Just because it’s in the cloud doesn’t mean it will always be there for you, despite the best of intentions. Intuit’s Quicken Online has been shut down today, as expected. What’s missing, however, is a replacement tool. Originally slotted for Mint.com, the personal finance management tool Intuit acquired last year, Quicken Online users are now left with nothing at all.

Little explanation, no viable alternatives and a seemingly non-existent back-up plan has left Quicken Online users understandably upset. After multiple outages and overall disruption in the porting process, Intuit decided against replacing Quicken Online with Mint.com’s services. TechCrunch outlines the message from Intuit, along with a customer comment,

One very upset customer asked Quicken to “at least wait until the end of the year so that people can have a complete year’s worth of financial records for tax purposes? I know it’s free, and I know you don’t necessarily “owe” anyone anything, but shutting down the product before the year ends is just a really bad idea, and basically tells consumers “Our product wasn’t worth anything anyway, and you probably shouldn’t use Mint.com either, because the same thing might happen with your data.”

From the outages to the head-scratching results, it’s clear that Intuit is facing some challenges with its cloud computing and storage solutions. Bringing Mint.com into the fold was supposed to be an inexpensive way of adding and distributing its services to Quicken’s existing user base. SaaS is something that’s seen a great deal of integration over the past few years, making it a more operational choice for businesses and consumers.

As the cloud computing trend grows, we’re likely to see more hiccups from roll-out processes as new products and services are incorporated into our favorite platforms. Finding a seamless way in which to do so is more than a matter of project management, but customer relations as well. The debacle leaves  room for competitors to swoop in and take some disgruntled customers, including Freshbooks, which has recently announced $1 billion in handled transactions.