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What happened to Mint?

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Re: What happened to Mint?

#241

Post by mdszy »

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.

Been using YNAB for over 5 years now, since back when it was a pay-once desktop application. Can't live without it at this point.

The best part for me is how it handles where money you earn goes, it always goes to next month, not the current month (granted, after I graduated college it took me a bit to actually get back into this because of living with effectively 0 income for 4 years), so you know that you're already budgeted for the month when you get into it. That feeling is super comforting for me.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#242

Post by mumblemumble »

EpicEng wrote: post #232
taurath wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a product is good, we shouldn't judge it on its inability to continuously add new features.

Not sure I understand that. If I want feature X, and doesn't have feature X, then that's a negative. Doesn't mean is not "good", but it's certainly criteria by which to judge it.

Arguably, though, an app is more than just the sum of its feature list. Also, even if a feature is desirable when considered in a vacuum, that doesn't necessarily imply that adding it will improve the product.

Somewhere in between $very_long_ago and $long_ago, I stopped using a well-known personal finance app because I grew dissatisfied with it overall. It gained all sorts of genuinely useful capabilities over that time period, and didn't shed any, but still managed to become less functional (for my purposes) at the same time. I ended up replacing it with a competitor whose feature list was much, much, much smaller.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#243

Post by chandraonline »

overcast wrote: post #138
djstein wrote: post #92

Just going to post a great alternative that people over at http://reddit.com/r/financialindependence/ recommend Personal Capital http://personalcapital.com/ I've been using it for about 4 years now. Best money management system I've used in a long time

Personal capital is amazing for investments, but it's shit for budgeting, and that's why Mint still rocks.

Came here to say this. I use both and Personal Capital works better for investments than Mint and Mint for other things. I am still not satisfied with Mint Budgeting and I am currently trying YNAB. Mint sync with banks works better than all and YNAB is not intuitive to use (at least for me) . Maybe I am not the right demographic.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#244

Post by [deleted] »

Dig1t wrote: post #212
sshumaker wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This space is really difficult to crack for a few non-obvious reasons. The first is that the total TAM is less than you think; for most people, tracking their spending to manage budgets just doesn’t appeal to them. For many consumers, just seeing all of their finances is incredibly depressing. I suspect the 13mm Mint users are a large portion of the addressable market for this kind of product. So without a strong mon…

I'm sorry, what is TAM?

[deleted]

Re: What happened to Mint?

#246

Post by MuffinFlavored »

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…

How are you going to get around 2FA? NerdWallet (which probably has more than enough money to hire lots of really good engineers to solve this problem) consistently has problems syncing my 401k/credit card/checking accounts.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#247

Post by banana_maker »

paulgb wrote: post #45
LegitShady wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't handle the forced system in ynab - it's clunky and I want a budget program not a whole new budget system. To me less useful than an excel budget because it tries to force you to do things it's way. I'd rather use Excel than be forced to use their stupid system.

You might like Tiller Money. It's basically the bank integration that Mint and YNAB have, but instead of being forced to use their interface it backs out the data into an Excel/Google spreadsheet that you can build your own system on top of. (It costs money, but after what happened to Mint I consider "sustainable business model that doesn't involve selling your data" a feature for this sort of service.)

Only allowing logins via google is highly disappointing, and makes tiller unusable for me.

The last thing I want to associate with my google account is my financial data.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#248

Post by gizmo686 »

tusharsoni wrote: post #94
eddyg wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks good, but it's free. Care to offer any insight on how you plan to monetize your app and make it sustainable?

Thanks! It's free for now because it's new. We want to get an initial set of users, polish the app further, and then start the monetization. Right now, I'm leaning towards a subscription model because it makes the most sense. I think YNAB is too pricy and a personal finance app can sustain with a $2-3/mo subscription. Is there any other monetization model that we should be looking at?

How do you plan to handle the transitionfrom free to subscription?

Once you price yourself at 0, it can be very difficult to convince users to start paying for what was once free.

I would generally recommend avoiding having a free period entirely, and instead offer an early adopters discount as well as a free trial period.

Since it sounds like you missed your chance on that one, I would look for ways to offer both a free and payed version. Again, the difficulty here is that once something is in the free version, you want to avoid removing it, so you will need compelling new feaures to make this work. You also need to make sure that the free version continues to leave a good impression.

Having said that, I suspect you will find there is a reason so many companies end up monetizing through avertisements...

Re: What happened to Mint?

#249

Post by overcast »

chandraonline wrote: post #243
overcast wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal capital is amazing for investments, but it's shit for budgeting, and that's why Mint still rocks.

Came here to say this. I use both and Personal Capital works better for investments than Mint and Mint for other things. I am still not satisfied with Mint Budgeting and I am currently trying YNAB. Mint sync with banks works better than all and YNAB is not intuitive to use (at least for me) . Maybe I am not the right demographic.

Same situation, I'm religious with budgeting in Mint, and Personal Capital gives me my over all net worth progress.
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