Convince me, a Frugal Money Dashboard User

General Chat
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I don’t have any payment subscription problems (the big money saving opportunity that Emma promotes). I’m actually already pretty on top of my spending.
I use(d) moneydashboard to get on top of things, mainly before they did their big Neon upgrade. I loved custom tags, budgeting and monitoring spend against budgets, flexibility to do short quick updates on my phone and infrequent overhauls of tagging on the desktop app. I liked looking at historic monthly spends.

But MD started having bank connection troubles, then they did their big Neon upgrade, leaving behind so many key features until they build them back in (maybe?) over some undefined period of time. I gave MD Neon a shot for a while, but the latest issue is that Lloyd’s transactions get duplicated at the start of every month, because (as MD tech team told me) Lloyd’s back end system does something that messes things up in MD’s records… They say they’ve raised it with Lloyd’s, and other banks don’t do it, so it should be resolved eventually unless Lloyd’s want to be the odd one out.

Maybe in a year, Neon will be brilliant; and of course it’s free. I’m not bothered by them selling my data. I’m also coasting and confident that I’m not exceeding any monthly budgets these days, so haven’t been too motivated to take action.

My concern with paying for Emma and switching to it is the possibility of not finding the same capabilities as a free tool, and also concern that I’ll face the same technical glitches. If one or both problems arise and I find I can’t rely on Emma to keep track of my expenses without significant additional input by me, then I’ll feel silly for paying for it.

So can you tell me that my favourite things in Money Dashboard are possible in Emma? And that the Lloyd’s problem doesn’t exist? And what about if I’m unsatisfied, and face similar tech glitches over the first 45 days? (needs a month at least to see if bank imports get messed up)

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From what you mentioned in opening paragraph everything you want apart from custom categories is available in free version of Emma.

So perhaps use free version for few weeks to assess feel and bank connection. Then decide if you want to pay for Pro to gain access to custom categories.

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Yeah, there’s no reason to jump in at the deep end. Go with free for a while (don’t forget the 7 day free Pro trial though) - it’s what I did for quite a while. Connect Lloyds and a couple of other accounts, then you’ll see if it’s working for you!

From what you say, Free might be all you need anyway

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Thanks everyone. I did take the dive into the 7 day trial, followed by the £15/year membership (Black Friday) offer at the moment. So far, impressed with the feature set / capabilities. It does things better than Moneydashboard ever did, in my opinion. I think some of the promo material that the app pushes to users is misleading in a detrimental way to its own business… For example, the advert stated shortly after I first signed up said that Emma costs £60/year. I had to dig into things to find out that’s only if you pay by the month, and there’s a massive savings to pay annually… At £60, I actually just about gave up there, before even trying it…

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I think £60/year is the normal annual pricing. Personally I think that’s too much for this type of app.

£15 is special promotion pricing and its a great price. No brainer territory for anyone on the fence. I’m also on that price following a promotion earlier in the year.

I think the right price (neither under nor overpricing the app) would be somewhere in the middle (perhaps £24 to £30 range).

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