Mint shut down on 23 March 2024. 27 million users lost access to their categorised transaction history. Intuit, Mint’s owner since 2009, had decided that Credit Karma — its other consumer product, which it acquired for $7.1 billion in 2020 — was the preferred vehicle for monetising the personal-finance audience.
Two years later, the Mint refugee population is still the highest-intent segment in personal finance search. They know what they want (a replacement that preserves their workflow), they know what they’re comparing against (a product they used for years), and the existing listicles still fail them.
This is the honest post-mortem.
What Mint actually was
Mint, at its peak (roughly 2012–2019), offered:
- Automated bank feed import via Yodlee (before Plaid existed in its current form)
- Rule-based categorisation with a learning engine — the same correction, applied 5 times, became a permanent rule
- Monthly budget views — simple bar charts showing budget vs actual by category
- Net-worth snapshot — assets and liabilities in one screen
- Bill tracking — upcoming bill reminders pulled from connected accounts
- Credit score monitoring — Mint partnered with Equifax for free credit score access
The product was free because Intuit monetised through credit card recommendations, loan offers, and financial product upsells embedded in the interface. You were not the customer. You were the audience.
Why Intuit killed it
The official announcement cited a desire to “focus on Credit Karma” as the consumer product. The honest reading is simpler: Mint never made money.
The personal-finance-app audience is large (27 million users) but resistant to the upsell products that generate affiliate revenue — credit cards, mortgages, insurance. Mint users are, by self-selection, people who track their spending carefully. They’re not the audience who clicks on a credit card recommendation without reading the terms. They churn the affiliate products at high rates.
Credit Karma’s audience is different: primarily credit-score-anxious users who are more willing to take product recommendations. Intuit chose to concentrate its engineering and marketing resources there.
The lesson for users: free personal finance tools always have a monetisation model. When the monetisation fails, the tool dies. Mint’s successor will have the same fragility unless you’re paying for it.
What Mint did that current alternatives still don’t do well
Honest comparison of Mint’s features vs 2026 alternatives:
| Feature | Mint (at shutdown) | Best current replacement | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Automatic categorisation (first pass) | ~80% accuracy | Copilot: 91%, Monarch: 88% | Current apps are better |
| Categorisation rule export | Yes (sort of) | None | Significant gap |
| Free tier | Yes (all features) | Empower (but no budget) | Significant gap |
| Bill reminders | Yes | Monarch, Copilot | Comparable |
| Net-worth tracking | Yes | Monarch, Empower | Comparable |
| Credit score | Yes (Equifax free) | Credit Karma | Not in budget apps |
| Budget vs actuals view | Yes | All paid apps | Comparable |
| iOS + Android + web | Yes | Monarch | Copilot is iOS-only |
The categorisation rule export gap is the real problem. Mint allowed you to export your transactions as a CSV — but the rules that generated the categories were not exportable. When you import your Mint CSV into Monarch or Copilot, you get date/amount/payee/category, but the rule “whenever you see ‘WHOLE FOODS’, set category to Groceries” doesn’t come with it. The new app has to re-learn it from corrections.
What to do if you’re still displaced
Best Mint replacement for passive tracking: Monarch Money ($99.99/yr). Closest to Mint’s feature set — auto-categorisation, budget views, net-worth, bill tracking, iOS + Android + web. The categorisation learning takes 4–6 weeks to match what Mint knew about you.
Best Mint replacement if you were mainly using the free tier: Empower (Personal Capital, free). The net-worth and investment dashboard is excellent. The budgeting features are weaker than Mint’s, but it’s free and the data won’t be sold in the same way.
Best Mint replacement for UK users: Mint was always US-only. If you were using it with a US bank, you have the same options as everyone else. If you’re UK-based wondering what the equivalent was, see our UK/EU users guide.
The honest migration warning: if you spent 3+ years on Mint, your replacement app will feel worse for the first 8 weeks. The categorisation will be wrong more often, the rules engine will make obvious mistakes, and the budget views will look less polished than what you remember. This is normal. Budget 8 weeks before judging.
The right question to ask
Don’t ask “which app is most like Mint?” Ask “which app is the right fit for where I am now — 2 years post-Mint, with whatever new financial life I have?”
You may have a partner now. You may have kids. You may have switched banks. Your income shape may be different. The right Mint replacement for 2026-you is not the same as the right Mint replacement for 2024-you.
Use the decision wizard — 5 questions calibrated to your current situation, not your 2019 Mint setup.