Personal financial management pioneer Wesabe is to shut down its operations after running out of money.
In a note to users, Marc Hedlund, Wesabe CEO says the five-year old business has been operating on a shoestring budget for months, and unable to offer adequate support to subscribers.
"I've felt especially terrible that some members have a good initial experience but then hit a problem, often after investing many hours, and aren't able to get help with it. That's obviously a bad experience, and not what we want to offer," he says. "Also, because Wesabe stores such highly sensitive data, continuing to operate the service with shoestring operations and security staff is not acceptable, and we do not want to continue accepting new accounts if we cannot guarantee the security level we believe our service requires."
Users of the service have been given until 31 July to scrub their membership and remove all account data from the site, after which any remaining personal information and user credentials will be deleted.
The company is planning on releasing parts of the Wesabe Web site and infrastructure as open source projects on Github and will continue to run its online forums with the financial support of one of its users.
The demise of Wesabe comes just four months after the closure of UK-based personal finance start-up Kublax, also due to cash-flow problems.
The clear winner in the independent PFM space has been Mint, which sold out to Intuit for a cool $170 million just nine months ago.