What happened to Mint? • Hacker News Board

Re: What happened to Mint?

#141

Post by bcraven » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

koboll wrote: post #53

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #29

Co-founder of a (yet to be launched) Mint competitor here [1]. One pattern I think we all see over and over again is when products get bought by a large company, they often lose their "soul" (and the original team). Both those things happened with Mint. Another important pattern I've seen is that products, in the long-term, morph to take the form of their revenue model. Many personal finance products are free, but ma…

I gotta say, a Mint-that-doesn't-suck is something I could absolutely see myself paying $5 a month for, for the rest of my life. The core functionality is indispensable, but it's become so outdated, inefficient, and difficult to use that I'm champing at the bit to jump ship. I'm surprised it's taken this long for a serious competitor to emerge, given that it's been saturated with ads for at least half a decade and Pl…

It's more UK-centric perhaps, but I've had a great time with Money Dashboard[0] for tagging and multiple-accounts overview. The In/Out chart is great for checking that I'm not spending too much each month.

[0] https://www.moneydashboard.com/ [0.1] affiliate: https://share.moneydashboard.com/71926HSZ

Re: What happened to Mint?

#142

Post by ian_d » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

illegalsmile wrote: post #75

eegilbert wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's You Need A Budget, which I love paying for.

I'm still on v4, it works great and I had to pay for it once. I know the model is subscriptions these days and $7/mo ($84/annual purchase) really is nothing in the big picture but it still bugs me. Looking through their release notes it doesn't appear that there has been major improvements in the budgeting aspect of the software. If you've used v4 is it worth it?

I'd go check the YNAB forums, there's a lot of v4 users who really hate the cloud version. I tried to switch and gave it up for two reasons:

- Import from v4 is super broken for credit card accounts and I ended up with weird positive balances that don't add up based on any combination of transactions. Forum advice was "start over".

- You cannot tag income as "available for next month", instead all income must be immediately budgeted. Which is different than the old YNAB advice of being a month ahead. Forum advice is to earmark it a special category then fix it when the next month lands (https://support.youneedabudget.com/t/63pgpp/budget-using-onl...).

- No side-by-side month view. You can only view one month at a time.

The differences were too much for me and the import was so borked that I immediately gave up and stuck with v4.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#143

Post by peterwwillis » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

> It’s as if Mint, with 13 million-plus registered users, were a resource-constrained startup instead of a property of Intuit

Somebody doesn't get how business units work. Your OPEX has to constantly decrease while the revenue has to constantly increase, but your revenue mostly goes to other BUs' CAPEX. So there's no money to fix tech debt, unless it's buying crap to scale with, if you can show growth. Doesn't matter if your daddy is M$, your allowance will still suck unless your lemonade stand is making bank.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#144

Post by nerdkid93 » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #29

Co-founder of a (yet to be launched) Mint competitor here [1]. One pattern I think we all see over and over again is when products get bought by a large company, they often lose their "soul" (and the original team). Both those things happened with Mint. Another important pattern I've seen is that products, in the long-term, morph to take the form of their revenue model. Many personal finance products are free, but ma…

Out of curiosity, is Monarch using Plaid for financial data aggregation? I have been wondering how long it would take for a standalone budget/asset tracker to emerge using Plaid's services. It seems most Plaid users are selling other financial products, and tack on aggregation as an additional feature, like Personal Capital.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#145

Post by skinnymuch » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 6:24 PM UTC

Sytten wrote: post #113

I started using Actual Budget[0] and I love it. Not more SaaS that can break a any moment or sell my data. End-to-end encryption and scripting built-in is just perfect for me. [0] https://actualbudget.com/

This is still an aaS, no, at $4/mo? If the apps still work if the company’s servers stop working or bug out, then why pay monthly if you don’t need the syncing?

Re: What happened to Mint?

#146

Post by archildress » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 6:24 PM UTC

Does anyone have suggestions on an alternative to Mint that simply aggregates data into a CSV / XLSX export across all of my accounts? I understand that Plaid's technology is designed to do this; I just wasn't sure if anyone had implemented it. For the record, I'd pay probably $10 - $20 per month for a service that does this with no privacy implications.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#147

Post by uptown » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 6:25 PM UTC

haskellandchill wrote: post #102

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #29

Co-founder of a (yet to be launched) Mint competitor here [1]. One pattern I think we all see over and over again is when products get bought by a large company, they often lose their "soul" (and the original team). Both those things happened with Mint. Another important pattern I've seen is that products, in the long-term, morph to take the form of their revenue model. Many personal finance products are free, but ma…

Ridiculous, your company will be nothing different in ten years if it even exists. Best of luck though, prove me wrong :)

Is this one of those things where if they fail you can point to this post as validation for your genius, but if they succeed you get to claim credit for motivating them?

Re: What happened to Mint?

#148

Post by bluesroo » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 6:25 PM UTC

joshgachnang wrote: post #128

Does anyone have a suggestion for a finance/budgeting app that's easy to use for splitting costs? My girlfriend and I don't have joined finances, but we do generally split everything down the middle. So most things are "I pay with my card, tally it up, then you Venmo me your half at the end of the month." I'm currently using YNAB and then split each relevant transaction, but it's very very tedious.

Splitwise might work for you. I've used it for parties that multiple people contribute to. Everyone just adds what they've spent and at the end you click a button to "settle up".

It's not really a budgeting app, though.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#149

Post by lxe » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 6:28 PM UTC

I've been using Mint daily for 12 years.

The #1 thing that I need from Mint is 100% reliable integrations so it can automatically pull all my data, which it no longer provides. I have been talking to their support for about a year asking to fix an integration with US's largest mortgage servicer.

The #2 thing is reliable inference of transaction categories. That's also starting to wither. Categories are all over the place.

Everything else I really don't care about. Even if there's on interface and just a big "Export to CSV" button I'd be thrilled about it.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#150

Post by move-on-by » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 6:30 PM UTC

awicz wrote: post #13

I switched to https://ynab.com a while back. It's not exactly the same concept as what Mint was intended to be, but I couldn't be happier with the move.

I tried really hard to like ynab, but I just couldn't get the hang of it. I think the hangup is that I'm not really looking for a budgeting tool, I just want to categorize and see where my money is going - less so planning. Its easy to do that with Mint as budgeting in Mint feels more like an addon then a core concept.