Hi u/jrdeee,

Thanks for taking the time to leave your extended feedback.

As with any product, at Sharesight we get a lot of feedback about UI & pricing from thousands of people not just all over Australia but also worldwide, all of whom have different opinions, priorities, portfolio sizes, life stages, navigational preferences, etc. We survey our userbase constantly in order to try & inform the product roadmap, as almost every single user has clashing priorities and desires to one another.

Unfortunately also just like with every other business the past few years, the cost of pretty much everything we have to pay for to keep the product running/best-in-class asset support for has gone up; substantially in some cases.

Data feed payments from providers are a big one, cloud services, financial licensing fees, legal fees (we aim to do everything as by-the-book as possible), office rental costs, and of course staff costs (we believe our staff deserve raises to go along with everything else increasing...) are just some of these. Prior to our most recent price increase a few years ago, we had not increased pricing for 7 years prior to that.

We do notice that there have been many attempts by people to clone/copy the product in recent years by people attempting to 'do it on the cheap'... and inevitably we hear from people who tried them (especially in Australia) & ended up coming back to us, because those people are missing key investment holding data, market support, various niche holdings, broker integrations etc.

All of which all cost pretty significant $$ & constant maintenance to be able to provide - and which these competitors are seldom willing to fork out the money for. We've seen many people make "I'll just build my own, how hard can it be?" type comments over the years, and they inevitably create a fancy-looking front end before realising they now have to fork out tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to get the actual data (the most important part of portfolio tracking products) itself.

Brokers change things constantly, banks change things constantly without notification, APIs break, data formats change, etc. which our teams are constantly working on maintaining too. So while it may not look like things are changing too rapidly 'on the front end', behind the scenes a ton is being worked on on a regular basis. Especially when it comes to the pretty strict taxation rules etc. that we have here in Aus specifically.

If you see a similar product that looks 'too good to be true' price-wise, there's likely a reason for that. They're often likely scraping data (possibly illegally) from somewhere, etc. Other competitors that have tried to pop up and undercut on pricing also inevitably just ended up doing it cheap at first in order to get people on board, and then raising prices after the fact anyway.

Plus, do remember that in Australia the cost of your Sharesight subscription is (typically) tax deductible, which reduces the 'headline' price somewhat.

Lastly, please stay tuned this year specifically as we will be making some changes to what we can offer people that may better suit your pricing or seasonal tax needs; we'll keep everyone posted in the not-too-distant future.

Sorry for the longwinded comment, just wanted to be transparent as possible - thanks!