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What happened to Mint?

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Re: What happened to Mint?

#91

Post by rollerboi »

illegalsmile wrote: post #75
eegilbert wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's You Need A Budget, which I love paying for.

I'm still on v4, it works great and I had to pay for it once. I know the model is subscriptions these days and $7/mo ($84/annual purchase) really is nothing in the big picture but it still bugs me. Looking through their release notes it doesn't appear that there has been major improvements in the budgeting aspect of the software. If you've used v4 is it worth it?

I used v4 back in 2012-2013 (when I was in college). They switched to nYNAB a year or so after, and I hated that everything was "in the cloud" and there was an option to "automatically import transactions from my bank account." I was like, what? I thought YNAB was about manually tracking my balances so I always knew what was going on.

But I got back into budgeting in mid 2018, and I actually love all of those features. imo the $7/mo I pay is well worth the auto-transactions, auto-syncing across all devices without dropbox, ability to link several different accounts (my checking acct is with a small local credit union, I have a brokerage account, a personal loan I'm paying down, etc.).

Re: What happened to Mint?

#93

Post by sugarpile »

I've been using https://lunchmoney.app/ since it launched. On top of being one of the cleaner saas apps I use the developer has been super responsive whenever I've submitted feedback or feature requests. It's the first budgeting/expense tracking app I've ever actually stuck with which I attribute to the aforementioned "cleanness"/usability. Genuine +1 from me (and I'm not even including my referral link)

Re: What happened to Mint?

#94

Post by tusharsoni »

eddyg wrote: post #71
tusharsoni wrote: post #47

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 fro…

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?

Re: What happened to Mint?

#95

Post by epanchin »

mherdeg wrote: post #86

I don't know whether this is just nostalgia, or maybe my finances used to be less complicated, but nothing beats the experience I had with the Microsoft Money desktop app. It was easy to download transactions from participating banks (I think in OFX format?) and it was easy to see the last successful sync date per account. The UI made it straightforward to categorize my transactions and dead-simple to compare monthly…

I agree. I tried GNU cash afterwards but it wasn’t the same.

Some early Microsoft products were so good - I was once lost in the middle of the Netherlands, typed a nearby company name in Microsoft Autoroute and got directions to my destination. All offline.

Nowadays, I’m can’t even get Windows 10 to navigate me to the correct program from the start menu search.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#96

Post by wpietri »

djstein wrote: post #92

Just going to post a great alternative that people over at http://reddit.com/r/financialindependence/ recommend Personal Capital http://personalcapital.com/ I've been using it for about 4 years now. Best money management system I've used in a long time

Could you say what's good about it for you? Like task-management software, I think the "money management" category hides a lot of variation in how people think about and do things. The right product for one person is definitely the wrong product for another.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#97

Post by sciurus »

djstein wrote: post #92

Just going to post a great alternative that people over at http://reddit.com/r/financialindependence/ recommend Personal Capital http://personalcapital.com/ I've been using it for about 4 years now. Best money management system I've used in a long time

I switched to Personal Capital last year after I became frustrated with Mint's stagnation, and it's a dramatic improvement.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#98

Post by jimcsharp »

illegalsmile wrote: post #75
eegilbert wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's You Need A Budget, which I love paying for.

I'm still on v4, it works great and I had to pay for it once. I know the model is subscriptions these days and $7/mo ($84/annual purchase) really is nothing in the big picture but it still bugs me. Looking through their release notes it doesn't appear that there has been major improvements in the budgeting aspect of the software. If you've used v4 is it worth it?

YNABaaS brings automatic integrations to the table and the 'sync' story is, obviously, much easier since it doesn't involve Dropbox. That's all I noticed. I did a trial and just was not impressed. In my opinion, using the SaaS version when you own the desktop software should get you a charity write-off.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#99

Post by sciurus »

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…

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.

Re: What happened to Mint?

#100

Post by wpietri »

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…

That makes a ton of sense to me. In some areas, I think our natural categories obscure human variation that's important from the product perspective.

For example, task management software sounds like a coherent thing. But in practice, people think and work so differently that there will never be a solution that everybody loves. At least from personal experience, personal finance is the same way.

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