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What happened to Mint?

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Re: What happened to Mint?

#391

Post by austhrow743 »

bananamerica wrote: post #312
wyclif wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate the phrase "lifestyle business." Look: it's a business. No, it's not going to make VCs billionaires. But it's a perfectly respectable business nonetheless. Nothing wrong with that.

So I went to Wikipedia and found this definition: "A lifestyle business is a business set up and run by its founders primarily with the aim of sustaining a particular level of income and no more; or to provide a foundation from which to enjoy a particular lifestyle." Seems like a useful concept. What's wrong with it?

That's a fantastic description of the business model a guy I know runs his plane tours under. He likes flying. He doesn't earn enough to justify flying just himself around in circles every weekend. So what he does is take people up with him on scenic tours. No real room to grow. He's not competitive if he tries to start scaling and actually completely cover pilots, planes, and the advertising required to keep them busy. But he keeps his hobby mostly cost neutral through word of mouth.

What it is not is a good term for any business that doesn't take VC. There are many businesses where the primary objective is to grow and make lots of money but where VC doesn't make sense. It's probably most businesses. So when someone calls a business a lifestyle business simply on the basis that the market isn't big enough to warrant VC, it's insulting to a large swath of business owners and generally a case of unwarranted elitism. Like if Zuckerberg was looking at businesses earning tens or hundreds of millions a year and went "how cute, lifestylers" it'd be shitty but at least he'd have the success to back it up. Mostly on here you see it from people just leaching off the success of their industry. They earn hundreds of thousands but use their position in tech to look down on people pulling in millions.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#392

Post by caseyf7 »

liamuk wrote: post #382

I've been using https://copilot.money/ which is great. Clean UI, uses Plaid to import transactions, paid for by subscription, not your data.

If it uses Plaid, they are taking all of the data they can get from your banks with your login.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#393

Post by sizzle »

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…

Fintech companies have tried to get at this goldmine of user data. You got it right, banks will never willingly give away this treasure trove of highly monetizable and privileged data abd drive their memberbade away from their own digital offerings.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#394

Post by Marsymars »

mumblemumble wrote: post #41
decasia wrote: post #4

It sounds like the answer is pretty straightforward — Mint was acquired and then semi-abandoned for want of providing sufficient revenue/having a sufficiently profitable business model. The question in my mind is: What is the matter with global banking institutions such that this has to be a third party service instead of a service that a well-organized banking consortium could provide to its clients? I would totally…

> Is it asking so much for an interface from my bank that can classify transactions, include basic budgeting features, and pull in some data from other accounts? Up until a rewrite of their online banking site to have a more modern, responsiveUI, my credit union used to have a pretty good implementation of the first of those. (After the rewrite, those features still exist, but hamburger buttons and poor information d…

> Up until a rewrite of their online banking site to have a more modern, responsiveUI, my credit union used to have a pretty good implementation of the first of those. (After the rewrite, those features still exist, but hamburger buttons and poor information density have made it impossible to use them efficiently.)

I feel like something is not right when the utility of my banks' websites is pretty much inversely proportional to the recentness of their last redesign.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#396

Post by NetOpWibby »

jnfr wrote: post #334
move-on-by wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Founder of Lunch Money ( https://lunchmoney.app ) here– I encourage you to check us out! I'd like to think we're a more non-opinionated and simple alternative to YNAB.

Out of all the services listed here, yours looks the best. I’ll try it out once I start my new gig in a month.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#397

Post by Terretta »

cfitz wrote: post #366
ineedasername wrote: post #355

My impression of Intuit's acquisition of Mint was always that it was done precisely so that it wouldn't grow and become a major player in personal finance. That what they were really purchasing was the Mint userbase in an attempt to cross sell them on paid products. And so they have kept Mint around with the absolute bare minimum of effort for the sales funnel through to revenue generating products

I have this same impression, but I also use Mint to organize my finances. I'm a big fan of how I can categorize expenditures and export them as CSV's or charts, which I can then send to my accountant for an easy tax season. Without this (so far) free tool - as I have not paid for anything Intuit related minus likely my personal data - my annual U.S. taxes would be a massive pain in the rear end, being that I'm self-e…

What tool will take Mint’s place for this exact use case?

Re: What happened to Mint?

#398

Post by shaklee3 »

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…

Wealthfront is great as well. The projections are far better than anything else I've seen.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#399

Post by taurath »

EpicEng wrote: post #354
taurath wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If is good, then its nice to focus sometimes on the fact that its good, rather than on what it doesn't have. Its similar to judging a Honda for not being a Maserati that gets 200 miles per gallon.

Sure, but whether or not I decide to stick with depends on many factors. One of those is "does it do everything I need/want." If the answer is no, then that factors into my decision.

No app is gonna rub your back at night or hold your hand on your deathbed (well, yet, google is probably working on something), so "everything" isn't... really a thing.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#400

Post by Ididntdothis »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #328
Ididntdothis wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. Microsoft Money was close to perfect sometime in the 2000s. I am really sad that it got abandoned.

Presumably it still runs, do the integrations with banks no longer work?

Last time I tried no. If I remember correctly one bank after the other abandoned OFX.
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