Another Emma price change... best free alternatives?

cwj_money_89

Starting from the 30th of April 2024, we'll be transitioning the following functionality to our premium plans:

• Budgeting

• Payday to payday tracking

• Recurring payments

• Networth

• Transaction history for more than 2 months

Just seen Emma have got rid of more features from the free plan for the 3rd time in a year... any suggestions of the best alternatives from the MSE team/community? 🙏

Emmia

cwj_money_89 said:

Starting from the 30th of April 2024, we'll be transitioning the following functionality to our premium plans:

• Budgeting

• Payday to payday tracking

• Recurring payments

• Networth

• Transaction history for more than 2 months

Just seen Emma have got rid of more features from the free plan for the 3rd time in a year... any suggestions of the best alternatives from the MSE team/community? 🙏

Unfortunately running Emma and similar apps does cost money - and I believe that developers of these things should be paid. I don't work for free (do you?) so why should the developer(s) do this for nowt?

If you like it and use it, pay for it. 

I pay for Emma.

400ixl

As more of these companies spring up and the market matures, the less the companies that buy the data from them and ultimately fund them are willing to pay. Therefore if as revenue cannot fill the gap then they charge the customer.

Not reacting fast enough to that change is what saw the likes of Moneydashboard go out of business.

blue.peter

cwj_money_89 said:

Just seen Emma have got rid of more features from the free plan for the 3rd time in a year... any suggestions of the best alternatives from the MSE team/community? 🙏

I've never use Emma, so I don't know exactly what functionality it offers, let alone what particularly appeals to you about it.

For what it's worth, though, my preference for money management software is AceMoney. I've had it for many years, and it serves me well. It's not free, but the cost is a one-off payment of about £40. It runs on a PC or Mac, not a phone.

A free alternative to AceMoney is Money Manager Ex, which has a good reputation. Again, it runs on a PC or Mac.

blue.peter

Emmia said:

If you like it and use it, pay for it.

Well, maybe. There are a lot of free apps/services out there, for all sorts of purposes. This is the Money Saving Expert forum. It's supposed to be all about saving, rather than spending, money. The OP is not only reasonable to be looking for something free to serve their purposes, but is asking in the right place.

cwj_money_89

Thanks all for your input and insight @400ixl and @blue.peter  - I'll take a look at AceMoney & Money Manager Ex 👍

Come across a couple of free alternatives that cover what I was looking for on a free or cheaper basis. Welcome any views:

• Moneyhub - £1.49 / month or £14.99 / year. Basic app but quite simple.
  
• Snoop... but still not really hitting the mark with all the functionality I was after.
• YNAB? Using envelope budgeting. Seems great. Any thoughts? Quite a lot of admin involved?
  
• Lumio? Which looks interesting for myself and my wife? Seems to have the free functionality I was after.

Always appreciate the MSE community brain.

Thanks again.

Futuristic

Moneyhub is free initially for like 6 months so give it a shot. Its core business is banking APIs for other companies and is profitable so it's not likely to disappear any time soon. The pricing has been same for years. Has functional web app as well. 

blue.peter

I'd always be very wary of anything that either (a) requires a monthly subscription, or (b) runs on someone else's hardware. Either can potentially run the risk of you losing access to your vital information. The provider can easily increase their price to an unaffordable or unacceptable level, or simply withdraw the service altogether (e.g., if they go out of business). Those are not risks that I'd be willing to accept. I see it as vital that all my records and the software needed to read and edit them should be on my own hardware. The biggest risk I have is that AceMoney will no longer run on a future version of Windows. Even if that happens, I can export my data in a common format (e.g., CSV or QIF) before switching. All that I've got on someone else's server is a backup copy of my data file on Google Drive. The working copy is on the computer in my study.

As it is, I paid my £40 (or whatever it then was) about 20 years ago, and AceMoney is still serving me well. It hasn't cost me a penny since. If I was starting out now, I'd try MMEx first, simply because it's free. I couldn't find a free one that I liked back then. MMEx didn't exist.

YMMV, of course.

morgmonster

I always remember… if you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product… have a feeling though that probably even though we are paying, we may well still be the product…

Anyway what I logged in to say was that YNAB is NOT free, it’s $99 a year. For me it is worth it, been using it for 7 years now. There is a month’s free trial so you could start that just before a pay day and see how you find it. I have never used Emma though, so couldn’t give a direct comparison. You can output everything into CSV format whenever you want if you do want to keep backups locally or off the YNAB servers.

blue.peter

morgmonster said:

… if you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product…

Hmmm. I don't follow your logic here.

It's certainly true that this is the case sometimes. But always, as a matter of course? No, I don't see it.

Let's take a couple of examples of free software that I use a lot: LibreOffice and Calibre. Both are offered free of charge. Neither requires me to give any personal information to the producers at all at any time. Neither generates advertising. No e-mails, no popups, nothing. Sure, both invite donations, but only in a pretty passive way. The option to do so is there, but easy to ignore. Indeed, Calibre makes it simple to remove the "Donate" button from the toolbar altogether. I've been using both for many years, but have never felt any great pressure from either to buy anything or to give money. (As it happens, I've chosen to support both with donations, but that was very much my own choice. I could easily have carried on using them without donating. And I'm sure that a lot of people do.)