How can Quickbooks Online justify increasing their costs by 85% over a 4 year period? It seems to be excessive to me, or am I the only one?

Thanks for joining the Community, @scott79.

Intuit is continuously evolving to keep pace with our customers as they grow. 

With QuickBooks, the software helps small businesses find more tax savings and save over 40 hours per month. Price increases enable us to continually reinvest in our products and accelerate innovations based on customer feedback. We have accelerated the development of QuickBooks Online by using automation, and other technologies to deliver time-saving features, including direct bank feeds to automatically and frequently update your transactions, enhancements to receipt capture, and more. The program also has over 680 third-party apps that expand the capabilities of Online while allowing you to work seamlessly anytime and anywhere. 

Feel free to comment below if you have any other questions or concerns. Enjoy your weekend!

@scott79 

Consider switching to QB Desktop and deploy a private cloud solution to let your mobile users access the data file by internet connection.

Just my 2 cents.

I totally agree that the price increases are excessive! My current subscription price is now 212% of what it was a year ago. And this does not include the increases to Payroll or TSheets. For me, a small business, the pricing has become prohibitive. I am actively looking for alternative products to use. 

Agreed.... and the trend continues. $550 for a desktop subscription is usurious. Its a good opportunity for competitors.

Anna S, I understand what you're trying to say, but there are a couple major issues I have with that view.

First is that, even with all the improvements, there remain many problems with basic functions that many of us have brought up that remain unadressed.  New features are rarely impressive when the basic problems persist.

Second, many of those new features are not useful to many of us.  Receipt capture, for instance, is not something that I use, and I will never use most of the other new features that have come along since I started with QBO.  And you mention syncing with banks, but that's been available from the start in QBO, and is also available on any other financial software - even the free versions, though I will admit that the QBO sync does better with lesser-known banks than services like Yodlee does within certain other software packages.

Then there are the add-ons.  Yes, there are some that are indispensable, but it could be argued that they should actually be part of QBO anyway.  Import/export of data is one example, and even though QBO seems to be including more of that, I've had nothing but problems with how it works.  Many of the apps, though, are prohibitively expensive.

No, I think what's happening is that QBO is pricing on the basis of the "how much can we charge before users start fleeing to other software?", while adding a lot of fluff in attempt to justify the price.