I Was Tired of Renting My Software

Somewhere along the way, almost everything I use became a subscription.

Not just the big tools — the little ones too. A few dollars here for a note app. A few more there for password sync. Another monthly charge for something I open twice a year. Alone, each fee feels small. Together they are a drip that never stops, and I got tired of paying rent on software I already decided I wanted.

I can still install and run my old copies of Photoshop CS6 and Microsoft Office 2010, and they still work perfectly fine. The personal finance software world is littered with the detritus of defunct perpetual licenses: Quicken 2017, YNAB 4, and others.

It is specifically galling with finance software. Online personal finance subscriptions come with invasive data mining of your financial life as a feature.

When I started building Big Picture Money, this infuriating modern trend was a core driver informing the licensing model.

Buy once. Keep it forever.

Big Picture Money is a $35 perpetual license for the current yearly edition. You buy the software once. It keeps working. There is no monthly fee required to open your ledger, categorize a transaction, or run a report on your own computer.

Your license does not expire. Updates for that edition year are included. If you want features from a newer release year later, upgrading is optional ($25). You can also stay on the edition you bought forever.

That is the deal I wanted as a customer: pay for software, own that version, and stop negotiating with a billing portal every year just to keep access to my own money data.

Why Connected Services is separate

Some features cost money to run every month — those are monthly bills we have to pay.

Bank aggregation through Plaid, hosted multi-device sync, encrypted cloud backup, a managed AI path, and a mobile companion all have ongoing infrastructure and vendor costs. If we baked those into the one-time price, either the sticker would have to climb, or we would quietly push everyone onto a subscription whether they needed hosted services or not.

So we sectioned them off.

Connected Services is an optional $79/year add-on (coming soon) for people who want Big Picture to provide those hosted pieces. It is not a second software license, and it is not required to keep using the desktop app. Cancel anytime and Big Picture Money keeps working — your local data file stays yours.

This is a deliberate split — the software you install locally is sold as “just software.” Services we operate on your behalf need a subscription, because we keep paying for them.

Stay in control of the optional expenses

Even without Connected Services, you can still plug in third-party capabilities you subscribe to or host:

• SimpleFIN — Bank sync works when you bring your own SimpleFIN Bridge subscription. You pay the aggregator directly; we do not insert a mandatory middleman fee.
• AI — Turn it off completely, run Ollama locally, or bring your own cloud API key. You choose the provider and the bill. We do not require you to send your ledger through our servers to get assistance. A managed AI path will ship with Connected Services.

Even without SimpleFIN, manual import of banking files will continue to work forever. The software will always be useful.

Those paths exist so the core product does not force you into our recurring revenue whenever you want sync or AI. Optional means optional — including the option to pay someone else, or nobody at all.

Subscriptions for services, ownership for software

Dressing up a local tool as a forever-subscription when the ongoing cost is mostly “please keep paying or you lose the app” is a bad fit. Personal finance software is especially bad at this: your history accumulates for years, then access becomes the lever.

A subscription is honest when we keep running a service for you — hosting, aggregation, sync infrastructure. Charging for that service matches the ongoing cost.

Big Picture Money is designed this way. The ledger lives in an encrypted file on your computer. The license is perpetual. Hosted extras are clearly labeled, priced separately, and cancelable without orphaning the software you already bought.

Own the version you buy

If you are also tired of the endless drip, that is who this model is for.

See pricing for the software license vs Connected Services, or licensing for the full promises in product terms. Join the beta when you want early access — buy once and keep using what you paid for.