It's always sad to see products that were truly innovative when they came out end up getting neglected and sunset due to large co M&A-based strategic decision-making.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders of Monarch Money, a (paid) competitor to Mint founded by the original PM on Mint.com. I had written a HackerNews front-pager a couple years ago about why Revenue Model is More Important Than Culture [0], and my co-founder wrote some thoughts about why Mint ended up going this route.
Since this announcement, we've seen an unprecedented influx of "Mint refugees" moving over. I think a lot of Mint folks have felt like the product has been neglected for years, but it was free and they often had years of history in the product. This was kind of a forcing function for them.
I would love to use and pay for your service, but it's inexcusable than a service that charges $100+ / year has so many trackers that uBlock shows 87 elements blocked just in the account signup flow (/signup/connect-spending-account).
A financial info aggregator is the one place where I would appreciate NOT having my data and behavior exfiltrated to third parties.
Hmm would be curious to know which block lists you have.
I'm only blocking 27 things with most of them being Split.io (for A/B testing I presume) Sprig, Stripe and Sentry.
Those aren't really third-party trackers (even though I am blocking most of them) in the marketing sense..
There's some analytics from Tiktok, Clarity, Reddit and Spotify(??), which make sense to block but don't feel that intrusive if they're tracking inbound referrals.
I don't even see 50 other things that I could be blocking.
Not arguing the point here, just wondering what I'm missing since I try to keep pretty extensive block lists myself.
> It's always sad to see products that were truly innovative when they came out end up getting neglected and sunset due to large co M&A-based strategic decision-making.
It is sad, but is it sad enough that if a large co offers to buy your company and make you very wealthy, you're going to decline?
Sorry for the cynicism but this cycle of adopting a software tool only for that to be bought out and subsequently shut down is getting pretty old. I'm sure Mint's initial sales pitch was also about passionate founders who cared about their customers. This is probably the nature of companies--no one will care as much about a product as much as the people who first created it, but the cycle seems so much faster with software.
> Sorry for the cynicism but this cycle of adopting a software tool only for that to be bought out and subsequently shut down is getting pretty old.
This behavior has fully converted me from "optimistic early adopter" to "late majority" on the Adopter Categories chart. I honestly don't trust any startup's products anymore, because of the real risk that they're going to cash in their chips and let the product die, probably when it's least convenient for me the customer. To be fair, I don't trust a lot of bigger companies too--there is at least one example of a BigTech company notorious for trying things and then shutting them down within a years or months!
I agree with you entirely. I was an early adopter of Mint, but the day they sold to Intuit I moved all my stuff out of there, because I knew it was never going to get better.
Happy Monarch user here - Monarch is amazing. I think it's the only personal finance tool I've seen that gets web really, really right.
Mobile first ones are nifty (used copilot for a bit), mainly for on the fly category updating, but after budgeting with Monarch on the web for a year and change now I don't think I can go back to a primarily app based one. Much easier to sit down once a week and crank through / review everything on web interface.
Thanks for the great work you and the Monarch team are doing, it's helped my wife and I save a lot of cash since we started using it
Thanks for working on Monarch! Does Monarch let you in some way import years of transactions data from Mint? From what I understand, if I signup on Monarch now and connect my accounts, there’s a limit on how far you can go into the history of my account to get the transactions, right? Or can you get every transaction from the first day of my bank account?
There are some quirks to it (ie Mint only lets you export up to 10K transactions at a time) but there are work-arounds to it. You can sign-up, link your accounts, then import from Mint to fill in the missing history. If you hit any issues, just Contact Support from within the app and our Customer Support team will work with you to get it sorted out.
I switched to Monarch from YNAB a few months ago because I'd been using YNAB for years and wanted something a little less involved. I'm really loving it. Thanks for building it!
I switched over to Monarch a year or so ago and I've been pretty happy with it. I much prefer a paid product to an ad-driven one. The product isn't perfect, they have some work to do on categorization and de-duplication of recurring payments, but overall it's good enough and seems to be getting better.
Definitely going to check this out. Does Monarch have rule based categorization, so we can set certain transactions to always fall under a category based on what is in the description?
Mint partially supported this but QuickBooks did it better.
I think I can confidently say we have the best transaction rule system out there. You can set rules to rename, recategorize, add notes, require review, mark as reviewed, etc, based on name, amount, category, account, etc. It's one of our most cited features.
Have been using Lunch Money, hadn't heard of Monarch
1. Have you got an import function if we have csv or in other formats?
2. My only issue with Lunchmoney is my connections are often broken. They use Plaid. Is this one of those things where if they have a problem, you also will? Or does your implementation of plaid integration affect stability?
I have meticulous notes for thousands of transactions in Mint over many years. What's the over/under on them surviving the migration? It's a real question. I'm considering doing it but, only if the notes get there.
Are you planning to add support for Canadian banks anytime soon? I checked out Monarch and ended up going with Mint just because they were one of the only ones supporting Canadian banks
Pocketsmith has been around for years, and built a properly sustainable business with essentially no funding. We've seen Mint refugees too, but also suspect there is a lot less there than the vanity metics might show.
In this space we've seen companies come and go and the ones that stay have a business model that works every day. That means providing a great service, charging people reasonably prices for the product and avoiding selling data or advertising. Mint was never sustainable, but the founders did well to sell it to Intuit when they did.
Pocketsmith uses Google Analytics and Mixpanel, and that's it - no remarketing and fully GDPR complaint. The company is strong in UK, Australia and New Zealand, with decent US support too. But I'd be interested to see what others see.
The fact that this is being shut down vs being sold or at least integrated deeply in credit karma speaks so poorly for the intuit management I am not even sure what to say. The app has to be capable of generating millions a month in revenue at the least. Who is on the leadership team for mint, so I know to never work or partner with them in the future? This is so insanely incompetent its just.. shocking.
This is a fumble not seen since skype fell asleep and did nothing during 2021 while google and zoom came and took their entire market.
At the very least, make the app paid only. If you are worried about upsetting me because I have to pay for something that used to be free, trust me- Im going to be way more pissed about not being able to use it at all.
I dont know, this whole thing just rubs me the wrong way. Intuit is a public company that should be focused on maximizing revenue. Destroying a app thats worth 500m-1b on the private market seems like its worthy of a shareholder lawsuit.
I dont say this out of spite or trolling. I say this as a user of mint since they launched in 2007. Ive been with this app, letting them ravage and sell my data for over 15 years. https://i.imgur.com/XlioSth.png . My old startup even participated in the same crunchies award as mint did, when we both won (us for bootstrapped startup and mint for
founder of the year) so I am nostalgic about them being put out to pasture for no reason.
How much they paid for Mint vs CK has little bearing. Google bought youtube for 1.6b and Motorola for 12b (later sold for 3b) - Which would you rather focus on today?
I dont disagree Mints revenue is not enough currently, but thats the issue. Mint has 3.6 million MAU. Maybe I need to be more explicit, but the value of a financial services user is high, not just in immediate revenue but also in referred revenue. Mint has never done a good job at pricing their product. Ive used it for 15 years and have never paid them a dollar. Thats a failure on their part, as I would have gladly paid monthly or yearly for the past 15 years. Even if I didnt, there were tons of products I would have IAP'd for that could have been seamlessly integrated into mint. Instead they seem entirely focused on trying to get me to sign up for credit cards or to switch bank accounts. What a lost opportunity.
As for the how much it costs to operate mint, thats true we dont know exactly what it is. But I am not a ostrich with my head in the sand. I can infer that the cost is going to be magnitudes less than the revenue it brings in, even in its current sad state. This isnt a chatgpt startup thats using insane resources on metal or developers to offer a product. Its a application suite that processes and coorelates data provided by plaid.com - Mint doesnt even do any of the heavy lifting anymore.
> The app has to be capable of generating millions a month in revenue at the least. Who is on the leadership team for mint, so I know to never work or partner with them in the future? This is so insanely incompetent its just.. shocking.
I have the opposite perspective: management made the right call pulling the plug on Mint. The problem with Mint is that it most likely loses a huge amount of money; from what I've read, most data aggregators charge a fixed amount per account + a fee per API call, so they have to recuperate their costs by selling ads.
That's why Credit Karma makes money: credit card/loan/insurance referrals are worth insane amounts (I've heard numbers like $100+ per sign up for premium cards, even more for insurance/mortgage), so it only makes sense to shuffle customers over to Credit Karma where the sales funnel is much more effective. If one credit card referral can pay for the customer's API calls for a few years, it only makes sense to aggressively push for it.
"Skype" didn't fall asleep and do nothing. It got reworked into a new platform. Microsoft Teams is used by like 280M users, roughly the same size as Zoom. Google Meet has ~100M users.
Its great that Microsoft has teams- but nothing to do with skype as a consumer front-facing product.
Years ago, Skype was the de-facto solution for video calls and video meetings. There was no zoom, there was no google meet. Skype was so known for video chat that it was a verb. 'Skype me'
Skype absolutely and completely fell asleep at the wheel and wholesale abandoned the public market to Zoom, Discord and Google. Its not like it happened overnight either. Skype had the ability to respond to these guys but instead did almost nothing after a redesign to 'skype 8' in 2018.
I cant exclaim how astronomical a failure it is to go from being the defacto verb for video calls and instant messaging to not even having 5% of the end-user consumer market anymore. It would be like if people stopped using google for search, or youtube for videos. You dont get to say "Yeah well google got reworked into gsuite which has 300m users" - Its still a failure of biblical proportions.
They should have been capable of creating a enterprise product and keeping their consumer offering going.
--
Just to be clear, I understand teams is large and doing well. Its also a enterprise product and it has nothing to do with what im talking about above. Discord (~20b valuation) only exists because Skype did zero updates or innovation for years.
As far as I know Skype and Microsoft Teams are separate platforms, currently coexisting though the business parts of Skype are slowly being phased out in lieu of Teams.
>This is a fumble not seen since skype fell asleep and did nothing during 2021 while google and zoom came and took their entire market.
Wouldn't a start-up competitor need to enter (and then grow) the space in order for this to be a failure like that?
If it's such a potentially lucrative product, then why have the myriad of VC-funded challengers languished?
I think in reality, Mint.com is a classic niche product where a small set of competent users (the kind you see on HN) love it, but most people just don't see a need for it.
Pushing users toward Credit Karma...which has next to zero feature overlap with Mint.
I'm surprised they couldn't even bother to try a paid offering before throwing in the towel. There have been people diligently using the service for over a decade who would definitely pay $10/mo if given the option rather than having to migrate somewhere else.
I still miss MS Money. It did everything I needed and I didn't hand over my account passwords to a cloud service like Mint. It's kind of mindboggling that this got ever accepted as the way to do things.
I'm using YNAB desktop edition which still works great. Cost me ~60 USD about 8-9 years ago for permanent license.
YNAB decided to go to a subscription based model, which is fine, but the annual cost of this software service seem ridiculously high for how simple the software is overall. Applies to monarch money too... 100 USD is a lot for simple personal accounting software.
To me the value is in bank synchronization, which is a big ongoing cost for the service. I can centralize all my financial information across accounts.
The habit of checking my transactions in a centralized place and categorizing them has led to me catching fraudulent transactions multiple times. I might have never noticed them without YNAB. That alone has paid for years of the subscription.
I know some people find that manual transaction entry helps them control their spending better but to me that’s just not practical. I don’t have time for that, there are too many transactions.
I also value the mobile app and automatic synchronization. It’s nice to be able to share a budget with multiple people and not fiddle around with local files or having to get on my desktop computer. I use YNAB on mobile 95% of the time.
If I give it a negative it’s not really the price, it’s that I’d like to see more progress on the software. I know they are still a small company but I’d like to see more ways to visualize without needing rely on external tools, and I’d like to see an overall a faster pace of feature development.
You can still use Microsoft Money sunset edition completely offline. I did this myself until about 2 years ago, when I broke down and wrote a simple web app to fill the need.
I still have a copy that I run in a VM. Doesn’t do as much as before, but I’m surprised how bad most of its replacements are at the basic feature level.
Yes, the terrible "upload your banking credentials to some cloud" model was what kept me away from Mint. Sadly, the main Quicken product has been moving in this direction for years with their so-called Express Web Connect Plus[1], but at least they're doing something oauth-like with some token rather than your actual credentials. They're really pushing this shit on their customers.
I don't want to be dependent on TheCloud. I want my local device to communicate directly with each bank and keep my credentials and "tokens" on devices I manage. Is this so much to ask for?
Totally agree. There should be a standard that uses access keys and provides APIs to access the data. If that existed I could easily cobble something together with some python scripts and a database.
I think they cancelled it in 2023, but MS did release for a while an Excel template replacement for MS Money - I think it even had some advanced stuff like bank integration via plaid.
As someone who uses Mint heavily, it's incredibly unclear whether this is going to negatively impact me or not. Because:
> [Credit Karma] “offers a simplified way for you to build awareness of your spending, and track your savings.” Intuit says it still plans on adding ways to view transactions, track spending, and aggregate financial accounts.
> Earlier this year, Credit Karma added one of Mint’s key features: the ability for users to track their net worth. Intuit says Mint users can transfer their accounts by logging into Credit Karma from the Mint app.
In my Mint usage, I've never cared about budgeting or categorization (their auto-categorization was never accurate anyways). I just want to aggregate all my accounts, track my monthly spending, and track my overall net worth.
So this might be... fine? Or it might not be? It's just truly bizarre that:
1) They're forcing the transition to a ludicrously short 2 month period (why not give 6 months or a year to migrate?)
2) They're doing a horrible job at conveying whether Credit Karma is a good replacement or not (how about a simple comparison chart of features?)
3) They're destroying the Mint brand, which is valuable and consumer-friendly. Meanwhile "Credit Karma" just sounds like a scam
If Intuit wants to better monetize Mint, it seems like it would be vastly better to port the profitable Credit Karma features over to Mint, rather than migrate Mint users to Credit Karma.
What Intuit is doiung is utterly baffling to me, and smells like internal politics over at Intuit is taking precedence over good/profitable product decisions, which does not give me faith in the overall management at the company. Shutting down Mint to replace it with Credit Karma has very strong vibes of shutting down Digg v3 to replace it with Digg v4.
I hope this turns out well in the end, but given what an atrocious job they're doing in communicating it, I'm not holding my breath.
To be honest I don’t think their decisions are that baffling once you start thinking in terms of money.
1. Credit karma doesn’t have all the features that mint does. I suspect they don’t plan on adding them either. But if you say that no one’s gonna sign up on credit karma. Might as well keep it vague and hint the new app can do that and hopefully some people end up signing up on credit karma.
2. I don’t think the care about mint brand. It’s pretty clear that mint wasn’t making enough money and they decided the effort needed to manage it isn’t worth it. On the other hand, credit karma is probably making a lot more money and much much easier to maintain - all it does is pull data from credit agencies. Credit karma recommends cards/loans etc. which I suspect is how they’re making good bucks.
Either way, it sucks for us. I suspect mint did some user surveys to see if they could make a paid version of mint work and realized not a lot of people are gonna pay for it. Sucks for us.
I use to look at Mint once a quarter. It gave a good high level overview of my finances -- it linked to all my accounts, had records of my assets, etc. Once a quarter I'd load it, see my total assets grow and my debts decrease, and get a strong sense of security.
What are some of the best alternatives for this sort of personal finance view?
I didn't even use the budgeting/bells and whistles features. It was mostly a great way to download transactions in a unified format from a dozen different banks past their short retention periods. I hope something similar exists :-(
I came here to say exactly this. I don't need a budgeting tool, I need a single pane of glass that aggregates all of my accounts across multiple financial institutions and lets me run very basic reports against them. That's it. This product does not seem to exist.
Yup. Most alternatives people are proposing need you manually enter every transaction you make, and that instantly makes it useless. I want one that connects to every single bank account/investment portfolio/loan I have and updates it in real time. I have never found something as seamless as Mint in that regard.
I used Mint in the same way and then migrated to Personal Capital after the Intuit acquisition. Unfortunately, they were sold by come company called Empower recently but it hasn't seemed to impact things on the Personal Capital side yet. Apparently it's branded as "Empower Personal Dashboard".
I've got ~4 or 5 bank accounts, a few different 401ks, some individual stocks via Equiniti or whoever, our mortgage, our credit cards, our house and car as assets (with values derived from Zillow and I think KBB?) - the only issues are the same ones I had with Mint where occasionally some service would need another login / password / 2FA or something and time out.
I use YNAB 4, and I manually input all transactions for my credit card usage. I feel that it makes me more conscious of my spending. It's certainly not for everyone, but I only have the one credit card that I put everything on. And I don't buy a tremendous amount of things that makes it very arduous. I also don't have a need to monitor my investment portfolio in real time. I check it once a quarter or so.
I don't know if I'm the weird one here. But I don't feel a need to connect all of my assets to constantly monitor them. I don't have any assets that necessitate that level of control.
I used Actual for a little while and ran into the same frustration; having to manually download and re-upload CSVs was driving me crazy.
I also loathe the idea of having to hand over the account credentials to any third party service--what I really want is my financial institution(s) to send webhooks of my transactions, or even just allow for an automated download of the CSVs. (I'd write a playwright bot, but the 2fa makes it difficult. Of course the accounts should have 2fa, I just want an API for getting my transaction data.)
Personal Finance/Empower is very similar in terms of tracking various accounts and assets/debts, although many of the features are more focused on investments
Honestly, just move your stuff into a spreadsheet and try to build your own integrations. Money management tools that aren't integrated into a trading platform or rhyme with "Slick Cooks" don't last long.
And this is why I'm still using YNAB 4. Cloud hosted services have their perks, but owning my own data and not having to worry about being forced to another service is nice. Though, I have a feeling I'm going to be pushed eventually to something else.
Yeah. It took some extra steps to install on both a new Android phone and a new Mac. I'm tempted to remake its functionality in a spreadsheet, but haven't mustered the will power yet
Credit Karma is a better funnel to credit providers (cards and loans). They are a credit broker. They make money when they refer a customer to someone issuing credit. When you provide them access to your credit information, that is used by partner models to credit decision.
EDIT: This is likely a cost efficiency effort, sunsetting what is underperforming and bolstering support for more profitable ventures.
> Kinda crazy to me that one of the biggest names in personal budgeting couldn't find enough value for its stakeholders.
The downside of getting acquired by a large company is that they want large-sized business. Lots of medium and small sized products that would be very viable on their own end up getting shut down because in the context of their parent company, they don't make sense.
It must be quite expensive to maintain. It predates Plaid, so unless they migrated, they're maintaining all the scraping logic and the services to actually do it.
The credit card ads are probably not generating enough revenue to justify the upkeep.
Readit News
Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders of Monarch Money, a (paid) competitor to Mint founded by the original PM on Mint.com. I had written a HackerNews front-pager a couple years ago about why Revenue Model is More Important Than Culture [0], and my co-founder wrote some thoughts about why Mint ended up going this route.
Since this announcement, we've seen an unprecedented influx of "Mint refugees" moving over. I think a lot of Mint folks have felt like the product has been neglected for years, but it was free and they often had years of history in the product. This was kind of a forcing function for them.
0: https://somehowmanage.com/2020/09/20/revenue-model-not-cultu... 1: https://www.monarchmoney.com/blog/mint-shutting-down
A financial info aggregator is the one place where I would appreciate NOT having my data and behavior exfiltrated to third parties.
I'm only blocking 27 things with most of them being Split.io (for A/B testing I presume) Sprig, Stripe and Sentry.
Those aren't really third-party trackers (even though I am blocking most of them) in the marketing sense..
There's some analytics from Tiktok, Clarity, Reddit and Spotify(??), which make sense to block but don't feel that intrusive if they're tracking inbound referrals.
I don't even see 50 other things that I could be blocking.
Not arguing the point here, just wondering what I'm missing since I try to keep pretty extensive block lists myself.
It is sad, but is it sad enough that if a large co offers to buy your company and make you very wealthy, you're going to decline?
Sorry for the cynicism but this cycle of adopting a software tool only for that to be bought out and subsequently shut down is getting pretty old. I'm sure Mint's initial sales pitch was also about passionate founders who cared about their customers. This is probably the nature of companies--no one will care as much about a product as much as the people who first created it, but the cycle seems so much faster with software.
This behavior has fully converted me from "optimistic early adopter" to "late majority" on the Adopter Categories chart. I honestly don't trust any startup's products anymore, because of the real risk that they're going to cash in their chips and let the product die, probably when it's least convenient for me the customer. To be fair, I don't trust a lot of bigger companies too--there is at least one example of a BigTech company notorious for trying things and then shutting them down within a years or months!
Mobile first ones are nifty (used copilot for a bit), mainly for on the fly category updating, but after budgeting with Monarch on the web for a year and change now I don't think I can go back to a primarily app based one. Much easier to sit down once a week and crank through / review everything on web interface.
Thanks for the great work you and the Monarch team are doing, it's helped my wife and I save a lot of cash since we started using it
There are some quirks to it (ie Mint only lets you export up to 10K transactions at a time) but there are work-arounds to it. You can sign-up, link your accounts, then import from Mint to fill in the missing history. If you hit any issues, just Contact Support from within the app and our Customer Support team will work with you to get it sorted out.
Mint partially supported this but QuickBooks did it better.
https://help.monarchmoney.com/hc/en-us/articles/360048393372...
1. Have you got an import function if we have csv or in other formats?
2. My only issue with Lunchmoney is my connections are often broken. They use Plaid. Is this one of those things where if they have a problem, you also will? Or does your implementation of plaid integration affect stability?
In this space we've seen companies come and go and the ones that stay have a business model that works every day. That means providing a great service, charging people reasonably prices for the product and avoiding selling data or advertising. Mint was never sustainable, but the founders did well to sell it to Intuit when they did.
Pocketsmith uses Google Analytics and Mixpanel, and that's it - no remarketing and fully GDPR complaint. The company is strong in UK, Australia and New Zealand, with decent US support too. But I'd be interested to see what others see.
(I'm the minor investor.) Edited for formatting.
This is a fumble not seen since skype fell asleep and did nothing during 2021 while google and zoom came and took their entire market.
At the very least, make the app paid only. If you are worried about upsetting me because I have to pay for something that used to be free, trust me- Im going to be way more pissed about not being able to use it at all.
I dont know, this whole thing just rubs me the wrong way. Intuit is a public company that should be focused on maximizing revenue. Destroying a app thats worth 500m-1b on the private market seems like its worthy of a shareholder lawsuit.
I dont say this out of spite or trolling. I say this as a user of mint since they launched in 2007. Ive been with this app, letting them ravage and sell my data for over 15 years. https://i.imgur.com/XlioSth.png . My old startup even participated in the same crunchies award as mint did, when we both won (us for bootstrapped startup and mint for founder of the year) so I am nostalgic about them being put out to pasture for no reason.
- Intuit paid $4.7 billion for Credit Karma, and only $170M for Mint.
- Credit Karma had expected revenues of $1.5 billion in 2021. (https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/05/how-credit-karma-acquired-...)
- We don't know how much it cost (in time and money) to keep Mint running.
I dont disagree Mints revenue is not enough currently, but thats the issue. Mint has 3.6 million MAU. Maybe I need to be more explicit, but the value of a financial services user is high, not just in immediate revenue but also in referred revenue. Mint has never done a good job at pricing their product. Ive used it for 15 years and have never paid them a dollar. Thats a failure on their part, as I would have gladly paid monthly or yearly for the past 15 years. Even if I didnt, there were tons of products I would have IAP'd for that could have been seamlessly integrated into mint. Instead they seem entirely focused on trying to get me to sign up for credit cards or to switch bank accounts. What a lost opportunity.
As for the how much it costs to operate mint, thats true we dont know exactly what it is. But I am not a ostrich with my head in the sand. I can infer that the cost is going to be magnitudes less than the revenue it brings in, even in its current sad state. This isnt a chatgpt startup thats using insane resources on metal or developers to offer a product. Its a application suite that processes and coorelates data provided by plaid.com - Mint doesnt even do any of the heavy lifting anymore.
I have the opposite perspective: management made the right call pulling the plug on Mint. The problem with Mint is that it most likely loses a huge amount of money; from what I've read, most data aggregators charge a fixed amount per account + a fee per API call, so they have to recuperate their costs by selling ads.
That's why Credit Karma makes money: credit card/loan/insurance referrals are worth insane amounts (I've heard numbers like $100+ per sign up for premium cards, even more for insurance/mortgage), so it only makes sense to shuffle customers over to Credit Karma where the sales funnel is much more effective. If one credit card referral can pay for the customer's API calls for a few years, it only makes sense to aggressively push for it.
I've seen life insurance referral fees at over $1000 per successful application.
Auto Insurance, when the market is soft (which it isn't right now), can sell at well over $100 per CLICK for premium consumers.
Years ago, Skype was the de-facto solution for video calls and video meetings. There was no zoom, there was no google meet. Skype was so known for video chat that it was a verb. 'Skype me'
Skype absolutely and completely fell asleep at the wheel and wholesale abandoned the public market to Zoom, Discord and Google. Its not like it happened overnight either. Skype had the ability to respond to these guys but instead did almost nothing after a redesign to 'skype 8' in 2018.
I cant exclaim how astronomical a failure it is to go from being the defacto verb for video calls and instant messaging to not even having 5% of the end-user consumer market anymore. It would be like if people stopped using google for search, or youtube for videos. You dont get to say "Yeah well google got reworked into gsuite which has 300m users" - Its still a failure of biblical proportions.
They should have been capable of creating a enterprise product and keeping their consumer offering going.
--
Just to be clear, I understand teams is large and doing well. Its also a enterprise product and it has nothing to do with what im talking about above. Discord (~20b valuation) only exists because Skype did zero updates or innovation for years.
Wouldn't a start-up competitor need to enter (and then grow) the space in order for this to be a failure like that?
If it's such a potentially lucrative product, then why have the myriad of VC-funded challengers languished?
I think in reality, Mint.com is a classic niche product where a small set of competent users (the kind you see on HN) love it, but most people just don't see a need for it.
I'm surprised they couldn't even bother to try a paid offering before throwing in the towel. There have been people diligently using the service for over a decade who would definitely pay $10/mo if given the option rather than having to migrate somewhere else.
YNAB decided to go to a subscription based model, which is fine, but the annual cost of this software service seem ridiculously high for how simple the software is overall. Applies to monarch money too... 100 USD is a lot for simple personal accounting software.
To me the value is in bank synchronization, which is a big ongoing cost for the service. I can centralize all my financial information across accounts.
The habit of checking my transactions in a centralized place and categorizing them has led to me catching fraudulent transactions multiple times. I might have never noticed them without YNAB. That alone has paid for years of the subscription.
I know some people find that manual transaction entry helps them control their spending better but to me that’s just not practical. I don’t have time for that, there are too many transactions.
I also value the mobile app and automatic synchronization. It’s nice to be able to share a budget with multiple people and not fiddle around with local files or having to get on my desktop computer. I use YNAB on mobile 95% of the time.
If I give it a negative it’s not really the price, it’s that I’d like to see more progress on the software. I know they are still a small company but I’d like to see more ways to visualize without needing rely on external tools, and I’d like to see an overall a faster pace of feature development.
I don't want to be dependent on TheCloud. I want my local device to communicate directly with each bank and keep my credentials and "tokens" on devices I manage. Is this so much to ask for?
1: https://www.quicken.com/support/how-quicken-connects-your-ba...
> [Credit Karma] “offers a simplified way for you to build awareness of your spending, and track your savings.” Intuit says it still plans on adding ways to view transactions, track spending, and aggregate financial accounts.
> Earlier this year, Credit Karma added one of Mint’s key features: the ability for users to track their net worth. Intuit says Mint users can transfer their accounts by logging into Credit Karma from the Mint app.
In my Mint usage, I've never cared about budgeting or categorization (their auto-categorization was never accurate anyways). I just want to aggregate all my accounts, track my monthly spending, and track my overall net worth.
So this might be... fine? Or it might not be? It's just truly bizarre that:
1) They're forcing the transition to a ludicrously short 2 month period (why not give 6 months or a year to migrate?)
2) They're doing a horrible job at conveying whether Credit Karma is a good replacement or not (how about a simple comparison chart of features?)
3) They're destroying the Mint brand, which is valuable and consumer-friendly. Meanwhile "Credit Karma" just sounds like a scam
If Intuit wants to better monetize Mint, it seems like it would be vastly better to port the profitable Credit Karma features over to Mint, rather than migrate Mint users to Credit Karma.
What Intuit is doiung is utterly baffling to me, and smells like internal politics over at Intuit is taking precedence over good/profitable product decisions, which does not give me faith in the overall management at the company. Shutting down Mint to replace it with Credit Karma has very strong vibes of shutting down Digg v3 to replace it with Digg v4.
I hope this turns out well in the end, but given what an atrocious job they're doing in communicating it, I'm not holding my breath.
1. Credit karma doesn’t have all the features that mint does. I suspect they don’t plan on adding them either. But if you say that no one’s gonna sign up on credit karma. Might as well keep it vague and hint the new app can do that and hopefully some people end up signing up on credit karma.
2. I don’t think the care about mint brand. It’s pretty clear that mint wasn’t making enough money and they decided the effort needed to manage it isn’t worth it. On the other hand, credit karma is probably making a lot more money and much much easier to maintain - all it does is pull data from credit agencies. Credit karma recommends cards/loans etc. which I suspect is how they’re making good bucks.
Either way, it sucks for us. I suspect mint did some user surveys to see if they could make a paid version of mint work and realized not a lot of people are gonna pay for it. Sucks for us.
What are some of the best alternatives for this sort of personal finance view?
I've got ~4 or 5 bank accounts, a few different 401ks, some individual stocks via Equiniti or whoever, our mortgage, our credit cards, our house and car as assets (with values derived from Zillow and I think KBB?) - the only issues are the same ones I had with Mint where occasionally some service would need another login / password / 2FA or something and time out.
https://www.empower.com/sites/default/files/styles/large_hq/...
I don't know if I'm the weird one here. But I don't feel a need to connect all of my assets to constantly monitor them. I don't have any assets that necessitate that level of control.
I also loathe the idea of having to hand over the account credentials to any third party service--what I really want is my financial institution(s) to send webhooks of my transactions, or even just allow for an automated download of the CSVs. (I'd write a playwright bot, but the 2fa makes it difficult. Of course the accounts should have 2fa, I just want an API for getting my transaction data.)
Founder is very responsive and easy to setup and apply rules/recurring spends
So you can build anything you want on top of it or just use the prebuilt templates.
I mainly use it for your exact use case.
Kinda crazy to me that one of the biggest names in personal budgeting couldn't find enough value for its stakeholders.
And how is Credit Karma not just a feature they could bolt on to Mint as a "Credit" tab.
All of this is prob just weird organizational convection forces inside the Intuit megacorp rather than anything that's going to make practical sense.
EDIT: This is likely a cost efficiency effort, sunsetting what is underperforming and bolstering support for more profitable ventures.
https://www.creditkarma.com/about/partners
https://www.creditkarma.com/about/personal-loan-disclaimers
The downside of getting acquired by a large company is that they want large-sized business. Lots of medium and small sized products that would be very viable on their own end up getting shut down because in the context of their parent company, they don't make sense.
The credit card ads are probably not generating enough revenue to justify the upkeep.
https://www.monarchmoney.com/blog/mint-shutting-down