What happened to Mint? • Hacker News Board

Re: What happened to Mint?

#101

Post by apocalyptic0n3 » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 5:51 PM UTC

gk1 wrote: post #44

pxlpshr wrote: post #38

I use Personal Capital and love it. It's just better when you have a variety of 15+ assets and supports things like Carta. Admittedly, it's been a long time since I used Mint but I now need a much broader view. I don't really care about my individual transactions; I'm more focused on turning a different set of knobs at this point in life. My biggest complaint about Personal Capital is the frequent phone calls from th…

Their sales calls are the reason I deleted my PC account and (reluctantly) returned to Mint. I, too, would be willing to pay some small subscription amount.

Same experience here. Tried to switch from Mint to PC, got like 5 calls from them in the first week or so, cursed the caller out over the phone on the fifth one, and then immediately deleted my account after. It's predatory and it completely destroyed any trust I reluctantly gave them in the first place.

I really wish there were self-hosted options for seeing all of your finances in a single spot. Even paid options. That's what I really want.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#102

Post by haskellandchill » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 5:51 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…

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

Re: What happened to Mint?

#103

Post by sithlord » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 5:51 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…

Personal Capital is free, works amazingly - not really a budgeting tool - but more an aggregating tool. Depends what you want to use it for, it does have some* budgeting capabilities.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#104

Post by agotterer » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 5:52 PM UTC

I actually deleted my Mint account this past weekend. I received a notification about one of my accounts not connecting and needed to upgrade the auth. It was then I realized I hadn’t logged in for years, it provided very little utility to me, and I was sharing a lot of purchase data and habits for no reason. So I deleted it. This article about sums up Mints demise.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#105

Post by calrueb » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 5:52 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 have been using YNAB for over 2 years since my 50 year old mother somehow found out about it. It is a different way to think about budgeting and the tool only excels if you work within the "YNAB principles". I would recommend reading the companion book You Need a Budget before starting with the app. It was important for me to digest and understand the philosophy before I started using the tool. Otherwise I believe I would have been turned off by the rigidity.

I seem to respond well to defined, rigid systems. I handle all my task management via the systems outlined in Getting Things Done. I'd be curious what other books are out there for handling aspects of life with a systemic, opinionated approach (professional life, social life, dating, etc.)?

Re: What happened to Mint?

#106

Post by freeone3000 » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 5:53 PM UTC

alistairSH wrote: post #67

I haven't used Mint, so I went to take a look... Am I missing something, or is Mint asking me to hand over the credentials to all my other financial accounts? That strikes me a horrendously awful idea.

The value is in automatically adding transactions live, which requires access to live transaction streams from all of your accounts. If you want to do it manually... Excel, maybe?

Re: What happened to Mint?

#107

Post by wpietri » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 5:54 PM UTC

roywiggins wrote: post #52

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…

Mint never really lost its soul. It always seemed like it was going to try and upsell me on stuff, but that was fine by me because I'm not in the market for new credit cards or whatever. But I guess that's part of the problem, and they're just not making much money off referrals and therefore can't be bothered to improve the product? The problem for me with Mint is that it just... stopped getting any updates, and the…

To me, the lack of updates is Mint losing its soul.

What was refreshing and different about Mint for me is that they said, "Hey, what if we really look at how people deal with their money and design accordingly?" It was a huge, innovative leap forward. It was far from perfect, but if they just kept iterating with the same spirit, I knew it would get to be something I loved. Alas, alas.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#108

Post by wnissen » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 5:55 PM UTC

Anyone who has seen how Intuit has bungled Quicken for the Mac multiple times in multiple ways for over a decade would not be surprised. I'm willing to pay for upgrades and still incredibly frustrated.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#109

Post by bostonvaulter2 » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 5:56 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?

What does bug me is being forced to store all my data on their servers. I'm sticking to v4 until I'm forced onto something else (or I build my own replacement)

Re: What happened to Mint?

#110

Post by sithlord » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 5:56 PM UTC

sschueller wrote: post #55

Off Topic, most of the services mentioned here use Plaid to connect to banks. This means that Plaid (now Visa) has full access to your entire banking history. Combined with credit card data they know almost everything you purchase. I find that fact quite unsettling.

I think Mint uses Plaid, but I think the others may use Yodlee