Thread by @solmssen

Hi @matthewstoller & @ddayen I pay a lot of attention to both of you, and I was hoping to point you at what's going on with Intuit and QuickBooks - software that's at the heart of a lot of small businesses, including mine.

#QuickBooks #Intuit #monopoly #greed #terrible

QuickBooks is a lot of products, but the ones most people know are QuickBooks Online (QBO), a monthly subscription for their accounting web application, and QuickBooks Pro for Windows (QBW), a Windows desktop application.

Intuit brings out a new QBW every year. Until 2022, QBW could be bought in two ways: a license for a specific year's version, say QBW 2019, for about $300, or as a subscription (QB Pro *Plus*) for about $350 a year that included version upgrades, support, and online backup.

The specific year versions were obsoleted after 3 yrs - no security updates or online stuff like downloading from your bank after 3 yrs, but if you didn't use online features the software would keep working. If you did, after 3 yrs you'd buy the current version and keep going.

So for most people the cost of ownership of QBW was about $100/yr. But in 2022 Intuit stopped selling those licenses. You could now only buy the subscription version for $350/yr. So the cost of ownership for most users immediately jumped from $100/yr to $350/yr.

And now, this year, the subscription is going from $350/yr to $550/yr - this is a huge increase AGAIN. Businesses don't like to change their accounting software, there's a lot of lock in here. And Intuit is taking full advantage to squeeze their clients hard.

It is monopolistic and extractive. Intuit is using their market dominance and the natural inertia around changing business processes, especially accounting, to really turn the screws on their customers, and it sucks.

Intuit will claim there's some value add here, that people are getting support and staying up to date on the software, but their support sucks and I don't want to pay for it if I don't use it. And I don't need to update the software to do what I do - very basic GL/AR/AP.

The whole thing stinks to high heaven, and it's another example of software inertia allowing vendors to stick a vacuum cleaner in their customers' wallets. This one is particularly egregious, and I hope you two will turn your gimlet eyes upon it.

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