Mint alternative: what to use now that it is gone

What happened to Mint

Intuit announced in late 2023 that Mint would shut down, and it closed in early 2024. Users were directed toward Credit Karma, another Intuit product, which is oriented around credit monitoring and financial product offers rather than around budgeting.

For a lot of people this was the first time they had thought about what Mint actually was. It was free because it monetised through referrals to financial products, and a free product with that model exists at the discretion of its owner.

That is worth carrying into whatever you choose next. A budgeting tool you pay for has a straightforward relationship with you. One that is free because it recommends credit cards has a more complicated one.

The thing Mint was good at

Credit where due: Mint made financial visibility mainstream. Connecting your accounts and seeing everything in one place was genuinely novel, and for people who had never tracked anything it was a real step forward.

The automation removed the largest barrier — the daily logging habit that most people never build. If your spending was overwhelmingly on cards and you mostly wanted to know where the money went at a coarse level, it worked.

The things it was not good at

The complaints were consistent across its lifetime, and they follow from the aggregator model rather than from poor execution:

• Categories needed constant correction. A feed can see the merchant but not what you bought, so a shop selling across categories is inherently ambiguous.
• Cash was invisible. A $200 ATM withdrawal appeared as one line, standing in for however many real purchases it became.
• Connections broke. Bank integrations are fragile, and a broken link means silent gaps in your data.
• Transfers between your own accounts were frequently counted as spending, which inflates your month by the exact amount you moved.
• Alerts and offers competed with the actual budgeting for attention.

None of that is unique to Mint. It is what aggregation costs, and every sync-based replacement inherits most of it.

The question worth asking before you replace it

Be honest about how you actually used it. Two very different patterns hid behind the same product.

If you opened Mint occasionally, glanced at a chart, and closed it, then what you wanted was passive visibility, and another sync app is the right shape.

If you found yourself recategorising transactions every week, mentally adjusting for the cash you knew was missing, and never quite trusting the totals — then the automation was creating work rather than removing it, and a manual ledger may genuinely be less effort.

That second case is common and rarely named, because "automatic" sounds strictly better than "manual" until you have lived with an automatic feed you did not trust.

What a manual replacement looks like

expenie has no bank connection in v1. That is the design rather than a restriction on a free tier — there is no aggregator, no stored banking credentials, and nothing arriving in your books that you did not accept.

Balances come from an opening balance plus every transaction you recorded, so reconciliation is a genuine check rather than a comparison of two automated approximations. Cash is a normal account you can count. Transfers are their own transaction kind and never inflate your spending.

Where Mint's dashboard showed charts, the home screen here is a statement: spent, received, net, and lines grouped by day — because the question at month end is where the money went.

For the logging friction, optional Pro AI capture drafts a transaction from a sentence or a receipt photo. The important part is that a draft is not a transaction. You confirm each one, which is the safeguard an unreviewed feed never had.

A note on checking the details

Competitor products change their plans and features regularly. Check the current details on their own site before deciding — this page compares how the products are built, not what they charge this week.