Many who will read this might not even know what "Buxfer" is. Buxfer is for all those people like me who are not so good in hisaab kitaab. It is a friend you can (read "hope to" after the latest episode) rely on to make you manage your money better. It is a savior to all those who have been living with a room-mate to track the endless IOUs. For some it is a money mantra that also reminds them when to pay the bills, and for some a planner to a better financial future.
And unlike many of our other friends ;), it doesn't ask much in return, or in my case, doesn't ask anything. As they say "the best things in life are free". (visit http://www.buxfer.com/)
It would take me more than one such bad experience to completely go as much against something that I start vouching for its complete shutdown. I value "brand loyalty" so no ways could I ever vote against Buxfer so easily.
It is very surprising for me to see people going so much against Buxfer, when it has been serving us for past 3-4 years with most of its features (that we really need) completely free of charge. Helping us to get rid of the excels, files, spreadsheets, emails etc. IOUs can get crazy sometimes (like they did for Buxfer founders) who came up with something that is so elegant, clean, organized and "free".
I don't know what is going to be the future of Buxfer. May be it will get open-sourced, or will get shut-down, or will continue as is, or may be google/yahoo owners will feel a bit itchy and will go for their grocery shopping, and come back home with Buxfer. But I really hope Buxfer survives.
And unlike many of our other friends ;), it doesn't ask much in return, or in my case, doesn't ask anything. As they say "the best things in life are free". (visit http://www.buxfer.com/)
Recently Buxfer suffered a 4-day long outage. I have to say in today's competitive world, for a financial software to go down for four days is a big deal. Anyways, I don't have any updates that cannot wait for 4 days. So this didn't affect me at all.
When the Buxfer website was back up and running, I had an update on my account that read:
When the Buxfer website was back up and running, I had an update on my account that read:
Buxfer was offline for the last four days. Our hosting provider had severe availability issues because of which our servers were down. We had to migrate our service to new servers in order to get the site back up. In the process, some data might have been lost and we sincerely regret that.
This was a bit surprising as I had never faced any issues with Buxfer over the past three years. But what was more shocking was that my past one month data had been completely wiped out from Buxfer. They just lost all that data.
And I think more than the outage, it is the loss of data that has hit Buxfer the hardest... on the face (with a book). People started tweeting about this episode and how they have started to look for other alternatives. But then I became curious and starting googling about Buxfer. I found some very interesting facts, and I am so surprised that I never knew this. Nor did it ever struck me to try to find about the Buxfer story (unlike the Facebook story, there is no Hollywood movie for Buxfer, but it still has a Facebook connection though. Seems like Facebook has a role to play almost everywhere these days).
Buxfer founders (Shashank Pandit and Ashwin Bharambe) took jobs at Facebook. This happened in either 2008 or 2009. Couldn't find the exact confirmed date, but bottom-line they took their jobs at Facebook. So who is running Buxfer now is a very good question I would say. Both Shashank and Ashwin worked towards their PH.D.s from Carnegie Mellon. I never knew about this Indian connection to Buxfer till a couple of days back. Usually I always do a basic research of all tools, gadgets, applications etc. that I use. Don't know why I was so ignorant with this one. Anyways, I don't know for sure who is running Buxfer now, so I am not going to write it here.
(An interesting read and source: http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/17/buxfers-founders-both-work-for-facebook-who-works-for-buxfer/)
Buxfer had the following update when I logged in yesterday:
And I think more than the outage, it is the loss of data that has hit Buxfer the hardest... on the face (with a book). People started tweeting about this episode and how they have started to look for other alternatives. But then I became curious and starting googling about Buxfer. I found some very interesting facts, and I am so surprised that I never knew this. Nor did it ever struck me to try to find about the Buxfer story (unlike the Facebook story, there is no Hollywood movie for Buxfer, but it still has a Facebook connection though. Seems like Facebook has a role to play almost everywhere these days).
Buxfer founders (Shashank Pandit and Ashwin Bharambe) took jobs at Facebook. This happened in either 2008 or 2009. Couldn't find the exact confirmed date, but bottom-line they took their jobs at Facebook. So who is running Buxfer now is a very good question I would say. Both Shashank and Ashwin worked towards their PH.D.s from Carnegie Mellon. I never knew about this Indian connection to Buxfer till a couple of days back. Usually I always do a basic research of all tools, gadgets, applications etc. that I use. Don't know why I was so ignorant with this one. Anyways, I don't know for sure who is running Buxfer now, so I am not going to write it here.
(An interesting read and source: http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/17/buxfers-founders-both-work-for-facebook-who-works-for-buxfer/)
Buxfer had the following update when I logged in yesterday:
Then there were a few voting options, whether we wish Buxfer shuts down once and for all. Or we still want Buxfer to continue operations."Since the past year, Buxfer is being maintained part-time by one of its original founders. The goal of Buxfer is no longer to make a profit, but to continue to serve its users the best way it can. The membership fees we charge are barely sufficient to cover the costs of running this service. Many of you have written to us saying that it might be better to shut down the service instead of providing a service with lack of proper support. If that’s what most of our users feel, we are planning to shut down Buxfer in the near future"
It would take me more than one such bad experience to completely go as much against something that I start vouching for its complete shutdown. I value "brand loyalty" so no ways could I ever vote against Buxfer so easily.
It is very surprising for me to see people going so much against Buxfer, when it has been serving us for past 3-4 years with most of its features (that we really need) completely free of charge. Helping us to get rid of the excels, files, spreadsheets, emails etc. IOUs can get crazy sometimes (like they did for Buxfer founders) who came up with something that is so elegant, clean, organized and "free".
I don't know what is going to be the future of Buxfer. May be it will get open-sourced, or will get shut-down, or will continue as is, or may be google/yahoo owners will feel a bit itchy and will go for their grocery shopping, and come back home with Buxfer. But I really hope Buxfer survives.
