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What happened to Mint?

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Re: What happened to Mint?

#401

Post by shashank »

drabadur wrote: post #387
shashank wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Founder here. Our product is very optimized for people who want to see things ahead of time. Entering stuff manually, reminders, budgets, forecasting, all the way up to retirement planning. About stock options: We do support automatic syncing with investment accounts. Is your institution not supported? Or is there some other issue you are facing? If you'd like, you can email me at shashank@buxfer.com and I would love…

Curious to know why MFA is only available in the most expensive category (PRIME)? It seems like if I don't pay the full amount I don't deserve my budget to be as secure as possible. And this is a no go for me.

Yeah, that's something we have received feedback about several times. The initial reasoning was something like this:

1: We didn't have MFA until we had PRIME. Generally speaking, we only add new features to our higher-end plans.

2: Our business model doesn't allow us to give away stuff for free. No ads, no selling data, simple subscription based pricing. MFA costs us money (SMS, phone calls).

So that's the logic, which I understand might not be very convincing. We are exploring making it part of our free plan, or a lower tier plan.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#402

Post by speedplane »

What's saddening is that Mint was so ahead of their time in this area, but it just didn't happen.

Why can't your banker do your taxes for you? Why can't they tell you how you'll pay for your kid's college tuition? Why can't they give you a personalized budget to reach some level of wealth in a certain number of years? Why can't your banker tell you when you're ready to buy a house or if you're borrowing more than you can realistically afford? Why can't they tell you when you're reaching dangerously high credit card debt or whether you can really afford that auto-loan?

They could do all of this with the current data that they have. But imagine if you gave them more data, like your current employment position, geographic location, and family status. They might be able to tell you if you're being under or over-paid, how others similarly situated plan their savings, or when is the right time (if ever) to move from renting to owning real estate.

Banking systems have an enormous wealth of data, that can do so much good, but they are still mostly a simple table of deposits and withdrawals.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#403

Post by shashank »

iudqnolq wrote: post #350
shashank wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Added. Was an oversight, thanks for pointing out!

No problem. I see it now on desktop but not mobile.

True, fixing mobile is slightly more involved due to the current design. But I've made a note and we will get it fixed soon!

Re: What happened to Mint?

#404

Post by abvdasker »

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…

Thank you for the thoughtful response. This is anecdotal, but I signed up for Mint as a pretty naive college student who had no idea that Mint was tossing my financial data all over the damn place. A few years later I eventually learned how Mint really works and promptly deleted my account (and then purged as much advertising data as I could in a bout of paranoia).

I hope the next generation of personal finance apps maintain strict privacy guarantees while running on a subscription model. I'll definitely be giving Monarch a look!

Re: What happened to Mint?

#405

Post by mail2harvinder »

I believe its mostly to do with the business model of Mint. In their initial years they were radically focused on the product and customer experience. But as with every so-called FREE product owners, founders of mint have now shifted their complete focus to monetization.

This is pattern and I have witnessed it happening in india too with personal finance products. Infact founders are expressly building products on mint model: create free expense tracking app, spend a year on customer experience, acquire millions of users, and finally shift their focus on upselling financial products leaving customers in the lurch. This looks like a brutal barter system to me.

One day users will figure out a solution to this pervasive problem in software industry and will choose products/tools prudently.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#406

Post by speedplane »

vonmoltke wrote: post #348
bananamerica wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you use it to describe someone else's business it's often considered a slur I see. I find it a bit unsettling that in some cultures stating that a business has priorities other than profit at all costs is considered a slur.

If you are using "lifestyle business" to mean "a business has priorities other than profit at all costs", you are using it incorrectly. A lifestyle business is one where the owners have set a target business size and profit level, and do not try to grow past this; some owners even actively inhibit growth to keep the business from getting too large. The purpose of the business is to give its owners a fixed cash flow.…

> A lifestyle business is one where the owners have set a target business size and profit level, and do not try to grow past this; some owners even actively inhibit growth to keep the business from getting too large.

I think this is too far narrow a definition of "lifestyle business". The better definition is simply a business that fits the founder's intent and lifestyle.

I know several founders that started from nothing, built their company to turn a sizable profit and resisted big VC money.

It's demeaning and inaccurate to call them "lifestyle businesses", they made a calculated decision. Roughly, they took a chance with self-financing, and maybe a ~40% chance bet on making a good living, versus taking the VC money and having 3% on becoming unbelievably wealthy.

Given a 40% chance of making several million and a 3% chance of making billions, it's pretty reasonable for folks to take the higher probability, even if the statistical expected value is better with the VCs. These aren't people who "gave up", often, they made the smarter decisions.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#407

Post by EpicEng »

taurath wrote: post #399
EpicEng wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who said "everything"? You're just making up arguments I never made. Can we agree that an app with zero features is useless? Assuming we can, the utility of an application is a function of which features it has and how well those features are implemented. So the features are important, and how they're implemented is also important. I don't understand why that's (apparently) controversial.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#408

Post by drabadur »

shashank wrote: post #401
drabadur wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious to know why MFA is only available in the most expensive category (PRIME)? It seems like if I don't pay the full amount I don't deserve my budget to be as secure as possible. And this is a no go for me.

Yeah, that's something we have received feedback about several times. The initial reasoning was something like this: 1: We didn't have MFA until we had PRIME. Generally speaking, we only add new features to our higher-end plans. 2: Our business model doesn't allow us to give away stuff for free. No ads, no selling data, simple subscription based pricing. MFA costs us money (SMS, phone calls). So that's the logic, whi…

Understandable, thanks for the extensive info! I think this should be included in the lowest paid tier, at the very least. Or disable SMS/phone calls and have people have the option to only use an authenticator app.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#409

Post by asdff »

I moved around through a lot of budget apps/ynab/etc. Ended up just binding the .csv from different accounts together and taking another look by hand. It's good to review spending, anyway.
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