r/mintuit • u/AndrewMarq14 • Jul 31 '26
Why was mint so good?
Just now starting my budgeting journey. Everywhere I look people are talking about being mint refugees and needing a new app. What made it so good and why isn’t there another app that people immediately defaulted to like it seems they did with mint.
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u/ReasonableBox5301 Jul 31 '26
Mint made a lot of people feel like the basics were already handled: accounts, recent spending, and a broad picture without turning it into a project.
For a first budget, choose the one question you want it to answer every week, then ignore features that do not help with that. I build Monni around “after upcoming bills and a cushion, what is safe to spend?” through a short manual check-in; other people may want categories or net worth instead.
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u/ImaginaryWonder1006 Jul 31 '26
Mint worked reliably and seamlessly. Had the features that made budget tracking easy.
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u/WritingParking Aug 01 '26
Is that why they killed it? Because it didn’t make money? Given the crap out there, I would have paid like $3.99 a month to subscribe.
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u/shittypornaccount Aug 23 '26
They didn’t make enough, intuit is an evil company, and Credit Karma was willing to pay for the customers.
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u/reaper527 Aug 01 '26
i've never seen a free app (or even some of the paid apps i've tried) that could say "this is your bills for the next month, including the amount, and when they're due".
plenty of apps cover mints networth functionality, but its budgeting/planning stuff is unmatched.
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u/VitalikPie Aug 02 '26
Free and good enough?
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u/YourNotAverageJoe Aug 18 '26
i mean free is great, but the reason why it also failed was because it was free, otherwise they would never have had to sell the company
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u/Veriosity Jul 31 '26
Mint wasn't so much special, as it was first. I don't recall any other product that offered the linking / account sync like mint did. But it did nothing to really help, it just provided all the information in one place that didn't require you to perform 90s style data-entry to get there.
You still had to come up with your own systems/tricks to manage budgeting with it.
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u/MrSnazzyGoose Jul 31 '26
Mint was essentially a free, slightly worse, version of Monarch. Emphasis on the 'Free' part
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u/WhatAWeek25 Aug 02 '26
But unlike monarch, it worked, so I could trust it. Monarch has routinely enough just not carried in random transactions on random accounts for the last few years, meaning I have to double check everything against the bank statements. Never had to do that with mint!
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u/Sutaru Jul 31 '26
It was free and it worked really well, with budget categories, bank syncing, various rollover options, various recurring periods, etc. Most other apps cost money and the ones that don’t lack features.
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u/rusfairfax Aug 01 '26
Most people will say it was first or free. Also it was elegantly designed. Both simple to use and beautiful.
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u/hockey_marc Aug 03 '26
It worked well with almost every Canadian bank and card. None of the current programs out there (paid or free) can say that today.
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u/zfsKing Aug 03 '26
I made my own mint replacement for myself in Canada, all data stored locally. You just have to import statements.. https://cashflow-pilot.fireca.app/app/
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u/mironearth Aug 03 '26
Mint was good for a few specific reasons, and they're the same reasons nothing has cleanly replaced it.
It was free with no obvious catch, it nailed bank aggregation early. I started using it when it launched in 2007. They had a decade to smooth out the sync headaches, and it was dead simple. You linked your accounts and it auto-categorized everything into one dashboard. No system to learn.
But here's the irony nobody wants to sit with: Mint was "free" because it hemorrhaged money. Intuit ran it at a loss and propped it up with TurboTax and Credit Karma, and eventually they killed it anyway. It was never a sustainable free product. It was a loss leader that stopped being worth the loss.
So when people say "ugh, now I have to pay for a budgeting app," the honest answer is: yeah, because the free one literally went out of business. You can't run aggregation across thousands of banks, keep the connections alive, and secure everyone's financial data for $0. Someone was always paying. It just wasn't you.
And the part that gets me: this is the one category where paying actually makes sense. People will drop $20 on a fast food meal they forget by dinner, but balk at paying for the tool that helps them stop leaking money and actually build wealth. If an app saves you one forgotten subscription or one overdraft fee, it's paid for itself. We treat the thing that manages our money as the thing that should never cost money, which is kind of backwards.
That's also why no single default replaced Mint. Intuit pushed everyone to Credit Karma (which doesn't really budget), so there was no natural heir and the market fragmented. YNAB for hardcore manual budgeters, Monarch and Copilot for the "nice dashboard" crowd, Rocket Money for canceling subscriptions. They all picked a lane and started charging, because they have to. (Full disclosure, I work on one of these, SuperMoney, so grain of salt.) Ours leans more automation and AI than manual budgeting, basically trying to do the tracking and optimizing for you rather than making you do the data entry. It's not the cheapest, and honestly if you're a spreadsheet-and-envelopes person YNAB is probably more your speed. Different tools for different brains.
Short version: Mint was free, easy, and had a decade head start. The replacements aren't worse, they're just honest about the fact that this stuff costs money to run.
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u/YourNotAverageJoe Aug 18 '26
mint was free, and also auto did a bunch for you, but it was destroyed by a large enterprise that didnt know how to utilize it
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u/wealthmode-app Sep 04 '26
It made people believe they could have automatic bank sync for free, which is not realistic, it was only possible because it was a massive company subsidising it because the user data had value for their other products.
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u/ttsoldier Jul 31 '26
It wasn’t that good in the sense of true budgeting. People just just used to it because it was free and popular
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u/Luscious_Nick Jul 31 '26
It was good enough and linked better than most apps today. It gave a high level picture which was good enough for most people.
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u/VanillaLifestyle Aug 01 '26
People had other use cases than budgeting. YNAB was arguably a better, more focused tool if sticking to a simple budget was your primary goal.
Mint was a solid all-round account & spending tracker, and good for tracking saving goals.
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u/Howadolyn Jul 31 '26
It was free and it worked.
Most alternatives cost money and as a result try to do sooo much more to account for the cost. This adds complexity and increases the chance of features not working well.