Services suck!

A long time ago I learned a really important lesson. Last Friday I learned something just as important, services suck!

In my teen years I ended up in debt like I’m sure a lot of people do. This was when I learned that if I didn’t keep track of my spending, my income, my expenses. Well I might as well throw my money out the car window and call a collections agency because that is where I would end up. On the other end of that “FUN” phone call. I started looking around and found an online tracker, moneytrackin.com that was perfect for me. Money/expense trackers are a dime a dozen now but I don’t need all the fluff. I don’t need it to be connected to all my bank accounts, I don’t need suggested goals. I don’t need suggested budgets or graphs and widgets. In fact with all the data breeches lately I would prefer if the app wasn’t connected to all my accounts. I just want to add my many, MANY accounts and manually input transactions. Just a basic setup that lets me do what I need. But that seems to be too much to ask. It’s why I love moneytrackin. The simplicity of it lets me do exactly what I need. When they introduced an iOS app it got even better. So years ago I setup an account for free. I think I paid $5 one time long ago for the iOS app without ads but that is all I’ve ever spent. I would gladly pay $1-2/month for the service because it is perfect for me and I don’t ever want it to go away. Except there is no way for me to do that as far as I know. The developers seemed to have also moved on because I emailed them awhile back without any reply.

Moneytrackin is not the most up to date service. The site and the app have remained the same for years. A few times the service has gone down for a day or two and I’ve worried that it was gone for good. The fact that the service isn’t charging users in order to make revenue is why I worry. Friday I was reminded of this and of why services suck! It stopped working for almost 4 days, the longest it’s ever been. This underscored why services suck to me. Using a service doesn’t guarantee that it will always be around. Paying for the service doesn’t guarantee it will always be around. Even when it’s run by a well established company, the Microsofts and Googles, that doesn’t even guarantee it will stick around. If the service is not profitable or profitable enough they will pull the plug. I was frantically searching for an hour Friday morning for all the alternatives I could use to replace it. I was becoming more and more frustrated because nothing I found was close to providing what I needed. A few came close but had very costly pricing tiers which didn’t make sense for the basic things I need. I mean really ridiculously costly by the way. Even if I did find a replacement all my data was locked up in Moneytrackin. I would be starting from scratch. A very daunting idea to face. Even if I could get my data out most services aren’t easily interchangeable. It’s not like I could just export from one, import to the other and be on my merry way. This is why services suck!

I don’t know the solution. I really wish I did. Lucky for me Moneytrackin came back online. Like an old faithful car sputtering back to life. But I wonder how long it will last. How long before it has to shutter? I decided to use this reminder as a wake up call. Now each time  I use the service I make sure at least the basic information is available to me. I may not get my history of transactions but I wont have to start from scratch either. Yes, services suck!