What happened to Mint? • Hacker News Board

Re: What happened to Mint?

#261

Post by JaiminDesai93 » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 9:13 PM UTC

city41 wrote: post #255

JaiminDesai93 wrote: post #251

Hey all, I noticed a bunch of folks talking about categorizing charges and the difficulties surrounding that. I've been working on an app that makes this a one-step process just by using Siri. Check it out here: https://launch.getreconcile.com/ Sorry for the shameless plug! Thought it would be appropriate to share my solution as it might help some of you out.

IMO, the image showing all the various Siri interactions should be at the very top. It succinctly describes the product quite nicely.

Thanks for that feedback, I'll move some things around!

Re: What happened to Mint?

#262

Post by jedc » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 9:14 PM UTC

I can't believe no one here has mentioned Buxfer (YC W07) yet! - https://www.buxfer.com/

I've tried a bunch of these apps and they're either too expensive, don't support multiple currencies (a deal-killer for me), or don't work well.

I highly recommend them. The founders have kept it alive and even launched a much better account syncing feature in the last few months - I happily pay for their $5/month Pro account.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#263

Post by texasbigdata » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 9:14 PM UTC

ghostpepper wrote: post #254

The killer feature I am waiting for is any site or app with automatic transaction importing from my bank without requiring me to input my online banking password and thus being one data breach away from someone having full access to all my accounts (sms-based 2FA notwithstanding) This is a solved problem in tech (OAuth, I think) so clearly there are perverse financial incentives (ie. my bank doesn't want to make it e…

For personal tiller excel with service account credentials

Re: What happened to Mint?

#264

Post by kposehn » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 9:15 PM UTC

zifnab06 wrote: post #169

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’ve looked at a lot of budgeting apps. In order of priority, I want: 1. Don’t be evil (aka don’t be intuit) 2. Web based with some sane security (2fa, encryption at rest, etc) 3. The ability to sync transactions from my bank. 4. Budgeting/reporting. 5. Some sort of sane forecasting. You’ve got N months of data from a customer, why can’t you tell them in 6 months this account is expected to have $x in it? 6. Sane API…

#5 is so critical. If you can’t enter transactions ahead of time and know where you will be, then what is the point?

Re: What happened to Mint?

#265

Post by dddddaviddddd » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 9:15 PM UTC

I now use firefly-iii. I always found Mint's storing banking credentials uncomfortable. I find that inputting transactions manually increases my awareness of spending.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#266

Post by brighton36 » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 9:16 PM UTC

Raphmedia wrote: post #40

brighton36 wrote: post #3

I switched to http://plaintextaccounting.org/ and couldn't be happier.

It seems that this side is a faq of plaintext accounting tools. What do you personally use?

I use ledger. I wrote my own journal makefile, and reporting system using ruby. I may switch to hledger next year.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#267

Post by kposehn » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 9:20 PM UTC

jedc wrote: post #262

I can't believe no one here has mentioned Buxfer (YC W07) yet! - https://www.buxfer.com/ I've tried a bunch of these apps and they're either too expensive, don't support multiple currencies (a deal-killer for me), or don't work well. I highly recommend them. The founders have kept it alive and even launched a much better account syncing feature in the last few months - I happily pay for their $5/month Pro account.

I’ve never seen them before - and it allows me to enter transactions ahead of time! However, it can’t track stock options without doing it manually. Wish they supported that.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#268

Post by bryanmgreen » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 9:21 PM UTC

parthdesai wrote: post #259

kposehn wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a few requests for you: 1. Allow people to enter transactions ahead of time and plan ahead. I dropped Mint in favor of Quicken because no other tool allows me to properly plan ahead. But Quicken still lacks support for a number of financial institutions as well as stock options. 2. Please support stock options and non-public wealth tracking. Quicken has to be shoehorned into it, Personal Finance supports it bu…

> 1. Allow people to enter transactions ahead of time and plan ahead This is such a no brainer. I tend to buy tickets to concerts/shows at times two months of time and I want to reflect that in that month's spending and not this months.

FYI - you can forward-date purchases in Mint by a few months.

Just click on the transaction and then again on the date and modify.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#269

Post by tusharsoni » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 9:27 PM UTC

gizmo686 wrote: post #248

tusharsoni wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We don't plan on monetizing our existing users. As early users, they're providing their value with feedback and helping us work out the kinks.

Once the app is monetized, all new users will have to go through that. Even then, I think a free period is a good idea or maybe a freemium version. The only risk with freemium version is giving away too much or too little for free.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#270

Post by dddddaviddddd » Thu, Jan 23, 2020, 9:29 PM UTC

archildress wrote: post #146

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.

I've considered writing my own scraper specifically for the banks I use. This might be the most reliable way to do achieve your goal with your privacy requirement.