We upgraded to SaaS YNAB and suffered through it for years, before dropping it in our house for the same reason. Syncing was broken for a really really long time. We finally reported it, and it was working the next time we checked.
So, their monitoring (if it exists) is not doing its job whatsoever, and they’re relying on customer reports to find out about months-long outages. Not to mention the smaller sync outages that would happen constantly.
We tried to understand the way they want us to deal with credit cards about a dozen times. Never had any interest in learning it and still don’t (because I don’t treat a CC transaction any different from a cash transaction w/r/t budgeting), but the new YNAB forced it on us.
Nothing I’m saying is new. It’s just wild to me how bad their Second System tanked their software & reputation.
> Syncing was broken for a really really long time. We finally reported it, and it was working the next time we checked.
Well they use Plaid, they aren't really responsible for syncing. Most competitor will also use Plaid and have the same issue sadly. Mine also stopped synced recently as my bank updated their website. It took a few weeks before it came back.
> So, their monitoring (if it exists) is not doing its job whatsoever,
Actually Plaid monitoring is quite good (for each bank you get the percent of failed queries), but how fast they react, well that's another ball game and I guess it depends on the amounts of users affected and the amount of works required to fix it.
I was considering working on my own opensource alternative to YNAB and that's why I looked a bit into Plaid. Now that Actual is open source, maybe I won't...
> I don’t treat a CC transaction any different from a cash transaction
Well they aren't different either... I treat both my cash and debit card transactions the same way I treat my credit cards transactions. I add them in their respective accounts and that's it (I only started adding them manually when my bank updated their website, it has gone better than I thought and decided to stay that way for now, never felt comfortable knowing Plaid had my banks credentials).
Maybe what you were confused with was the amounts shown on the Budget side? The credit cards categories act a tiny bit different than the actual categories. I know you said you had no interest in learning, but if you change your mind, I could try explaining how it works.
I guess an issue with credit cards is that it feel like it's actual money, but it's not. That doesn't goes well with zero based budgeting which depends on the fact that you already have the funds to pay for all your spending. You work with past money, not future one.
So, their monitoring (if it exists) is not doing its job whatsoever, and they’re relying on customer reports to find out about months-long outages. Not to mention the smaller sync outages that would happen constantly.
We tried to understand the way they want us to deal with credit cards about a dozen times. Never had any interest in learning it and still don’t (because I don’t treat a CC transaction any different from a cash transaction w/r/t budgeting), but the new YNAB forced it on us.
Nothing I’m saying is new. It’s just wild to me how bad their Second System tanked their software & reputation.