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What happened to Mint?

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Re: What happened to Mint?

#41

Post by mumblemumble »

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 density have made it impossible to use them efficiently.) I honestly thought it did a better job than Mint for a time when I was young and did everything, even my credit card, with that one financial institution.

Which brings us to that last one, "pull in some data from other accounts". My guess is that that would be hard to get past senior decision makers, precisely because it would make it easy for customers to keep most their money elsewhere.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#42

Post by teej »

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…

> It became a "top-of-the-funnel" lead generation tool for other products

If I recall correctly, the original pitch deck for Mint stated that this was the plan. Weird to say it morphed into something that was just the original vision.

Edit: found the deck https://www.slideshare.net/hnshah/mintcom-prelaunch-pitch-de...

Re: What happened to Mint?

#43

Post by benplumley »

orev wrote: post #32

I had been using PocketMoney for a very long time, but it was recently destroyed by the company that acquired it. Seriously looking into GNUCash to try to avoid that kind of thing in the future. Using an online service for financial tracking seems crazy to me, given the data free-for-all that is going on now.

I've been using YNAB4 for about 5 years, when it eventually stops working I'm planning to move to Eqonomize[1] - it's GPL so should avoid your concern, but isn't quite as drastic a jump as GNUCash, and it's cross-platform too.

[1] http://eqonomize.github.io/

Re: What happened to Mint?

#44

Post by gk1 »

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.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#45

Post by paulgb »

LegitShady wrote: post #28
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 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.)

Re: What happened to Mint?

#46

Post by steveklabnik »

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'm on month two of ynab, and I'm a total convert. It's been extremely valuable to me so far. We'll see if I can stick with it.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#47

Post by tusharsoni »

After struggling with Mint and YNAB for a while, I figured that I didn't really want to budget. I was tired of categorizing and setting up $20 budgets. I ended up with a simpler methodology which is basically a MUCH simpler version of YNAB. It worked really well and I've stuck with this for a while now.

Just a few weeks ago, my partner and I launched Funded [0] that follows this method. Would love to get feedback from the HN community too.

[0] https://apps.apple.com/app/id1438924754

Re: What happened to Mint?

#48

Post by steveklabnik »

LegitShady wrote: post #28
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 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.

Check out Tiller; I tried both it and ynab, and went with ynab because I'm the opposite of you, at least in this regard :)

Re: What happened to Mint?

#49

Post by jmull »

Isn't it a free service? Yet it costs money to run, more money to minimally maintain, and a lot of money to keep fully current and improve.

That doesn't mean it couldn't be a thriving product, but for that to happen Intuit would have to be wringing a lot of money out of it somehow through a side channel or back channel.

A semi-neglected aging service probably isn't the worst scenario for its users.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#50

Post by lstamour »

untog wrote: post #30
mikelward wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No Android app. :(

More crucially, no web site! App-only services like this infuriate me. For something as crucial as the state of my money I absolutely want to use my laptop from time to time. Start with a (responsive) web site, then add apps as necessary. This service does nothing that requires an app.

Also, not to pile on, but it doesn’t work in every country Mint is supported in. I can’t speak to other countries, but they’re missing Canadian banks and aren’t even available for download on the Canadian App Store.
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