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Ask HN: Alternative to Mint.com?
48 points by SMAAART 10 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 74 comments
I confess: I was addicted to mint.com, and not that it's gone CreditKarma just doesn't do it.

What are the inexpensive/Free solutions out there? I need something that will sync automatically all of my and wife's accounts including retirement accounts. SaaS or McOs software will do.

A while back there was a tread in here where someone had an inexpensive one-time license mac software, but I cannot find it.

Thanks in advance.




YNAB has turned my financial life around. I wish I had started using it 10 years ago. They also have built an importer from Mint. Some highlights I love:

* One window to every account I have, which mostly automatically updates/syncs

* Envelope budgeting has forced me to look at every penny and figure out what it's for

* API to work with other tools (for me, Splitwise - https://github.com/vascopinho/split2ynab/)

And here's my referral code for a free month: https://ynab.com/referral/?ref=ASH303nViLPCKyr-


Another vote for YNAB. It is expensive, but for me it pays for itself in a month.

It can be as open-ended or as detailed as you like. And the tutorials / videos are worth watching, as well.


I have been a bit lax with my budgeting lately, but YNAB has been a constant in my life since 2014. Syncs perfectly with Barclays UK, Starling Bank, Revolut.

I recommend their Four Rules to budgeting to anyone that wants to learn how to manage money and expenses: https://www.ynab.com/the-four-rules


For anyone reading the parent comment, you should avoid YNAB if you use an American Express card. YNAB uses Plaid and the overall integration from YNAB through to Amex and back does not work.


I don't have AmEx, but I do have Discover which also had some issues a while back. I believe they don't exclusively use Plaid anymore. When my discover card wasn't working for a few months they rolled out a switch to use alternative verification and then Discover just worked. This was over a year ago. YNAB realizes that the account syncing is what makes the system work.


I have found this to be the case with my Apple card - so once a month I export a .QFX from the Wallet app and import it into YNAB. This process is a bit laborious but I've never had to manually enter an account's transactions in several years of using the app.


Apple Wallet transactions just got added to shortcuts on iOS. You should be able to create a shortcut that adds the expense to YNAB whenever the card is charged.


Thank you for this tip! Apple Card has been the thing keeping me from commiting to YNAB full time so far


FWIW, I also have an Amex with YNAB and have not had any issues with it in the past year.


Believe this is also the case for Fidelity (Plaid doesn't work w/ Fidelity)


I have YNAB and the most annoying part of the entire thing is that you cannot see your total expenses? I mean, the most basic feature is not in this app.

If I want to see my monthly expenses (total), it doesn't let me. It just shows me how much I need to save this much in each bucket.

Weird.


I use the "Reports" section for this - breaks down expenses just fine in several different ways with a calendar widget as well. Have you tried that out?


FYI, the reports in the webpage are much deeper than the reports in the app. You can see spending in any combination of categories over any arbitrary period of time, and drill down in an intuitive way.


Came here to say this. YNAB is awesome.


In past Ask HN threads I've seen recommendations for Lunch Money (https://lunchmoney.app/) and You Need A Budget (https://www.ynab.com/). I can't personally speak to them as I use GnuCash, but I don't recommend it for you because it does not do automatic sync as you requested.


I'm biting the bullet and moving to GnuCash myself. It seems intimidating at first but playing around with the UI made it less scary.

As I get older I'm also just doing fewer transactions in general, so it's easier for me these days to keep a hold on manual entry.


I've been really enjoying Monarch money. It's not free, but they offer an introductory discount for Mint users.

I'm not a power user. I used Mint mostly for a window into the current state of my accounts, and to check recent transactions. I find the Monarch UI to be snappier and less laggy than Mint, which makes sense given it seems like Mint was not a very well-funded project at Intuit.

I've toyed around a bit with Monarch's transaction tagging and grouping features and they seem to do what I expect. I've also played with their budgeting feature which is helpful as a way for me to try to keep tabs on my spending per-category month-to-month.

Personally I do prefer the idea of paying for a service like this, but that's because I know it will probably decay if it's not supported monetarily by users. I also prefer my data _not_ be sold to third parties (which Monarch promises.. for now). Unfortunately I suspect the end goal for Monarch is to get acquired by one of the FinTech giants which probably sadly means it sees a similar fate to Mint down the road.


I tried Monarch for awhile, and I really wanted to like it. Like you said, the UI is much better, and the team does seem to be working very hard to improve it.

Unfortunately the importers were just terrible compared to Mint's. I had to re-login to each account on Monarch every time I used it, and I would get constant spam SMS notifications from my bank as their importers would run in the background - often throughout the night.

I know that Monarch uses 3rd party importers, so its technically "out of their control" - but it is a key aspect to the usability of their product.

I also understand that there are security trade offs here - in terms of 2FA, but ultimately on the user side here - I need something that is usable, and "just works". Especially if I am going to pay a premium for it.


I'll second Monarch. I had issues with connections when I first started a month or so ago, but they've since been resolved. They seem to have a very active customer service team AND a roadmap (which is something Mint hasn't had in years). Budgeting is much better than Mint. Transactions are much better than Mint. Rules are much better than Mint. You have to subscribe to it, but you get to try it out for a month for free and in that time I genuinely felt a subscription would net me more than my money's worth.


I switched to Monarch as well. I tried YNAB first, after mint closed, and _despised_ it. Then tried Monarch and felt basically at home again.


> A while back there was a tread in here where someone had an inexpensive one-time license mac software, but I cannot find it.

I think you are looking for https://www.banktivity.com/

It feels a lot like Quicken which isn't a paradigm that works well for my brain and I moved to https://lunchmoney.app + a small app that consumes the API, does some transformations and exposes to Google Sheets' =IMPORTDATA formula.

This gives me: * full featured transaction syncing that I don't need to worry about * a nice UI for bulk editing, tagging, etc. * a programatic way to perform transformations and add features Lunch Money doesn't have: I like to use categories and tags in concerts to give me per trip breakdowns of expenses by category of my travel * the flexibility of a spreadsheet for reporting and quick iteration.

A very new player that I haven't tried fully yet is https://finwiseapp.io/


Tiller is $79 a year - https://my.tillerhq.com/ - but puts all the data straight into a Google Sheet and lets you do what you want with it. I love the flexibility.


Happy Tiller user as well, with a bit of effort customizing your Google Sheets and you can out-do any SaaS app on the marketplace.


I'm also a Tiller user. It's much better to edit incoming transactions in an offline spreadsheet than a web tool like Mint as well as create custom reports. The daily email snapshot is also useful.


If you like spreadsheets, BudgetSheet might be an option for you: https://www.budgetsheet.com

You can try it for free, and if you want to upgrade you can pay monthly or annually.

Disclaimer: I am the creator of BudgetSheet :)


I tried out YNAB, Rocket Money, and Quicken Simplifi.

YNAB was a bit too opinionated and "hands on" for my tastes. Rocket Money seemed to be geared toward the "we'll cancel subscriptions for you" use case and was otherwise not configurable enough.

Quicken Simplifi seems much closer as a spiritual successor to Mint. It's mostly hands-off, though you can set up configurable rules and budgets. And it worked with all of my accounts.


Also a +1 for Simplifi. I switched from YNAB recently. Simplifi maybe isn't as nice looking and feels like the focus is definitely on function (imo), but it seems better for general purpose tracking, and it costs a bit less.

My bank (PNC) was supposedly going to be making it harder for Plaid to connect so I went looking for a different tool. So far it seems like Simplifi will be able to connect multiple times a day for that extreme scrutiny fix! I'd rather banks just play as nice as possible with data aggregators, but I also didn't feel like moving to another bank just to keep using YNAB reliably.

I will give my experience with YNAB full credit for making me realize I need to be tracking expenses carefully, even if I don't need a tool built around YNAB's specific budgeting system.


+1 for Quicken Simplifi. YNAB is more of a methodology, and you pay for the UI. Simplifi is more of tool that lets you look at your money as you see fit.


The subreddit r/mintuit[0] has tons of posts and detail on all these alternatives and people's experiences with them with reviews and everything else you could want to know.

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/mintuit/


YNAB isn't too expensive though I don't like that they went to an annual subscription. It does sync with most accounts (I don't use that feature but it seems to work well for others, pretty sure the same syncing backend as Mint and others use).

GnuCash can sync with some banks but I only had luck with one of mine, and never tried with other account types like investment and retirement accounts. If you're willing to do a bit of work, your banks will provide CSV or other export options and you can download that and import it into GnuCash. Doing that, I had to tidy things up a bit but it wasn't awful if I did this somewhat regularly so the number of transactions to examine wasn't high (like once every week or two, versus once every few months).


I'm a massive advocate for YNAB and it has improved my financial life so much. Definitely worth the subscription.

But if it didn't have the syncing feature, it would easily be one of the first subscriptions I would eliminate. Instead of being a chore I do once or twice a month, I instead check in on all my accounts for a couple minutes every morning and know exactly where my finances stand. It allows me to have multiple credit cards and bank accounts for various different situations and not have to worry. Budgeting only money in my accounts is such a better system than trying to guess how much money I think I might have later.

Accounts that do not work with it usually actually aren't worth using. My Apple card is a massive manual pain with YNAB, but with my other cards it is only ever worth using for interest free and 3% back on Apple purchases, which aren't that often.


I can't process how $100/yr for a static accounting program isn't severely overpriced. Do banks and credit cards charge for API requests? Is the compute necessary to balance your books require leasing A100s to crunch your numbers? A terabyte of rack space to store my transactions?

Before the MBA enshitification of software, you would buy an accounting program for $60 and use it for years. And it would work great because accounting is well established and hasn't really changed in the last 100 years.

I'm just so fucking sick of SaaS and peoples total complacency with it.


Account connection services are insanely expensive and you don't want to create all that yourself. That would be even more expensive to maintain. That's why there's services like Plaid. For every user it costs at least 1$ a month per user per connected account. That alone creates a huge amount of ongoing expenses.

That's why we don't offer the ability to connect accounts within our app. Users don't understand or don't want to understand that such a feature alone would easily double the subscription price. Without VC you cannot give users the ability to connect their accounts for free without losing lots of money.


I work at Plaid and I think that pricing info is a bit off — assuming we’re talking about just the APIs for transactions data (which is what the budgeting apps typically use) and these prices are in USD, even customers who don’t qualify for any volume discounts are paying closer to 30-45 cents per month per connected account. (Volume discounts then can start to kick in starting at a total API spend of $300 / month -- the higher the monthly API spend, the greater the discount percentage.)


> For every user it costs at least 1$ a month per user per connected account.

Then how is Quicken Simplifi, mentioned by some other folks in this thread, able to offer it for $2.99 per month? Volume??


I work at Plaid. The basic, non-discounted rate for the Transactions API is like 30 cents per connected account per month (or 45 cents per month if you're buying some optional add-ons to go with it), and any customer the size of Intuit would definitely be getting some kind of huge volume discount. I can't speak for other companies in this space, but I assume they have similar pricing.


The idea of YNAB (I'm a paying user) is that learning to budget your money effectively with their app and methodology pays for itself tenfold.

Think about it: if you are from the Western world, how many $10 do you waste each month? I spent $20 for pizza yesterday. How much money would you save if you could budget effectively (and get yearly discounts to all your subscriptions instead of paying monthly, for example?) How much is it worth it to you to get out of debt and increase your net worth by avoiding surprise bills?

I gladly pay the $100/yr to deal with my finances, especially now that I'm broke and with negative income.


If only plumbers could charge to keep a toilet in your house...


I generally agree, but presumably features are added to it, integrations with all sorts of banks, markets, payment processors, crypto(lol), etc, etc. People probably also want mobile apps, which is an ever-moving target as mobile OSs change SDKs every other release.

If you wanted basic accounting functionality, could just use a spreadsheet. Plenty of free spreadsheet software out there. Why spend $60?


I was just trying to integrate with my banks this past weekend because of this, with no luck. I was pointed at OFX (Open Financial Exchange) as an integration method, but it seems banks have since moved on from that to FDX (Financial Data Exchange). But FDX seems to be under maintenance and individuals can't register? Is this the right method to integrate with your personal accounts to get transaction information or do you need to use a service like plaid?


If you just want to review your spending categories across all your accounts and don't need all the fancy planning features with more involved programs, I have been liking Fidelity Fullview. It's free and lets me keep tabs on things which is all I really used mint for as well.

Fullview also is one of the few services not married to Plaid, if that's a factor for you.


Thanks for mentioning this, I already have a Fidelity account but didn't realize they had this feature.


LunchMoney is now the sole closed source application that I (1) love, (2) use daily, (3) blows away OSS alternatives. Jen is brilliant, the product is great. It just gets steadily better over the last 4 years, while remaining the same core product, visual identity. It's web, not-mobile, first, and I love that, too.


I haven’t found anything better than Tiller.

I tried moneydance for the cross platform/offline operation but it’s kinda clunky.


An option I don't see mentioned usually is Every Dollar. It's from Dave Ramsey's company, so it carries all of the opinions of his "Financial Peace" system but it may be a good fit for some.


I personally enjoy Monarch. Nice looking UI, full financial picture like Personal Capital but they use multiple data aggregators to sync your data and most institutions you sync they allow you to choose which aggregator you want to use.

Link to site: https://www.monarchmoney.com/

If you are feeling charitable, my referral link: https://www.monarchmoney.com/referral/d8nz9odkbx


Just started using Copilot, I like the UI and their Mac and iOS apps are well done: https://copilot.money/


I used to like auto-synching with accounts, but I found this encouraged a pattern where I would only look at my budget periodically, long after the information would have been useful (e.g. in the moment of asking whether I should make a purchase).

Instead, I've switched to software that requires me to manually input each transaction (firefly-iii with lychnos, a custom front-end I wrote). This keeps me aware of the budgets since I get in the habit of looking at them each time I make a purchase and record it.


I've switched to a paid annual plan with Monarch Money. The app is sleek and it works fine, but I'm open to switching over to something open-sourced and/or free.


"where someone had an inexpensive one-time license mac software,"

I know there's another one I'm thinking of but https://moneymoney-app.com/ comes to mind.

I've also tried working on one based on beancount (plan text accounting) and fava: https://github.com/seltzered/beancolage


I use SoFi Relay Insights[1] to help make a balance sheet of all my accounts once a month.

I made a web app to scrape my SoFi Relay data so I can paste it into a spreadsheet: https://github.com/Leftium/transform

[1]: https://www.sofi.com/financial-insights/


I've been using Kubera for the past few years. It's a web app and works great with many types of synced accounts. I also wrote some thoughts about it:

https://productidentity.co/p/4-kubera-whats-my-net-worth


Quicken's Simplifi is pretty close. I tried Monarch as well. Simplifi seemed a bit more polished. To me, YNAB was a different type of tool than what I wanted. I didn't want everything assigned to a budget and such. I just want something to collate all my transactions, do some basic tagging and classification. That's it.


I moved everything to Gnucash about 8 months ago and didn't look back. Online and automatic was convenient, but local is working fine for me. I thought I would miss the automation more, but in practice it doesn't take much time to import transactions downloaded from providers, or just enter them manually.

If automation is a critical feature it may not meet your needs.


Not free, but I use old-school desktop Quicken and have never really had any trouble with it. The huge down side is they've gone to subscription pricing which is horrible. I have not migrated away only because I haven't found an acceptable alternative.

So my recommendation is a product that I hate. That's the current state of this category of software.


Actual Budget is fantastic and now open source. The bank integrations are only for European banks though I think.


Came here to recommend Actual Budget, also. I have it self-hosted on my Synology, and it just works like a charm. It's very similar to YNAB, so if you're into that style of budgeting, Actual will feel familiar.

The latest version actually supports SimpleFin for integration with U.S. banks. Simplefin costs $1/month, and has been working smoothly for me.


https://www.budgetrewards.com/

Free for a couple months, run by a husband/wife duo as a small business, lots of budgeting in addition to the basic account dashboard and transaction syncing you expect.


I'll throw out that another option is to categorize at the time of purchase with an envelope budgeting app like Qube money. Using Qube has been life changing for our family.


Fidelity Full View. Pro: Free, High grain management especially on investment asset Con: Detail is not fully polished. Auto-categorization has lots of flaws.


Thanks for asking this question- I'm in the same boat. I keep meaning to see if Yodlee is still a viable option (they used to be what Mint was based on).


I've been using Simplifi by Quicken and it's been very nice. It's around $50/year, I can track all of my transactions and bank accounts.


They also offer a discount if you import account data from Mint. However, it's worth knowing that the imported account data will be entirely wrong* and you'll need to delete those accounts when you want to use the site for real.

It also lets you add a second login, which is great for couples.

* In our case all transactions were flipped, showing a negative balance on our checking and brokerage accounts and positive on our CC.


I tried lunchmoney and I really wanted to like it but just couldn't make it work for me.

I ended up using YNAB.


Fidelity Full View. It's free.


I'm quite happy with Monarch.


Fidelity Full View. Hands down.


I tried both Mint and YNAB but they both had syncing issues that infuriated me. My friend recommended Copilot[0] and it's been a joy to use. It's designed so well that it somehow got me to take the time to label my transactions & set my budget, where with Mint/YNAB I would just add my accounts & not do anything else because of the laggy interfaces.

[0]https://copilot.money/


Personal capital, now empower. I don't think there's a better one that's free as well.


I used to use Personal Capital, but now I switched to SoFi Relay[1]

Personal Capital had problems maintaining connections to my accounts, especially to SoFi. Of course SoFi has no problems connecting to SoFi accounts. SoFi connects to 21 of my accounts; there's only 3 accounts that don't work: Apple Savings, Apple Card, and Treasury Direct.

I also wrote a web app to convert the SoFi relay summary into text that can be pasted into a spread sheet: https://tt.leftium.com/ (I just paste the HTML into the textbox, and the TSV data is copied to the clipboard)

[1]: https://www.sofi.com/financial-insights/


Do they still call you constantly trying to get you to buy their money management services?

I liked personal capital but hated the sales pressure.


I responded to one of their sales emails saying that I liked their service because it was free, and I wasn't interested in paying for their advice. Haven't heard from them since, but have been using the free service for years.


Just tell them you're not interested and they stop calling. Small price to pay for something that's free.


I switched from mint to personal capital years ago and I couldn't be happier. The UI is so much more responsive and the site is more reliable. The design is a lot better too.




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