wasn't able to use YNAB when it required downloading/installing software, but I've been hearing about it for ages. I'm super excited to give it a try.
I have had a look at the new one, never having used YNAB before but it seems not to support AU Banks, so is it a great tool to use even if the bank isn't supported for import?
Make sure you tell all the students in your life.
That is the US budget deficit. give or take a few billion here and there.
I've using the old YNAB for years and it literally saved us from a deep financial hole. I freely admit to being a big fan of the product and its methodologies. The new online version seems pretty good so far and there are some excellent new features. Having said that however, there are a few annoyances, small bugs, and loss of certain functionality that I sorely miss. They're also heavily pushing the new direct import functionality which is absolutely useless to anyone living in Australia.
Personally I'm going to stick with the new version since I think it definitely has the potential to be an excellent application, but I would strongly recommend that you give the free trial period a go before fully committing to it.
If you're going to give it a go bear in mind that, whilst normally pretty good, the YNAB technical support team is swamped at the moment and responses to help requests and bug reports are a little slow. Additionally, the standard response to most requests for the return of certain old functionality is "sorry, but we're probably not going to re-implement that".
It's also worth noting that any existing YNAB users are entitled to a lifetime 10% discount off the annual subscription rate of the new model.