First, let me start off by saying that I am generally satisfied with Buxfer. If you are a person that has accounts in different currencies, Buxfer is almost a no-brainer - so far it is the best of the bunch of the tools that I have tried. So far, there is only one account that it can't sync to. 15 out of 16 accounts isn't bad. It was the best result of all of the services I tried.At the time of writing this, I have the Plus plan, which is the lowest plan you can buy. The others are Pro and Prime - more on those in a moment.If you just want to have an overview via syncing and keep a basic budget, you can get by with the Plus plan. However, if you want to do any sort of planning, you quickly find you'll need the Pro plan at a minimum, which costs $1 more per month. The only real reason to move to the Pro plan is for the forecasting feature which lets you log recurring charges to keep an eye on them and help you budget better (e.g. those annual memberships for example). $1 more per month ($12/year) seems a fair deal for that additional feature (the other features of the Pro plan aren't all that special).So if I am generally happy, why only three stars? It comes back to the plan pricing - and specifically the price-to-value ratio between the Pro and Prime plan. The difference between the Pro and Prime plan is an additional $5 per month ($60/year). What does prime give you? It gives you the ability to sync investment accounts, get backups of your data, and some other features (check the membership comparison chart on their website). I would argue that most of the other additional features aren't things which most will care about. My issue is that there are two features which they block off that should really be part of the Pro plan - if not standard:* Investment accounts. To try and wall those off as a Premium++ service feels gimmicky and a needless money grab attempt. If investment account required a different API or unique technical connection I could understand. But they are just like any other account, so the distinction they try to make isn't very logical at all.* Backups. Once you move to the Pro service, backups should really be included in that membership level. Again, to not have any backup available unless you pay $60/year is almost as much as any storage provider will charge you for their basic paid tier. And in fact, I would argue that the ability to backup your data should be included in every plan. I could understand charging extra if they were hosting your backup in the cloud, but they basically have just API'd this to send backups to your own cloud services (e.g. Google Drive, Dropbox, etc). It doesn't require them to hold any additional data beyond their production servers. Of course, being a cloud-based SaaS, they have to pay for all data transferred out, but it's really unlikely that any one account generates more than $5 worth of data per month because the information is text-based. One gets the sense that you could raise the price of the other plans $0.50 or so per month and cover that cost as standard.The summary of this is that whilst I recommend Buxfer, I wouldn't recommend anything beyond the Pro plan until they stop blocking those two features behind the arbitrary Premium++ paywall. Even if they wanted to add another $1 to the cost of the PLUS and PRO plans to bring in these features, that's much more reasonable than what they are asking now.I don't have a workaround for the data backup, so for now I just accept that will lose everything if Buxfer fails as a company.For the investments part, my workaround to paying an extra $5 per month is to keep the majority of my investment account information in Mint because it's free! Sure, I no longer have absolutely everything in one place. But I can live with that. In fact, once you consider all of your retirement resources (especially pensions managed on the state/national level instead of by private companies), it's not likely Buxfer can get to those anyway so you have to do manual tracking or keep that information somewhere else. For $60 of savings per year, I can look across two screens on occasion and do a bit of manual tracking outside Buxfer.So overall, yes I do recommend Buxfer. But just be smart about what you need from it and investigate if you can use a combination of their paid service and free service to basically get what you need.If Buxfer were to do better matching between features and plan/pricing, this would easily go from three stars to at least four stars at least.
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