Long time GNUCash user, but not exactly a defender here. > there is no widely-used open standard for manipulating your bank account over the internet, AFAIK,

Long time GNUCash user, but not exactly a defender here. > there is no widely-used open standard for manipulating your bank account over the internet, AFAIK, http://www.ofx.net/about-ofx.html http://www.ofx.net/about-ofx.html OFX is widely supported (but not universally). The UI leaves much to be desired. > I don't want a big tax-optimisation program tacked onto my bookkeeping software which I won't use. GNUCash generally does a good job of keeping things you don't use hidden or at least unobtrusive. Account reconciliation being one of them. IMO tax calculation is not a viable OSS tool, as it's country specific and changes rapidly. Ubuntu ships 18.04 at the end of April. Do you want to file using tax software from July 2017? > Mobile app and cloud storage: This one is a little tough. You want it to sync up between your mobile device and (presumably) desktop. GNUCash specifically has problems here. The code base assumes single user transactions and concurrent modification is unsupported. I use a psql database for cloud storage, but if I lose network connection I get a dialog about someone else using the books and have to discard the stale lock. This is problem whether using files or SQL, although SQL is at least a solid backend to some day support it, while filesync solutions would be pretty much a fail. > IMHO, we don't really have a good answer for the issue of "who pays for the servers?" in FOSS IMO, we do: the users. There's no reason you can't charge people for a username / password, although, when hosting financial data the liability could get painful.