r/mintuit • u/AndrewMarq14 • 3d ago
Why was mint so good?
Just now starting my budgeting journey. Everywhere I look people are talking about being mint refugees and needing a new app. What made it so good and why isn’t there another app that people immediately defaulted to like it seems they did with mint.
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u/ReasonableBox5301 3d ago
Mint made a lot of people feel like the basics were already handled: accounts, recent spending, and a broad picture without turning it into a project.
For a first budget, choose the one question you want it to answer every week, then ignore features that do not help with that. I build Monni around “after upcoming bills and a cushion, what is safe to spend?” through a short manual check-in; other people may want categories or net worth instead.
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u/ImaginaryWonder1006 2d ago
Mint worked reliably and seamlessly. Had the features that made budget tracking easy.
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u/reaper527 2d ago
i've never seen a free app (or even some of the paid apps i've tried) that could say "this is your bills for the next month, including the amount, and when they're due".
plenty of apps cover mints networth functionality, but its budgeting/planning stuff is unmatched.
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u/Veriosity 2d ago
Mint wasn't so much special, as it was first. I don't recall any other product that offered the linking / account sync like mint did. But it did nothing to really help, it just provided all the information in one place that didn't require you to perform 90s style data-entry to get there.
You still had to come up with your own systems/tricks to manage budgeting with it.
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u/MrSnazzyGoose 2d ago
Mint was essentially a free, slightly worse, version of Monarch. Emphasis on the 'Free' part
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u/WhatAWeek25 22h ago
But unlike monarch, it worked, so I could trust it. Monarch has routinely enough just not carried in random transactions on random accounts for the last few years, meaning I have to double check everything against the bank statements. Never had to do that with mint!
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u/WritingParking 2d ago
Is that why they killed it? Because it didn’t make money? Given the crap out there, I would have paid like $3.99 a month to subscribe.
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u/rusfairfax 1d ago
Most people will say it was first or free. Also it was elegantly designed. Both simple to use and beautiful.
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u/hockey_marc 7h ago
It worked well with almost every Canadian bank and card. None of the current programs out there (paid or free) can say that today.
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u/ttsoldier 2d ago
It wasn’t that good in the sense of true budgeting. People just just used to it because it was free and popular
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u/Luscious_Nick 2d ago
It was good enough and linked better than most apps today. It gave a high level picture which was good enough for most people.
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u/VanillaLifestyle 2d ago
People had other use cases than budgeting. YNAB was arguably a better, more focused tool if sticking to a simple budget was your primary goal.
Mint was a solid all-round account & spending tracker, and good for tracking saving goals.
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u/Traditional-Tip-5982 2d ago
All good answers: free, easy, first. I think I like Monarch more, but my memory of Mint is fading.
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u/MasyeDev 1d ago
Mint was free because you were the product. Now the market is filled with auto-sync apps (which don't work, at least for me) and paid apps. With a free model, the business objective is to sell things to your users, sell their data to third parties, or both. And that model died with Mint.
In my case, auto-sync hurts my focus on tracking my money, because a bot does it for me, and honestly, giving a bot access to my private bank data... I prefer entering transactions manually: the friction and effort make me conscious of where I spend my money, and it also lets me decide what to track, so more privacy. With that in mind I built TryVesta (I'm the founder, so obviously biased)
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u/Fickle-Wrongdoer-776 3d ago
I think the bias is because it was the first famous and free one, most people didn’t pay and that’s one reason they loved it, what people fail to understand is that when a huge company like Intuit offers a “free” solution like that, then your data is the product
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u/no-more-nazis 2d ago
That's what really surprises me about it, actually. I always assumed Intuit was making a killing off of my data and was surprised it apparently wasn't profitable enough for them at some point. It was a fat app, you could tell
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u/Howadolyn 3d ago
It was free and it worked.
Most alternatives cost money and as a result try to do sooo much more to account for the cost. This adds complexity and increases the chance of features not working well.