Be sure to see this discussion as well: https://www.wesabe.com/groups/222-wes...pen-source

The community discussions on Wesabe were better than any service I've used in any category. I learned much from the Wesabe users and thought it was a great service. I'm sorry to see Wesabe go. Thanks for all your effort. I think other services benefited from your original insight.

The implication from the blog post is that the reason for the shutdown is a money issue. "Shoestring" comes up quite frequently. I'm curious as to why a pay-service was not considered. I'd certainly pay for the service you provide. It far exceeded the quality of alternatives. Also, I'm afraid of change.

I'm really sad about this. There are no alternatives for international users available. This one being the only one and many times better than others available only for US customers.

I would be willing to pay to keep this running or offer to host this for free somewhere else at our own cost

I'm sorry to see it go, but I appreciate that Marc and the team are remaining true the ideas of Wesabe, even as it forces it to close. I've been glad to have this service for quite awhile and I've been glad to receive and give so much advice and insight about money since I found this site. It won't be the same without Wesabe here, but I hope everyone takes what we've learned to make their lives more financially secure and free.

I would like to than Marc and the entire team for providing me this section of cyberspace in which to learn and improve my financial life. Its been fun and frustrating and only the beginning of the trip, but it was quite interesting. So long, and thanks for all the fish.

I am so bummed. Sorry to see you go.

Thank you for all things Wesabe.com and best of luck on future endeavors!

Bit of a bummer. As has been said, Wesabe was the Mint.com for the rest of the world. Wish you all the best for whatever you do next.

Wesabe is so superior to its better-marketed competitors. Will be sad to see this service, which has become a routine part of my life, go away. Marc - you created an incredible site and wonderful product. Just wanted to add to others who have been saying that they would pay for the service. I would too!

I too am saddened by the decision to close off this service. I guess it was too good to be true. As many have said before me, I too would be willing to pay for the service. I have been running the program for seven months now and not sure what I am going to do. It took me a while to find this service. As we have all come to trust you and your organization I am sure we would all appreciate some recommendations of where to go to replace your service. I know that you are not required to do this and I am sure you might be nervous doing this but it would be helpful to both you and us if you were able to point us in the some direction. Maybe the answer is to start up a discussion on this topic. Thanks for what you have provided and for what you will provide in the future.

Dang!

I wonder what's going to happen with the Credit Unions and Banks that were contracted with Wesabe?? They must've had some sort of deals with them?

Hi @Marc-Hedlund

I remember personally talking to you, the CEO of the company, for tech support. How often do you get that for a large, impressive international site??? I was impressed with your care for your users, and seeing you have to go feels like I am losing a friend! I actually went to my wife with a sad face and said "They have to shut down Wesabe!"
And yes, we would have paid!

You guys have set the bar very high in your exemplary conduct with our sensitive financial information. I appreciate that you are intentionally choosing not to run "half a company," as we are business owners ourselves.

With the hard work you've put in, I'm sure you will have no trouble picking up a new project to grow. Your ethics really impress me. Users really do wish every site had a "data bill of rights" like you have done.

It really is odd, but I feel like I have some great memories from using your service and learning about my personal finances in a critical time in my life.

Thanks for the memories and the help,
Danny

Count me in as another user who would have (and vocally volunteered to) pay for Wesabe.

Not excited about switching to another service-- and ultimately I think the Groups conversations are going to dwindle as there's no larger motive for users to return to the site.

Best of luck in your future endeavors, Marc-- but next time, please consider a pay model!

I would pay either a one time or ongoing subscription fee. I am a Mac user and their are simply NO other even remotely decent options.

man, so sad. thank you so much for the service you have provided and the standard of ethics that you have set. i have only started using wesabe recently but it has been a wonderful experience. good luck to everyone at wesabe. and thank you for going open-source. as a linux user i really look forward to seeing what might come out of the ashes.

@Mark-Hedlund,

About a month ago I spoke with Matt Fellowes (Hello Wallet) and Michael Parker (Inoutcash) about white labeling. Both were hesitant to implement that type of strategy. Whats the future of Springboard?

I would love to talk to you about this. (314)280-7408.

Damn it! Why is always the 'good guys'? I have just completed a year's worth of transactions from 8 different accounts and it's proven invaluable.

Although the open-source version sounds good, I'm not in the position of being able to set that up.

Anyone got any suggestions for alternatives? I'm in Australia and there's nothing specific for that country.

Thanks for the wonderful service, guys. I've been a user for several years and converted a number of friends. I'm very sorry to see such a pro-user, pro-privacy site close its doors.

Thanks for the hard work and great support. Best of luck on your next venture.

I just discovered Wesabe two months ago. I've tried so many different budget systems over the years - saving receipts, Quicken, Gnucash, Mint - everything. This was the first tool I've used where tracking and categorizing my spending was actually effortless.

I would absolutely pay monthly to keep using Wesabe accounts - I think many people would, too. I hope you consider some kind of monetization strategy before shutting down .

i'd pay. is that even an option - or is this a final statement?

Very sad to see Wesabe go. It played a huge part in helping me and my family survive a large pay cut last year thanks to the recession. Now we're back to normal, the lessons learned are helping me to save for the future. Thanks to Marc and all at Wesabe for having provided this great service.

I'm very sad to see Wesabe go ... Like many others here have said, Wesabe was the Mint for the rest of the world. It was for me, the easiest and most flexible of them all. It's a shame that pioneers like Wesabe leave. It's very honorable to donate all your work to the community, good guys till the end :) Do any of the Wesabe folks plan on contributing to the open source version ?
Thanks for everything ...

Can someone please post a URL with a clear explaination on how to migrate our data from Wesabe to Mint?

@Jonathan Doe: as far as I know Mint does not accept historical imports. (Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.) The best migration path to Mint would be to start fresh with new data, I'm afraid.

Thanks for such a great service, I really don't know what I'm going to do now! You guys are legends: best of luck for the future.

I would gladly pay for this service. I have had many programs and service to try and manage my finances in a detailed and simple way and none hold a candle to Wesabe. Please consider a fee service.

I would pay a subscription fee as well if it did what I would I like, it seems some services would rather give up than move to a subscription based model. Today is the fist I have heard about the financial difficulties.

I have not used it personally since February 2009 and the main reason is because the iPhone app has always been view only. There is no adding or editing of data, I can only do all that via the browser. It would be especially good if it worked with another new financial service, such as "Yes Secure" or "Zopa".

So now with no Wesabe and of course Mint not available, what alternatives are there? It seems desktop and mobile software.

Gutted about this news. As a UK user with no viable alternatives, I'd gladly pay a subscription to keep using Wesabe!

Obviously there is interest in people paying a subscription fee, why was it never offered? Perhaps Brad Greenlee can explain.

Yes, it seems that there were some missing steps between "Totally free" and "WTF we're out of money". Sad to see the Wesabe option go.

SPECULATION FOLLOWS:
Mint is actually pretty good but Intuit is evil. In the Wal-Mart tradition, I think we can expect Mint to move to some profit maximization strategy now that the competition has been wiped out. Hell, they likely paid Brad off to throw the fight. See paragraph #1, where I outline how recent events make no sense.

@kevin_numberhere

I don't normally start forum fights, since people say things they would never say in real life, but I couldn't stand to see what you wrote in print.
It takes a lot of gall for you to come to Wesabe's death bed and kick them when they're down. The creators of Wesabe were pioneers or at least promoters of such honourable ideas as their "Data Bill of Rights." Come on man, these are great people that hit a hard time.

God bless you anyway! Maybe you didn't mean it like that.

Oh wow, no, I certainly did not mean it like that. I love Wesabe and am hoping against hope that this is not actually it's "death bed".

My speculation was a comment on Intuit and how I believe they conduct business. I see, in retrospect, that it also implied bad things about Brad and Wesabe. This was not my intention at all.

For the record, it appears there is a movement in place to open-source Wesabe!

https://www.wesabe.com/groups/222-wes...pen-source

This is so awesome I don't know what to do with myself.

Green Sherpa says that they can't import wesabe, but they can import QIF. Can anyone make a QIF exporter or converter tool for our data please?

I would pay for this service too, why are we not discussing this as a viable option ?

Is there a way to get QIF/OFX download of your data? CSV is *probably* fine if you're willing to spend a lot of time shuffling the fields. OFX would be perfect. Is that possible?

@ikaris and others - sorry I hadn't responded earlier, but I'm visiting my family in Michigan this week and Internet access is spotty.

Believe me, we considered a subscription model, but the numbers just don't work out. In order to just cover the costs of the infrastructure + minimal staff, we'd need on the order of 4-5,000 people paying $10/mo or 8-10,000 paying $5/mo. We're barely getting that many people actively using the site monthly as it is. If we started charging, I'd expect maybe 5-10% of those would stick around, and that's being very optimistic.

I really wish we could keep the site going, too. We all use it ourselves, which is one of the driving forces behind us creating an open-source version that we can run on our personal machines.

I received an e-mail from Green Sherpa and they have indicated that they may be working on a wesabe data importer for the CSV data. I'll let folks on this thread know if/when I have any additional information.

any chance you say who it was you spoke to?

would love to tip them off that if they allow for foreign currencies (even just a £ sign would be a start - i hate seeing my money in $ when it's £) then they could expect a large influx of new international customers...

RichardD: I just e-mailed info@ - they seem pretty small and responsive.

great.

As a short term solution, the open source option of wesabe is superb, and undoubtedly very selfless/generous. But given the choice i'd probably rather migrate to somewhere that is 'open for business', in the hope that they can try and support and develop their product, in the same way that Wesabe have done, (and we've all slightly taken for granted!)

cheers

I created a poll in the hope that enough might respond. Maybe Wesabe can create one themselves or email everyone the link to this one. Of course if people are paying they will use it far more. Personally I have found it looks quite different from when I last used it, but I've not heard about any changes until now. I would like to use it now, especially if the iPhone app can update and sync with the site, that would be well worth paying for.

Wesabe.com is a premium quality product equal to business accounting services that charge a monthly fee. To keep Wesabe, what would you pay per month?

Vote here: http://poll.fm/21ngd

(This is copied from the open source thread to make sure everyone sees it.)

An important note about the open source project:

Brian is working on a "snapshot" export format that will preserve all data from your Wesabe account - tags, edits, etc. The open source project will accept the snapshot as an import format. Since our current export formats are designed to give you data to take somewhere else, they aren't as complete.

So: if you plan to use the open source project, please don't delete your data from the wesabe.com site yet. Wait until the snapshot format is available, download that, and then delete.

We realized this may not have been clear before and wanted to make it clear. If people have already deleted we can't do much about that, but it would be possible to transform one of the current export formats into a snapshot if someone wants to write a converter.

I will be away from July 14th to August 13th, so probably I'll not be here when you have whatever download might be available by the end of July. Will I be able to access it after I return after August 13th

Also, I'm a Canadian ad Wesabe is the only thing I've found which connects to Canadian Banks. Is it possible to do just manual uploads with some of the other online programs like Mint?

Well, I was in the same situation as you are and finally opted for MoneyStrands. They supported my bank (Caisse Desjardins) and also QFX/OFX/CSV imports which pretty much sealed the deal. I did not find any other site that supported imports (aside Wesabe of course).

That's great except what happens when MoneyStrands closes up? Personally I'm really going to try the Wesabe hosting myself so I am not reliant upon a free 3rd party web site that has no business model.

sansp00: I don't suppose you were able to get your Wesabe tags to be imported to MoneyStrands were you?

No, tried to upload the Wesabe data and it crapped out the account data. They seemed pretty open and I guess if many of us migrate there, they might be inclined to facilitate the migration.

@Spike123,

Unfortunately we will need to take the site offline on July 31st, and no downloads will be available after that time. If you would like to keep a copy of your data please download one of our export formats now, before leaving on your trip.

Enormously sad to see such a great project go - I love Wesabe and hope that at the very least the Open Source option will remain available. I have been in touch with GreenSherpa and while they do not yet support foreign currencies (I guess seeing my debts in dollars makes them seem somewhat less severe) I got an email from Doug there - who has been great at getting and staying in touch - that they have a Wesabe exporter in Beta testing which we can use. "GreenSherpa now supports importing Wesabe CSV files. This feature should be considered "Beta" level, as it is brand new". So hopefully with an influx of international users they will also be tempted to start allowing us to use our own currencies.

yet another user who wants to voice their disappointment and sadness. thank you so much for this wonderful, wonderful service. i would also be happy to pay for this service if given the option. i will follow the open sourcing discussion. marc, brad, and everyone else at wesabe: thank you very much, and best of luck with everything. i would be curious to know what you all are working on next

Just to let all who talked about MoneyStrands alternative that I have found yet another site, that offers similar functionalities WHICH DOES SUPPORT CANADIAN BANKS: the name is Yodlee MoneyCenter. The UI is not as slick as Mint or Wesabe was, but at least it supports auto update and most canadian bank. It also supports some budgeting functinalities and auto categorizing. You can create some auto categorizing rules too. They offer a Forum to exchange about issues or feature requests, a little the way Wesabe Groups works.

I had tried MoneyStrands and found it less reliable than Yodlee (autoupdate used to fail most of the time) and found their UI too clutered - not easy to read. Editing transaction was kind of complicated too compared to Yodlee.

Let share your thoughts about both alternative products (remember Mint is not accessible to non US users)...

For non US people (like myself) who wish to use Mint (I use it sometimes). Just create an account with a service like borderlinx to get a valid US address and use it to register. They don't have a lot of CAD banks, but the rest is pretty slick.

As for Yodlee, I also been using it for a while, old UI sucked, new one is way better, but still a bit clunky for my taste, but this is personnal preference. The bill pay feature does not work at all (for me at least) and they do not offer import (neither do Mint). The bill pay would have been nice because it offered a sort of cashflow forecast.

Just sharing my own experience.

@sansp00 Yodlee billpay seems to work seemlessly for me, at least for the time I use it (which is not that long). Also manual transaction creation is supported (as well as recurring planned transaction which allows forecasting of cashflow). But I am not sure if CSV or QIF import is supported. So far I am impressed with the number of features, and so far site is pretty responsive and easy to use.

I hope this is not considered out of place - but i have just signed up with GreenSherpa, and found to my surprise that despite not supporting UK currencies - it can access my First Direct bank online, and download all the statements.

Quite surprised about that - and as a 'paid service' (think it's $5/month) could indeed show some potential.

work a look anyway...

Thank you for getting me started in a new direction with my finances. I have had some trouble with importing my data and have not been using this site except for the wonderful forum. I have learned much, and you have helped lots of us to take charge, think differently, and control our money. What a success! Thank you also to Tony(?) who made the excel spreadsheet I could download to from Wesabe. It's been so helpful getting a handle on my spending!

PS- It was Tommy Vernieri that did the spreadsheet-Thanks again!

I really wished you considered charging a bit for the site. I checked out Mint and, you can't import any data, meaning I'd lose my notes and tags. I was pleasantly surprised that everything was successfully imported into GreenSherpha, however, compared to Wesabe, the GUI is not user friendly at all, and it's missing all the features to sort by tags, to sort accounts by type, to see everything in graph form. It really makes me appreciate Wesabe that much more and, really I'd pay to keep my account active and, from the thread, it seems many others would, too.

I loved Wesabe. Really Sad you have to shut it down. Thanks for all those years of great service. Cheers.

I was just getting started Wesabe and loved it. I would like to investigate to get a version up and running in the UK. If anybody is interested I would like to see if if is feasible. I am looking for someone to work on the configuration and setup.

I use Everbank which just recently started using the yodlee backend so I can manage all internal and external accounts in Everbank.

Graphic output way below quality of Wesabe.
Takes 3x many mouse clicks as Wesabe.
Can't import old Wesabe data.
But it works and is free.

I noticed in a press release that MS Money is going sunset and yodlee has set up an import for Money files. I'm looking into how to convert my csv to Money then import into yodlee.

It's never too late to offer freemium service.

I'm also very sorry to see Wesabe go. The Wesabe team came up with a fantastic product and support for all these years. Great job, thanks for the open source version, and best of luck in whatever's next!

Too bad. I'm curious, it seems like mvelopes is successful in this space. I wonder what advantage they have, over being early to market.

I never really became a Wesabe user because even though I liked the service and API, it never supported "envelope" style budgeting, and never worked with auto-import of all my accounts.

Great job on open-sourcing it, though. Someone will make something great with this codebase as inspiration.

I would be happy to provide hosting services through my company ADTU Enterprises and any technical support needed, I really do not want to see Wesabe go as there are no really good Canadian alternatives.

My thought is that you could form a group of public moderator type users. So all the new-user questions could be answered by people for free, just need to make it clear that no sensitive information should be shared with this group. If sensitive information is needed for the problem, it could be escalated or sent to a different address. So it would foster the community helping new users

Tremendously sad news. I'd been waiting for the iphone 4 to be released in Canada and one of the big motivators was to have my Wesabe right at hand at all times. Another sad Canadian with few other options.

Best of luck in your future ventures. You've brought a lot to a very large community.

Moneydance can actually import Wesabe data (as long as you get it out before they shutdown :)

http://moneydance.com/blog/

I would have paid $20 per month for wesabe...It saves so much work and effort. We are all worth more than $10 per hour and how many hours per month did it save? I wish we would take this other offer of supporting wesabe from adtuent....

I created a poll on whether it should be paid for and how much. After two weeks, not one vote. Perhaps apathy is the reason Wesabe won't work.

Wesabe is about good financial management, so Wesabe needs to be able to show that what it offers saves people more than the money it charges for the admin. To reduce that, it needs sponsored advertising, which outside the U.S. is not worth as much (especially in hard economic times), which is why Strands is still able to provide its service for free.

Lotusbelle makes a good point in saying "how many hours per month did it save?" however that depends on the need for the statistical data. I think for most it is interesting, perhaps helpful, but not essential.
After hearing about this and being only an occasional user (perhaps because I have no money vested), I decided to try Strands, which I find connects to a lot of UK banks (via the site and the iPhone app, and I can edit entries via the iPhone app.

Hello. I recently started browsing the site looking for a conversation with Marc regarding hosting some of the team's code.

We run a site that targets brokerage data with a focus on tax report generation. Maybe there is a way to host some of the code with source control.

Starting multiple thread of work will dilute limited resources. By focusing there is a greater chance for success. Let me know if I can help.

Hello all,

I run a competing service called Iron Money. I feel crappy for advertising this on Wesabe, but I think some users will interested in looking at it.

Today I updated the account uploader so that it has better support for Wesabe’s CSV and Excel files, and it now supports the JSON files that you can find in the “accounts” folder of your Wesabe snapshot (blog post: http://irn.me/22).

Best,
Chasen