Goodbye Outright

I am no longer recommending Outright.com and have removed the link from my previous post. They've made several "improvements" over the past year, most of which I don't like, and are now going to charge a monthly fee. Here are excerpts from a recent email:

• New users are now charged $9.95 a month after a 30 day free trial.
• All existing Outright customers may continue to use Outright for free through Dec 31, 2011. That gives you about a year to continue to use Outright for free and determine for yourself if we provide enough functionality to make Outright worth the monthly cost. It also guarantees that you can track your entire 2011 calendar year finances for tax purposes. After Dec 31, we hope that the small (and tax-deductible) monthly fee will feel insignificant compared to the time savings and peace of mind that Outright provides. If not, and you wish to move to another solution, you will be free to download your transaction history - we don't believe in holding data hostage.

Well, apparently they do believe in holding my data hostage until the end of the year as I can find no way to export it now - and now is when I want to do so as I plan to create my own tracking system in Excel. Beings I'm currently immersed in 2010 taxes, now will be an easy time to create a custom set-up based on what I actually need to know at the end of each year. So I'll just manually enter data rather than export. Fortunately, much of the needed info is also on PayPal, which will let me export with no problem.

I understand that Outright needs to pay their bills and chose to transition to a paid service rather than subject their users to ads. So be it and I wish them well. It just isn't worth nearly $120/year to me.