Mint.com Replaced by Credit Karma
Emma Roth (via Hacker News, Reddit):
Intuit first acquired Mint in 2009, an app that has offered a free way for users to track their budgets, manage expenses, negotiate bills, and keep tabs on subscriptions. Now, Intuit is inviting users to Credit Karma, a service that the company acquired in 2020.
While Credit Karma offers similar features, like the ability to view transactions, track spending, aggregate financial accounts, and credit monitoring, it still doesn’t come with the same budget tracking tool that many people specifically use Mint for, and it’s not clear whether Credit Karma will ever adopt it.
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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.
It seems like it from a product perspective, but presumably Mint was not great as a business, even as a funnel for TurboTax.
As the first product manager on the original team that built Mint, as well as the Co-founder and CEO of Monarch (a subscription-based personal finance app) I have now been in the personal finance space for over 15 years and have seen first-hand the benefits (and challenges) that these apps can provide across millions of users. I wanted to share my (admittedly biased) perspective on what Mint users should consider going forward.
[…]
I’ve always been proud that we created a product that has helped so many people better manage their financial lives, and the prospect of Mint getting shut down is a little sad.
At the same time, it’s not a surprise. A free personal finance app is simply not a viable business.
Most free apps in the app store have minimal direct costs associated with delivering their service. This is not the case with personal finance apps, which typically rely on data aggregators (Plaid, Finicity, etc) to connect to tens of thousands of financial institutions to aggregate the necessary financial data. These data fees are quite expensive, which means a personal finance app is losing money on each free user and must make it up in some other manner.
Mint’s business model was to present users with offers for various financial products (banks, credit cards, etc) and to earn a referral fee if a user applied for one of those products. Unfortunately, this model was never able to cover our data costs of delivering the service. Worse still, this ad-based business model created misaligned incentives between the company and its users, because the financial products that offered the highest referral fees were typically not the objectively “best” products for our customers. There was always an internal tension between doing what was in our users’ best interests and trying to drive revenue to keep the business alive.
Credit Karma is thrilled to invite all Minters to continue their financial journey on Credit Karma, where they will have access to Credit Karma’s suite of features, products, tools and services, including some of Mint’s most popular features. We know the most active Minters use Mint to monitor their cash flow and track their spending, and not only does Credit Karma offer these capabilities, but we’re able to take things even further for our members.
Let us explain: at Credit Karma, we leverage our members’ data to provide them with a view of their finances so they know where they stand and can confidently take action to improve their financial situation. This view means members can track their net worth and monitor their spending habits, transactions and cash flow. Once they know where their money stands, Credit Karma will leverage this data to empower members to take action, whether that be suggesting they use a different credit card in their wallet to maximize their rewards opportunities according to their spending habits, or proactively flagging when they’re about to be in a cash crunch, with actionable recommendations to help them smooth out their cash flow and avoid a similar situation in the future.
[…]
Credit Karma is on its way to becoming a full-service financial platform where we take stock of members’ financial profiles, connect the dots for members and identify saving opportunities to act on, at the right time.
The core Credit Karma product is useful, and the interface is fast and well designed compared with other financial sites. It gets really annoying, though. Before turning off notifications, I would get constant e-mails that provided no value and seemed like they were just trying to drive engagement. Every week there would be a supposed major change to my credit score, so I’d log in to check it and find that it was exactly the same as before or up or down 1–2 points. Then I would see that it had recommended a credit card that it knew I already had.
Previously:
- MoneyWell 2023.01
- QuickBooks Desktop Subscriptions
- Quicken 2018 Switches to Subscription
- Intuit Sells Quicken to H.I.G. Capital
I have been using monarch money for 3-4 years now. Its a paid subscription, but well worth it. Its by the original dev of mint and has the same functions, uses several connection protocols, so almost eveyrthing will import. Doesn't have apple card support, sadly.