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What happened to Mint?

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Re: What happened to Mint?

#411

Post by benplumley »

illegalsmile wrote: post #77
benplumley wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Same. YNAB4 has been great, I have no issues with it and their changelog indicates that nothing radical with regards to budgeting has been implemented since. Any idea if you'll be able to move YNAB data over to Eqonomize!?

YNAB4 allows exporting as CSV, then you'll need to massage this a little bit to get it into the format Eqonomize prefers (correct headings, etc) then import. I started the process to see if it was possible, didn't get round to finishing because I don't want to move until I have to, but it all seems possible from what I can tell.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#412

Post by danieltillett »

jjeaff wrote: post #323
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…

Luckily for most founders, a business that tops out at $10mm a year in net income is still considered a lifestyle business for most VCs.

Yep. You can probably go higher than this today - $25 million these days seems to be too small for the VCs.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#413

Post by longstaff2009 »

kanwisher wrote: post #296
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.

Honestly I couldn't get past the homepage. The UI looked horrible, and there are no screenshots of the app so I suspect its even worse. You should invest a bit more in your presentation

they have a live demo https://demo.buxfer.com/dashboard

Re: What happened to Mint?

#414

Post by philwelch »

sshumaker wrote: post #57
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…

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…

> 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 think that depends on how you address the market, actually. The Mint way, which requires continuous engagement and ad impressions, is something you’d be right about. But there’s a larger addressable market of people who intermittently think about getting their finances squared away, maybe as a New Years resolution or something. If you market to those people the way gyms do, there might be a larger market.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#415

Post by sciurus »

dionidium wrote: post #375
sciurus wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try Personal Capital ( https://www.personalcapital.com/ ). I used Mint for years but jumped ship about 6 months ago and am glad I did so.

I agree with you; Personal Capital is very good. I use both. But they aren't interchangeable. Personal Capital is pretty good for tracking investments and net worth, but Mint is much better at budgeting and tracking monthly expenses.

I disagree. I find the budgeting to be equal (although I don't use it much in either) and personal capital to be better at tracking expenses. Both can categorize and analyze equally as well, but personal capital also has a nice cash flow view that mint lacks.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#416

Post by chrbr »

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…

Good to see that there are some other competitors looking to emerge. I've had several discussions with my colleagues who can't stand Mint, have used YNAB to life-changing effect, but feel like they've "outgrown" the YNAB philosophy as it's targeted towards people still looking to set a solid financial foundation. They also have to straddle multiple tools for different purposes - YNAB for budgeting, Personal Capital for investment tracking, typically. Looks like you're aiming to fill in the gap there. Looking forward to seeing what y'all come up with!

Re: What happened to Mint?

#417

Post by eddyg »

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?

Sounds good. I would definitely pay $2-3/month for a good "money" app that consolidates views in to all my spending and provides insight in to where my money is going.

How does "Sign in with Apple" work if I want to share Funded with my somebody on another device that has their own Apple ID?

Re: What happened to Mint?

#418

Post by andreilys »

austhrow743 wrote: post #391
bananamerica wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bu…

Someone making tens or hundred of millions of dollars a year is far beyond the definition of a lifestyle business.

At that point you will have achieved significant scale and all the headaches that come with it.

Getting back to the above post, a budgeting tool is a lifestyle business. It will likely never grow to 100m+ revenue or 200+ employees.

It can however make for a great lifestyle business that generates enough money to cover living costs with minimal investment from the owners (after initial investment of building the business).

Re: What happened to Mint?

#419

Post by anotherman554 »

HashHishBang wrote: post #206
L_Rahman wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the main reason I stopped using it. I don't know if they pushed an update to transaction tagging, but it got really bad all of a sudden making the product much less useful to me.

Agreed. I don't know what they did but having to consistently re-categorize rent payments from whatever nonsense they were auto-categorized as killed it. Automation is great when it doesn't get things comically wrong.

If you use the web interface you can set rules to automatically categorize recurring transaction the same way in the future by hitting the details button as you categorize transactions. It works for me. Oddly I don't think the app has that feature.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#420

Post by anotherman554 »

altec3 wrote: post #271
HashHishBang wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I don't know what they did but having to consistently re-categorize rent payments from whatever nonsense they were auto-categorized as killed it. Automation is great when it doesn't get things comically wrong.

I always assume that once I categorize a recurring bill as something, it will always be categorized that way. If feels like it takes recategorizing it many times before the category sticks. Which is really annoying.

If you use the web version of Mint there's an option to explicitly tell Mint to categorize it that way in the future. It works for me.
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