It's always sad to see products that were truly innovative when they came out end up getting neglected and sunset due to large co M&A-based strategic decision-making.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders of Monarch Money, a (paid) competitor to Mint founded by the original PM on Mint.com. I had written a HackerNews front-pager a couple years ago about why Revenue Model is More Important Than Culture [0], and my co-founder wrote some thoughts about why Mint ended up going this route.
Since this announcement, we've seen an unprecedented influx of "Mint refugees" moving over. I think a lot of Mint folks have felt like the product has been neglected for years, but it was free and they often had years of history in the product. This was kind of a forcing function for them.
I would love to use and pay for your service, but it's inexcusable than a service that charges $100+ / year has so many trackers that uBlock shows 87 elements blocked just in the account signup flow (/signup/connect-spending-account).
A financial info aggregator is the one place where I would appreciate NOT having my data and behavior exfiltrated to third parties.
Hmm would be curious to know which block lists you have.
I'm only blocking 27 things with most of them being Split.io (for A/B testing I presume) Sprig, Stripe and Sentry.
Those aren't really third-party trackers (even though I am blocking most of them) in the marketing sense..
There's some analytics from Tiktok, Clarity, Reddit and Spotify(??), which make sense to block but don't feel that intrusive if they're tracking inbound referrals.
I don't even see 50 other things that I could be blocking.
Not arguing the point here, just wondering what I'm missing since I try to keep pretty extensive block lists myself.
> There's some analytics from Tiktok, Clarity, Reddit and Spotify
This is completely inexcusable from a fintech company. It shows me, as a potential customer, that they're not serious - either they're trying to get acquihired or they have no idea about privacy.
Yeah this is on the public inbound signup pages, not in the app itself (although I can't confirm that it's not in the app - I didn't sign up).
This is pretty standard stuff, and while I'm not a fan of trackers and I personally block them, I don't resent companies that want to understand their traffic and prospects.
As a business you want to know which paid channels are working and where your traffic is coming from.
A question for you then, if this is "completely inexcusable": How else do you propose that companies monitor their sales and marketing efforts?
> How else do you propose that companies monitor their sales and marketing efforts?
There are several ways:
- Have a specific URL for each entry into the sales funnel - you see this on YouTube with things like "go to blahblahblah.com/witty-tag to sign up and get my discount"
- Look at the referrer URL if you don't want separate incoming links per entry
- Ask for a referral code when someone is creating their account - this allows you to track entry from people referred into the product
- Have a field on the signup page where you ask this question instead of invading the user's privacy to get it
There are many ways that don't involve sticking a ton of trackers on a signup page, a page that by definition, all of your users must go through at least once and part of the face of your company. To me, it's not a good look that these trackers are there and invasive.
> A question for you then, if this is "completely inexcusable": How else do you propose that companies monitor their sales and marketing efforts?
By simply asking users how and where they found out about a service?
Sure there is a possibility that some users might not respond truthfully (or at all), but I believe that the quality of data collected in this (respectful) way still trumps that of data snitched from unsuspecting users but skewed by those who use adblockers (not unlikely in the case of a fintech service because of expected higher user awareness of privacy concerns).
So you're going to intercept and ask every single user who lands on your inbound signup page before you let them sign up?
That doesn't feel like a great user experience. As a user, I would just button past that pop-up or form.
The goal with these kinds of analytics is not to get referral information from only users who sign up, but for anyone who lands on the page - maybe just to read about you at first - so you have a sense of where they came from and how your marketing spend is doing.
Most paid traffic doesn't convert. If you want to know how much of it is converting, you need to also know how much didn't convert.
This is a good point. But it would mean more work on the Monarch side (and possibly more support for the analytics team when their customer messes up etc).
I would bet that the JS is an implementation shortcut, and a way for the analytics service to avoid doing customer-side implementation support. Keep things as simple as possible (which is a reasonable business goal).
Plus it means that the service you're using can refactor or change around how they handle things and you don't need to be updating your code all the time?
But the tradeoff is that you end up in this situation where people ask "why do you need to load a JS file from a third party?"
Tracking behaviour on a marketing homepage is a bit different than tracking in the app. It's probably just conversion pixels for ad networks (ie, you need to determine if advertising on tiktok actually works). Not sure if you need to install JS from their specific networks, probably not. But generally I'm not against the idea if it's restricted to marketing sites.
>> either they're trying to get acquihired or they have no idea about privacy.
This is my fear for any finapp I try now, as I was on Mint, and now left. At what point will Monarch be acquired and/or begin to sell me things I don't want to increase profits?
> begin to sell me things I don't want to increase profits?
What financial service, new or old, doesn't do this already?
90% of the communication from my bank is them trying to push additional services on me. It's never about what's good for me, it's what's good for them.
> It's always sad to see products that were truly innovative when they came out end up getting neglected and sunset due to large co M&A-based strategic decision-making.
It is sad, but is it sad enough that if a large co offers to buy your company and make you very wealthy, you're going to decline?
Sorry for the cynicism but this cycle of adopting a software tool only for that to be bought out and subsequently shut down is getting pretty old. I'm sure Mint's initial sales pitch was also about passionate founders who cared about their customers. This is probably the nature of companies--no one will care as much about a product as much as the people who first created it, but the cycle seems so much faster with software.
> Sorry for the cynicism but this cycle of adopting a software tool only for that to be bought out and subsequently shut down is getting pretty old.
This behavior has fully converted me from "optimistic early adopter" to "late majority" on the Adopter Categories chart. I honestly don't trust any startup's products anymore, because of the real risk that they're going to cash in their chips and let the product die, probably when it's least convenient for me the customer. To be fair, I don't trust a lot of bigger companies too--there is at least one example of a BigTech company notorious for trying things and then shutting them down within a years or months!
> This behavior has fully converted me from "optimistic early adopter" to "late majority" on the Adopter Categories chart.
Hadn't seen it put so clearly but yeah same. Not even limited to tech unfortunately, same issue with TV Shows. Why watch Season 1 set up a bunch of cool premises if there's not gonna be any pay-off?
I agree with you entirely. I was an early adopter of Mint, but the day they sold to Intuit I moved all my stuff out of there, because I knew it was never going to get better.
Happy Monarch user here - Monarch is amazing. I think it's the only personal finance tool I've seen that gets web really, really right.
Mobile first ones are nifty (used copilot for a bit), mainly for on the fly category updating, but after budgeting with Monarch on the web for a year and change now I don't think I can go back to a primarily app based one. Much easier to sit down once a week and crank through / review everything on web interface.
Thanks for the great work you and the Monarch team are doing, it's helped my wife and I save a lot of cash since we started using it
Thanks for working on Monarch! Does Monarch let you in some way import years of transactions data from Mint? From what I understand, if I signup on Monarch now and connect my accounts, there’s a limit on how far you can go into the history of my account to get the transactions, right? Or can you get every transaction from the first day of my bank account?
There are some quirks to it (ie Mint only lets you export up to 10K transactions at a time) but there are work-arounds to it. You can sign-up, link your accounts, then import from Mint to fill in the missing history. If you hit any issues, just Contact Support from within the app and our Customer Support team will work with you to get it sorted out.
I switched to Monarch from YNAB a few months ago because I'd been using YNAB for years and wanted something a little less involved. I'm really loving it. Thanks for building it!
I should say a lot of it comes down to the theory of the budgeting system, not the software itself. Monarch is a more traditional cashflow based system, as opposed to the cash system that YNAB uses. You're budgeting your income in a given month in Monarch, vs. budgeting only money you actually have in YNAB. In general the way you're encouraged to set up your budget is different. YNAB and the YNAB community seems to trend toward creating very granular catergories, and every single transaction has to be viewed and approved. In monarch, you start with a set of default categories that are fairly broad, and they encourage you to use these as they seem to have done a pretty good job at designing filters that automatically classify transactions into those categories. You can still add your custom categories though. Transactions get automatically put in categories and you don't need to review them except for certain circumstances where Monarch decides it can't confidentially categorizes them. Some things get improperly categorized sometimes but this isn't that big of a deal because your categories in Monarch are likely broader than they would be in YNAB, and it's also not like YNAB where the total of your budget represents money you literally have on hand so if the numbers don't line up perfectly it's not the end of the world. In the end Monarch isn't super different from more traditional budgeting apps like mint or rocketmoney, it's just the best executed.
I still think YNAB is invaluable for people that have to really tightly manage money to make sure they have enough cash on hand at the end of the month to pay rent, for example. But now that I'm in a position where I have a little more cushion, I've grown tired of the constant queue of transactions to approve and the general micromanagement in YNAB
I think you and I are pretty similar. I started using when I was in college and overdrafting on my account was a real risk, so tracking every dollar made sense. Now I'm at the point where I'm fine with transactions being automatically categorized so I can focus on the bigger picture and longer term goals. So at first it felt like Monarch would be great.
I just can't wrap my head around the Goals feature. I've noticed the following:
1. Monarch expects specific accounts to be used for specific Goals, for example, a savings account for a vacation fund.
2. A transaction can only be associated with a goal if it is from the account attached to the goal.
I actually completely agree with Monarch on this. If you're using a savings account for your vacation fund and you buy plane tickets with checking, you should have to transfer money to match. In YNAB you don't have to. I choose to regularly create transfers so my account balances match the category balance in YNAB, but YNAB doesn't require me to.
However, this completely breaks down with:
3. Some account types don't support transactions. Retirement accounts show your portfolio but not transactions.
So if I have a Goal to contribute $100 to an IRA every month, and I debit $100 from my checking to transfer it to the IRA, it's impossible to mark this Goal as complete because there is no corresponding credit of $100 in the IRA. The balance of the portfolio increases but that doesn't matter.
I use YNAB, and I totally agree that broad categories are preferable. It's really easy to proliferate categories, but rarely do I find the granularity useful in hindsight
I switched over to Monarch a year or so ago and I've been pretty happy with it. I much prefer a paid product to an ad-driven one. The product isn't perfect, they have some work to do on categorization and de-duplication of recurring payments, but overall it's good enough and seems to be getting better.
Definitely going to check this out. Does Monarch have rule based categorization, so we can set certain transactions to always fall under a category based on what is in the description?
Mint partially supported this but QuickBooks did it better.
I think I can confidently say we have the best transaction rule system out there. You can set rules to rename, recategorize, add notes, require review, mark as reviewed, etc, based on name, amount, category, account, etc. It's one of our most cited features.
Have been using Lunch Money, hadn't heard of Monarch
1. Have you got an import function if we have csv or in other formats?
2. My only issue with Lunchmoney is my connections are often broken. They use Plaid. Is this one of those things where if they have a problem, you also will? Or does your implementation of plaid integration affect stability?
I have meticulous notes for thousands of transactions in Mint over many years. What's the over/under on them surviving the migration? It's a real question. I'm considering doing it but, only if the notes get there.
Are you planning to add support for Canadian banks anytime soon? I checked out Monarch and ended up going with Mint just because they were one of the only ones supporting Canadian banks
Pocketsmith has been around for years, and built a properly sustainable business with essentially no funding. We've seen Mint refugees too, but also suspect there is a lot less there than the vanity metics might show.
In this space we've seen companies come and go and the ones that stay have a business model that works every day. That means providing a great service, charging people reasonably prices for the product and avoiding selling data or advertising. Mint was never sustainable, but the founders did well to sell it to Intuit when they did.
Pocketsmith uses Google Analytics and Mixpanel, and that's it - no remarketing and fully GDPR complaint. The company is strong in UK, Australia and New Zealand, with decent US support too. But I'd be interested to see what others see.
The fact that this is being shut down vs being sold or at least integrated deeply in credit karma speaks so poorly for the intuit management I am not even sure what to say. The app has to be capable of generating millions a month in revenue at the least. Who is on the leadership team for mint, so I know to never work or partner with them in the future? This is so insanely incompetent its just.. shocking.
This is a fumble not seen since skype fell asleep and did nothing during 2021 while google and zoom came and took their entire market.
At the very least, make the app paid only. If you are worried about upsetting me because I have to pay for something that used to be free, trust me- Im going to be way more pissed about not being able to use it at all.
I dont know, this whole thing just rubs me the wrong way. Intuit is a public company that should be focused on maximizing revenue. Destroying a app thats worth 500m-1b on the private market seems like its worthy of a shareholder lawsuit.
I dont say this out of spite or trolling. I say this as a user of mint since they launched in 2007. Ive been with this app, letting them ravage and sell my data for over 15 years. https://i.imgur.com/XlioSth.png . My old startup even participated in the same crunchies award as mint did, when we both won (us for bootstrapped startup and mint for
founder of the year) so I am nostalgic about them being put out to pasture for no reason.
The govt should never be allowed to make tax software. They should make an easy interface for reporting taxes, but never make any tax management software. It is too huge a conflict of interest to let the same organization that complicates taxes profit from selling you software to simplify your taxes. And by profit, I don't just mean the $ price tag of the software. The parent said it should be "free". Presumably they meant free as in beer. But free as in freedom involves a lot more than that. More than "open source", too.
If you want the govt to make tax management simple, have them simplify the tax code.
Let's look at an example: sales tax. How many people do you know that have software for managing their sales taxes? They track how much they spent on food vs medical supplies etc.? They track that spending across all the different merchants, and across different tax districts so they can prove that their aggregated spending crossed a certain threshold to qualify for a different tax bracket. They quantify how much was for the local charitable food drive so they can take deductions.
No, wait. Nobody does any of that. They just walk up to the checkout stand and pay for their purchases. Now, merchants on the other hand, do have to manage sales tax. They might need simple software for that. It should not come from the government.
> Presumably they meant free as in beer. But free as in freedom involves a lot more than that
What does it involve?
The government already has a computeTax implementation that they use to verify that your return is correct. We're just asking them to give everyone else access to it. Not really sure what freedoms are harmed.
That's kind of my point. Why do we need to file a tax return at all if the government already knows everything? Why should we ever get a return? Did you ever get a sales tax return?
> Why do we need to file a tax return at all if the government already knows everything?
Most people wouldn't need to, because the government knows most tax-relevant information about most people at tax time. But it doesn't know everything about everyone. So it seems you're driving at
> If you want the govt to make tax management simple, have them simplify the tax code.
Presumably you mean get rid of all the different types of deductions and credits that can affect your taxes and only become known to the government at tax time.
That's easy to say, but really hard to do. Close to impossible. Rewrites of codebases are generally a bad idea. The tax code is also a codebase (more of a specification, but whatever). Only it's a codebase written by politicians and their staff and lobbyists. Imagine how much time you spend at work arguing about stupid shit, and everyone involved is technical. Now imagine the same discussion with non-technical people and voters and TV ads.
> Why should we ever get a return? Did you ever get a sales tax return?
It's called a refund. A return is the paperwork you file.
> I can't believe that they make so much on a tax product. The govt should really step in and make this free and easy.
Unpopular opinion, but I think it's a great product and I enjoy using it every year. Pricing is a bit steep, but let's not pretend like TurboTax doesn't have fantastic UX. As an FE, I have always held their design org in high regard. And I can't possibly imagine a government agency doing better.
Personal tax software and solutions should be freely available. Intuit legally bribes politicians in the USA to go against a simple and free tax solutions, like most 1st world counties. I cannot support or endorse them by any means.
Intuit requires manually entry while the governing bodies like IRS or your state treasury already has that information and can per-populate the information. This feature would be great and reducing input errors and wasted time on redundancy. Taxes are already paying for this automation at the those entities. Why not just add on the last mile?
Last time I used Intuit, it was littered with delayed transactions timers to social engineer the idea that, "the tax system is complete and our software is working extra hard to get you the best tax breaks." Just filling out the forms and submitting the digitally takes a little more time than Inuit's manual entry system and worth it for not funding Intutit's legal political bribes.
> As an FE, I have always held their design org in high regard. And I can't possibly imagine a government agency doing better.
I'm always so conflicted because the flow is really nice but I feel so patronized the entire time. I'm half expecting next year's TurboTax to have skinner-box mechanics plagiarized from mobile games.
How much they paid for Mint vs CK has little bearing. Google bought youtube for 1.6b and Motorola for 12b (later sold for 3b) - Which would you rather focus on today?
I dont disagree Mints revenue is not enough currently, but thats the issue. Mint has 3.6 million MAU. Maybe I need to be more explicit, but the value of a financial services user is high, not just in immediate revenue but also in referred revenue. Mint has never done a good job at pricing their product. Ive used it for 15 years and have never paid them a dollar. Thats a failure on their part, as I would have gladly paid monthly or yearly for the past 15 years. Even if I didnt, there were tons of products I would have IAP'd for that could have been seamlessly integrated into mint. Instead they seem entirely focused on trying to get me to sign up for credit cards or to switch bank accounts. What a lost opportunity.
As for the how much it costs to operate mint, thats true we dont know exactly what it is. But I am not a ostrich with my head in the sand. I can infer that the cost is going to be magnitudes less than the revenue it brings in, even in its current sad state. This isnt a chatgpt startup thats using insane resources on metal or developers to offer a product. Its a application suite that processes and coorelates data provided by plaid.com - Mint doesnt even do any of the heavy lifting anymore.
> The app has to be capable of generating millions a month in revenue at the least. Who is on the leadership team for mint, so I know to never work or partner with them in the future? This is so insanely incompetent its just.. shocking.
I have the opposite perspective: management made the right call pulling the plug on Mint. The problem with Mint is that it most likely loses a huge amount of money; from what I've read, most data aggregators charge a fixed amount per account + a fee per API call, so they have to recuperate their costs by selling ads.
That's why Credit Karma makes money: credit card/loan/insurance referrals are worth insane amounts (I've heard numbers like $100+ per sign up for premium cards, even more for insurance/mortgage), so it only makes sense to shuffle customers over to Credit Karma where the sales funnel is much more effective. If one credit card referral can pay for the customer's API calls for a few years, it only makes sense to aggressively push for it.
"Skype" didn't fall asleep and do nothing. It got reworked into a new platform. Microsoft Teams is used by like 280M users, roughly the same size as Zoom. Google Meet has ~100M users.
Its great that Microsoft has teams- but nothing to do with skype as a consumer front-facing product.
Years ago, Skype was the de-facto solution for video calls and video meetings. There was no zoom, there was no google meet. Skype was so known for video chat that it was a verb. 'Skype me'
Skype absolutely and completely fell asleep at the wheel and wholesale abandoned the public market to Zoom, Discord and Google. Its not like it happened overnight either. Skype had the ability to respond to these guys but instead did almost nothing after a redesign to 'skype 8' in 2018.
I cant exclaim how astronomical a failure it is to go from being the defacto verb for video calls and instant messaging to not even having 5% of the end-user consumer market anymore. It would be like if people stopped using google for search, or youtube for videos. You dont get to say "Yeah well google got reworked into gsuite which has 300m users" - Its still a failure of biblical proportions.
They should have been capable of creating a enterprise product and keeping their consumer offering going.
--
Just to be clear, I understand teams is large and doing well. Its also a enterprise product and it has nothing to do with what im talking about above. Discord (~20b valuation) only exists because Skype did zero updates or innovation for years.
As far as I know Skype and Microsoft Teams are separate platforms, currently coexisting though the business parts of Skype are slowly being phased out in lieu of Teams.
>This is a fumble not seen since skype fell asleep and did nothing during 2021 while google and zoom came and took their entire market.
Wouldn't a start-up competitor need to enter (and then grow) the space in order for this to be a failure like that?
If it's such a potentially lucrative product, then why have the myriad of VC-funded challengers languished?
I think in reality, Mint.com is a classic niche product where a small set of competent users (the kind you see on HN) love it, but most people just don't see a need for it.
Pushing users toward Credit Karma...which has next to zero feature overlap with Mint.
I'm surprised they couldn't even bother to try a paid offering before throwing in the towel. There have been people diligently using the service for over a decade who would definitely pay $10/mo if given the option rather than having to migrate somewhere else.
I still miss MS Money. It did everything I needed and I didn't hand over my account passwords to a cloud service like Mint. It's kind of mindboggling that this got ever accepted as the way to do things.
I'm using YNAB desktop edition which still works great. Cost me ~60 USD about 8-9 years ago for permanent license.
YNAB decided to go to a subscription based model, which is fine, but the annual cost of this software service seem ridiculously high for how simple the software is overall. Applies to monarch money too... 100 USD is a lot for simple personal accounting software.
To me the value is in bank synchronization, which is a big ongoing cost for the service. I can centralize all my financial information across accounts.
The habit of checking my transactions in a centralized place and categorizing them has led to me catching fraudulent transactions multiple times. I might have never noticed them without YNAB. That alone has paid for years of the subscription.
I know some people find that manual transaction entry helps them control their spending better but to me that’s just not practical. I don’t have time for that, there are too many transactions.
I also value the mobile app and automatic synchronization. It’s nice to be able to share a budget with multiple people and not fiddle around with local files or having to get on my desktop computer. I use YNAB on mobile 95% of the time.
If I give it a negative it’s not really the price, it’s that I’d like to see more progress on the software. I know they are still a small company but I’d like to see more ways to visualize without needing rely on external tools, and I’d like to see an overall a faster pace of feature development.
You can still use Microsoft Money sunset edition completely offline. I did this myself until about 2 years ago, when I broke down and wrote a simple web app to fill the need.
I still have a copy that I run in a VM. Doesn’t do as much as before, but I’m surprised how bad most of its replacements are at the basic feature level.
Yes, the terrible "upload your banking credentials to some cloud" model was what kept me away from Mint. Sadly, the main Quicken product has been moving in this direction for years with their so-called Express Web Connect Plus[1], but at least they're doing something oauth-like with some token rather than your actual credentials. They're really pushing this shit on their customers.
I don't want to be dependent on TheCloud. I want my local device to communicate directly with each bank and keep my credentials and "tokens" on devices I manage. Is this so much to ask for?
Totally agree. There should be a standard that uses access keys and provides APIs to access the data. If that existed I could easily cobble something together with some python scripts and a database.
I think they cancelled it in 2023, but MS did release for a while an Excel template replacement for MS Money - I think it even had some advanced stuff like bank integration via plaid.
As someone who uses Mint heavily, it's incredibly unclear whether this is going to negatively impact me or not. Because:
> [Credit Karma] “offers a simplified way for you to build awareness of your spending, and track your savings.” Intuit says it still plans on adding ways to view transactions, track spending, and aggregate financial accounts.
> Earlier this year, Credit Karma added one of Mint’s key features: the ability for users to track their net worth. Intuit says Mint users can transfer their accounts by logging into Credit Karma from the Mint app.
In my Mint usage, I've never cared about budgeting or categorization (their auto-categorization was never accurate anyways). I just want to aggregate all my accounts, track my monthly spending, and track my overall net worth.
So this might be... fine? Or it might not be? It's just truly bizarre that:
1) They're forcing the transition to a ludicrously short 2 month period (why not give 6 months or a year to migrate?)
2) They're doing a horrible job at conveying whether Credit Karma is a good replacement or not (how about a simple comparison chart of features?)
3) They're destroying the Mint brand, which is valuable and consumer-friendly. Meanwhile "Credit Karma" just sounds like a scam
If Intuit wants to better monetize Mint, it seems like it would be vastly better to port the profitable Credit Karma features over to Mint, rather than migrate Mint users to Credit Karma.
What Intuit is doiung is utterly baffling to me, and smells like internal politics over at Intuit is taking precedence over good/profitable product decisions, which does not give me faith in the overall management at the company. Shutting down Mint to replace it with Credit Karma has very strong vibes of shutting down Digg v3 to replace it with Digg v4.
I hope this turns out well in the end, but given what an atrocious job they're doing in communicating it, I'm not holding my breath.
To be honest I don’t think their decisions are that baffling once you start thinking in terms of money.
1. Credit karma doesn’t have all the features that mint does. I suspect they don’t plan on adding them either. But if you say that no one’s gonna sign up on credit karma. Might as well keep it vague and hint the new app can do that and hopefully some people end up signing up on credit karma.
2. I don’t think the care about mint brand. It’s pretty clear that mint wasn’t making enough money and they decided the effort needed to manage it isn’t worth it. On the other hand, credit karma is probably making a lot more money and much much easier to maintain - all it does is pull data from credit agencies. Credit karma recommends cards/loans etc. which I suspect is how they’re making good bucks.
Either way, it sucks for us. I suspect mint did some user surveys to see if they could make a paid version of mint work and realized not a lot of people are gonna pay for it. Sucks for us.
I use to look at Mint once a quarter. It gave a good high level overview of my finances -- it linked to all my accounts, had records of my assets, etc. Once a quarter I'd load it, see my total assets grow and my debts decrease, and get a strong sense of security.
What are some of the best alternatives for this sort of personal finance view?
I didn't even use the budgeting/bells and whistles features. It was mostly a great way to download transactions in a unified format from a dozen different banks past their short retention periods. I hope something similar exists :-(
I came here to say exactly this. I don't need a budgeting tool, I need a single pane of glass that aggregates all of my accounts across multiple financial institutions and lets me run very basic reports against them. That's it. This product does not seem to exist.
Yep. I meant now that Mint is going away, I won't have a tool to do that.
For me the risk was acceptable because it was read-only access from a very small number of institutions. But those institutions have changed over the 15 years I used Mint, so having the historical data from places I used to have accounts was immensely helpful in understanding things like how much net worth changed over time. Especially when I could layer in other accounts manually as well as estimated real estate values from Zillow. So "I bought a house" wouldn't show up as "I lost $X dollars" but instead "I owe $X on a mortgage against a house worth $Y."
Yup. Most alternatives people are proposing need you manually enter every transaction you make, and that instantly makes it useless. I want one that connects to every single bank account/investment portfolio/loan I have and updates it in real time. I have never found something as seamless as Mint in that regard.
I used Mint in the same way and then migrated to Personal Capital after the Intuit acquisition. Unfortunately, they were sold by come company called Empower recently but it hasn't seemed to impact things on the Personal Capital side yet. Apparently it's branded as "Empower Personal Dashboard".
I've got ~4 or 5 bank accounts, a few different 401ks, some individual stocks via Equiniti or whoever, our mortgage, our credit cards, our house and car as assets (with values derived from Zillow and I think KBB?) - the only issues are the same ones I had with Mint where occasionally some service would need another login / password / 2FA or something and time out.
I use YNAB 4, and I manually input all transactions for my credit card usage. I feel that it makes me more conscious of my spending. It's certainly not for everyone, but I only have the one credit card that I put everything on. And I don't buy a tremendous amount of things that makes it very arduous. I also don't have a need to monitor my investment portfolio in real time. I check it once a quarter or so.
I don't know if I'm the weird one here. But I don't feel a need to connect all of my assets to constantly monitor them. I don't have any assets that necessitate that level of control.
I used Actual for a little while and ran into the same frustration; having to manually download and re-upload CSVs was driving me crazy.
I also loathe the idea of having to hand over the account credentials to any third party service--what I really want is my financial institution(s) to send webhooks of my transactions, or even just allow for an automated download of the CSVs. (I'd write a playwright bot, but the 2fa makes it difficult. Of course the accounts should have 2fa, I just want an API for getting my transaction data.)
Personal Finance/Empower is very similar in terms of tracking various accounts and assets/debts, although many of the features are more focused on investments
Honestly, just move your stuff into a spreadsheet and try to build your own integrations. Money management tools that aren't integrated into a trading platform or rhyme with "Slick Cooks" don't last long.
And this is why I'm still using YNAB 4. Cloud hosted services have their perks, but owning my own data and not having to worry about being forced to another service is nice. Though, I have a feeling I'm going to be pushed eventually to something else.
Yeah. It took some extra steps to install on both a new Android phone and a new Mac. I'm tempted to remake its functionality in a spreadsheet, but haven't mustered the will power yet
Credit Karma is a better funnel to credit providers (cards and loans). They are a credit broker. They make money when they refer a customer to someone issuing credit. When you provide them access to your credit information, that is used by partner models to credit decision.
EDIT: This is likely a cost efficiency effort, sunsetting what is underperforming and bolstering support for more profitable ventures.
> Kinda crazy to me that one of the biggest names in personal budgeting couldn't find enough value for its stakeholders.
The downside of getting acquired by a large company is that they want large-sized business. Lots of medium and small sized products that would be very viable on their own end up getting shut down because in the context of their parent company, they don't make sense.
It must be quite expensive to maintain. It predates Plaid, so unless they migrated, they're maintaining all the scraping logic and the services to actually do it.
The credit card ads are probably not generating enough revenue to justify the upkeep.
Mint was originally built on the back of Yodlee.com which is something I had a small part in building. I was gone before that deal was.. minted, so I have no idea what the terms were like. My options ended up being worth like $15 and Mint got bought by Intuit, so I'm guessing not great for yodlee.
AFAIK they only used yodlee for the first couple years until they were able to secure their own connections to financial institutions.
Makes me a little sad thinking about how long I've been at this now..
I do it today with 1password. I did it back then with yodlee and mint.
I've always avoided including any email, phone or utilities account creds since these are, unfortunately, ways financial companies frequently use to authenticate you or authorize changes. I didn't want to be locked out of them in the event my bank or trade accounts got taken over.
While I haven't used it in ages, I'm surprised no one has mentioned Personal Capital (now Empower). I thought it was largely a feature parity competitor for Mint. But, perhaps it was acquired and made terrible... ?
> Empower acquired Personal Capital in 2020, and in Feb. 2023, Personal Capital finished its rebranding under the new name Empower. The service and its offerings remain largely the same.
So far it is just as good for me. They do some sales pitches and I talked to an advisor. I didn't go with their pitch, but they left the analysis up for me for free, and I used it to adjust my investments.
Credit Karma is a lead provider for lenders. They probably make a boatload of money from that. I don't think they care about providing the same functionality.
Unless Mint had QuickBooks ambitions, there was never much overlap. It felt like Mint was a way for Intuit to get into the consumer space. You can see that here. Credit Karma isn't exactly a replacement, they're not recommending QuickBooks, and no one here is recommending an Intuit product.
I've been using Banktivity[0] for a while and generally like it.
Their subscription model is interesting. If you decide to cancel your subscription everything still works, but you don't get access to the connected services. The only thing I don't like is that you need to take a step to cancel the subscription, so if you want the software but don't want the connected services it's a bit of friction. I'd rather pay one price for the software (and I'm fine with doing this for every major version) with a separate subscription for the services set up separately.
That said, every piece of personal finance software I've tried has some bit of friction with how I want it to work.
If you have an office 365 subscription microsoft money is a spreadsheet that can connect to your accounts through plaid I believe. Not offline, but also probably not going away.
I haven't used this before, but are there things that you wish you could have used Python to analyze the data in the workbook? I currently use Mint, so need to migrate to something and maybe I could find a way to extend any missing functionality via Python (disclosure: I'm a founding member of the Python in Excel team).
Mint holds a place in my heart because we were basically neighbors. I lived a block away on the same street as their old Mountain View office. I remember being impressed when I first tried it, and even applied for a job there, but never heard back.
Over time, my account connections started to rot, and as banks got acquired and accounts changed, data got glitchy, and I started seeing duplicate transactions. For a while, I'd diligently re-categorize transactions, hoping some sort of basic ML would learn from my updates, but it never did. My account fell into disrepair, and the information it offered became inaccurate and noisy. Over time, I just lost interest.
I said I applied for a job there. I was never sold on their business model, and their suggestions to me never made any sense. At the same time, all the $100 per year replacements people are suggesting also make no sense.
Mint offered an incredible product, especially for its time, but I'm not sure if there's a business there.
Assuming you mean "free" as in "I don't need to provide a credit card to sign up", then https://ghostfol.io/
If on the off chance you mean "free" as in "freedom from having my data sold", then You Need a Budget (YNAB) is a popular option. But be warned, YNAB is more than software...it's a new way of thinking about budgeting. It takes some getting used to.
https://www.ynab.com/
I have so many of these self-hosted apps in my server now, it's getting rather full but it's so freeing to know my cloud is just mine. My data stays on my machine and isn't reliant on some server farm christ-knows-where, their infrastructure, and their security policies which are all effectively required to be taken on faith.
I absolutely love it and I have so much appreciation for the people building this stuff.
Care to share some useful apps you have been using? I recently got a NAS and found out it's quite easy to host a service via docker and forward connections with cloudflared.
So far I am running vaultwarden and an audiobook server using plex.
Either it's accurate so nobody uses it so I don't have confidence in it, or the number is wrong but nobody's noticed this glaring error on the home page and so I also don't have confidence in it...
I use Fidelity Fullview(must be a customer of Fidelity but that can also be free). Fidelity also has eMoney, which is a more comprehensive option, but requires going through a financial advisor that supports it.
Otherwise the other options people have mentioned are decent, particularly hledger.
Not that you should trust that your info is any safer than with Mint, but has anyone tried Personal Capital? I've seen it recommended in the past, but they seem to have rebranded and their site doesn't list much detail about it. https://www.personalcapital.com/
I use personal capital and it's just about the same as mint, with a more "investment" focused tooling set as they want you to buy their fund.
Beyond that, a few CC providers have terms that say "you aren't protected if you give out your password to services like this" so do keep that in mind (I didn't wire up some accounts explicitly for that reason, and I track them manually in the tool)
Wish the US would get it's act together and mandate a modern open banking API.
I got tired of the pushy sales calls for their managed option. Kind of turned me off. I wish I could have just paid for it. I eventually switched to tiller ($5/mo) as it mostly works and is super configurable (just a spreadsheet synced with bank data)
The US banking system needs an enforcement model like PSD2. That one mandated an API that EVERYBODY can use.
I should be able to write an application that pulls data directly from Chase / BofA / CapitalOne via a standardized API, without having to pass through systems like Plaid.
This is essentially the largest hurdle that open-source applications have. Not that they don't have enough knowledge, but their adoption is hampered by a difference in features between applications like Mint.
Mint worked seamlessly. No need for CVS exports & imports, mapping columns etc. It just worked.
The fact that we can't get that without having to sign large contract is scandalous.
> Your favorite Mint features are moving to Credit Karma:
Continue to see your financial accounts in one place
Continue to view your transactions
Continue to track your spending
Continue to view your cash flow
Continue to track your net worth trend over time
I'm still waiting on access to some API for Canadian banks (RBC mainly) so I can get transactions and account balance information for my own account. Its garbage this isn't available in 2023.
One thing I’ve not seen any competitor to Mint reproduce is the Mac app it offered back in the mid-2010s. It lived in your menubar and presented a popover when clicked which was very handy for quick reference, much nicer than having to switch to a browser tab or pick up my phone.
I’ve considered building a simple WebView menubar app that wraps the Personal Capital mobile site or something which would kind of approximate the old Mint app’s experience, but it wouldn’t be as good since it’d be fudging a touch experience on desktop.
I was with Intuit last year when they made the announcement internally. Since then, I've been working on something to help people as a replacement app. It's not ready yet, but I'd love to get people's thoughts on it. I'm in the middle of building now and can always use more customer feedback. Anyone who's interested can email me at jd@olympusmoney.com or check out the website so far: www.olympusmoney.com.
I switched from Mint to LunchMoney a few years ago, because I assume with it being free, Intuit was probably selling my financial data. It's pretty awesome, highly recommended.
Mint had plenty of anti-consumer sleaze in its years. Like in 2009 when they promoted freecreditreport dot com (which is a deceptive site and not actually a free credit report). It's possible that came more from Intuit, in line with all the deceptive marketing of Turbotax, etc.
Governments should provide citizens free or very low cost basic financial account transaction balance aggregator service with connectors to all financial providers.
Perhaps also option to grant the likes of Credit Karma etc access to this basic aggregated transactions to try to add value eg budgeting, etc.
I've mentioned it elsewhere on HN; I am not affiliated but a fan of TillerHQ. TillerHQ Syncs your account transactions to a Google Sheet or Excel Spreadsheet. $79 a year.
One thing that happened since Mint came out - banks become more technically savvy. My credit card's app now gives me a pretty decent breakdown of my spending whereas before, Mint was more-or-less the only tool that would do this.
Every financial I have an account at (too many, but not many fintechs) has the option to download account and transaction data as CSV, Excel or similar format.
Ha. When I created my own money management spreadsheet in 2014, some people asked "why not just use Mint or YNAB or something like that?"
Back then, the answer was "I budget biweekly, which Mint can't do, and YNAB has opinions on budgeting that I don't agree with."
When Mint gained that capability, my new answer was "because things just disappear on the Internet"
And here's Mint becoming another victim of the 2023 tech enshittificnado.
I'm pissed on behalf of everyone who has years and years and years of data that will likely (but hopefully not) be impossible to fully export and now needs to find a new home for it all.
I'm doing the same with Expensify and moving that data into Google Sheets, then later into Excel (because Google Drive still existing is a miracle)
Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders of Monarch Money, a (paid) competitor to Mint founded by the original PM on Mint.com. I had written a HackerNews front-pager a couple years ago about why Revenue Model is More Important Than Culture [0], and my co-founder wrote some thoughts about why Mint ended up going this route.
Since this announcement, we've seen an unprecedented influx of "Mint refugees" moving over. I think a lot of Mint folks have felt like the product has been neglected for years, but it was free and they often had years of history in the product. This was kind of a forcing function for them.
0: https://somehowmanage.com/2020/09/20/revenue-model-not-cultu... 1: https://www.monarchmoney.com/blog/mint-shutting-down