The Excelsior App was always a solution in search of a problem — and a costly solution even at its original $2.5 million price tag.

Anyone who got a COVID-19 vaccination received a card they could keep in their wallet or purse to show if there was a vaccination requirement to enter a restaurant or event. The app was never really necessary — but Gov. Andrew Cuomo had to have a shiny new toy to show his effective leadership during the pandemic. Enter the Excelsior App, which was based on existing IBM technology and tailored for use in New York.

The app wasn’t great when it was launched, with complaints of glitches in the system and limited use because it wasn’t required everywhere. There were nearly immediate complaints about cost even in 2021 when it was revealed a contract with IBM could cost between $10 and $17 million over three years — though that contract wasn’t mentioned when the app was rolled out. Then there were the concerns over data privacy after privacy advocates found businesses and venues checking the app could be tracked by scanners and questions over the security of the data being stored by the state.

“Mostly these apps are a waste of time and money,” Alexis Hancock, director of engineering at the Electronic Frontier Foundation to technologyreview.com in 2021. “Governments really need to consider the resources they have in place and allocate them toward getting the public to a better place after the pandemic, not putting people in a position of more paranoia and privacy concerns.”

Hancock was right. The Excelsior App had limited effectiveness and effectively flushed $64 million of your money down the drain — a good chunk of which went to the Boston Consulting Group and Deloitte, companies that have raked in millions of dollars in state contracts under Cuomo and current Gov. Kathy Hochul. By March of this year, the Excelsior App was an expensive memory costing you $200,000 a month in legacy costs to manage the data it had collected. To rub a little more salt in the wound, the Albany Times Union reported the app got a $2.2 million update in March despite its limited use.

New York could have done a lot of good with $64 million over the past three years. Instead, it invested in a fad that went the way of the Furby.