Why I decided to switch to the new web-based version after completing the trial:
- I don't mind paying for regular improvements to software
- The new version looks great on a Retina screen (unlike version 4)
- Importing transactions made keeping the budget up to date much simpler. Instead of logging in to the bank and two different credit card sites, clicking around three different screens to download Quicken files and then running an Import on each of them, I could now simply click Import within YNAB once for each account.
- Since the software is now web-based I can easily access my budget from work.
- Numbers 3 and 4 meant that it was much simpler to simply reconcile all my transactions once every week or so rather than saving all that work for the end of the month. Having more-frequent reconciliations in turn is huge, because now the monthly budgeting process takes maybe fifteen minutes instead of an hour. I'm also much more in tune with the status of our budget spending, and have a higher confidence in the numbers I'm seeing throughout the month.
- Syncing between YNAB's new iPhone apps and the web service is instantaneous. On the old version, after every time I did our monthly budgeting, I would usually get wrong budget numbers until after manually syncing two or three times.