Quicken Online Users Saw The Bait, Took The Switch To Mint.com, And Are Left With Nothing

Quicken Online users have known for some time that the product they love would be terminated this year. With the shiny new Mint.com acquisition on board it was only a matter of time before they figured out that one of the two competing products would have to go. The thought was to merge the best features of both into one new product.

By February that idea had been changed. The new plan was to turn Quicken Online off at a set date and then merge all those users over to Mint:

Quicken Online users will be migrated seamlessly over to Mint.com, preserving all of their account history and account connections. On Mint.com, they’ll be able to track their investments, avoid more bank fees, and find more savings opportunities with a completely free product – while maintaining aspects from Quicken Online (like manual transaction entry).

Fast forward to real life and this is what Quicken Online users are facing:

Q. Can I transfer or import my Quicken Online data to Mint.com?

A. No. After careful consideration we made the decision to not transfer or allow customers to transfer their data from Quicken Online to Mint.com.

We realize you may have received messaging several months ago that we would migrate your Quicken Online data into Mint.com. Unfortunately, due to the complexity of the different categorization tables, budgets and account authentication between Quicken Online and Mint.com, there was no way to achieve this with elegance or accuracy. We felt this would give you a very inaccurate picture of your financial situation and require too much manual reconciliation.

One very upset customer asked Quicken to “at least wait until the end of the year so that people can have a complete year’s worth of financial records for tax purposes? I know it’s free, and I know you don’t necessarily “owe” anyone anything, but shutting down the product before the year ends is just a really bad idea, and basically tells consumers “Our product wasn’t worth anything anyway, and you probably shouldn’t use Mint.com either, because the same thing might happen with your data.”

This same user also say he’d be willing to pay a fee to keep Quicken Online going until the end of the year, to avoid reconciling two sets of data.

This seems like a boneheaded move to us. A mid year move for fiscal products must have some porting feature to move accounts and data over. Otherwise you’ve just waisted all that time your users put into the product. Quicken should hold the take down of Quicken Online until end of year, or figure out how to port accounts over to Mint. Because some of these users are lawyers. And most of these users at least know a lawyer. Bad stuff happens when you annoy lawyers. They see stuff like this as a big fat class action case waiting to fall into their laps. And fall it will.