Aligns company interests with your interests. When you are paying for a service, you are the customer. The opposite is true in a free service, these companies are incentivized to sell your data to advertisers, and build features that make you click more ads, not features that actually help you.
Provides better data connectivity. Personal finance apps are only as useful as their underlying data. Keeping this data up-to-date is a massive and expensive challenge that everyone underestimates. Free services can't invest the same amount in this data quality, leading to stale data and a frustrating user experience.
Protects your privacy. Your financial data is extremely sensitive. It's also extremely valuable to advertisers. Companies with free offerings typically rely on selling this data to advertisers to generate revenue.
It is a more sustainable business. If you're investing a lot of time and effort into setting up a new personal finance app, you want it to stay around long term and continue to improve, not stagnate from lack of development, or go out of business because they ran out of money. The subscription model provides a higher chance of a company staying around long term.
