Mint shut down. How to pick a replacement, including when it should not be us

Mint shut down on 23 March 2024. Intuit pointed everyone at Credit Karma, which it also owns, and which cannot budget - it has no budgets and no subscription management, so it was never the same product.

Two and a half years on, the replacement market has settled, and it has settled expensive. Most of the serious options run around $100 a year. YNAB publishes $109 a year or $14.99 a month. Monarch, Copilot, Rocket Money and Quicken Simplifi are all subscriptions in the same neighbourhood.

We make one of these, and ours is not a Mint replacement in the way most people mean. This is a guide to working out which kind you need, and it will send you elsewhere if that is the honest answer.

First question: do you want the bank feed back?#Link to this section

This is the whole decision, and almost everything else follows from it.

Mint's defining trick was that it logged into your accounts and filled the ledger in for you. If that is the part you miss - if what you want is to open an app and see last week's spending already categorised, without typing anything - then you want an app with bank sync, and you should stop reading here.

The main ones, all with connected accounts:

• YNAB - $109 a year, 34-day trial, direct import for banks in the US, Canada, UK and EU. Opinionated envelope method; people either love it or bounce off it.
• Monarch - subscription, strong on connectivity, US and Canada.
• Copilot - iOS only, well liked on design.
• Rocket Money - cheaper, leans on subscription cancelling.
• Quicken Simplifi - the usual budget pick on price.
• Empower - free, but investment-focused; it is a net worth and portfolio tool more than a budgeting one.
• Credit Karma - free, and what Intuit actually suggested. No budgeting. Worth knowing before you spend an evening on it.

That is a real market with real products. If bank sync is what you are replacing, one of those is your answer, not us.

Second question: were you actually served by Mint?#Link to this section

Here is the part the roundups skip.

Mint was US and Canada. If you are anywhere else, you were never really a Mint user - you were someone who tried Mint, discovered your bank was not supported, and went back to a spreadsheet. The shutdown changed nothing for you, and every "best Mint alternative" list is still recommending products with the same coverage problem.

The aggregators behind these apps cover the same institutions. If your bank is not in Plaid or its equivalents, the entire category above is closed to you, and it will stay closed.

Third question: how did you feel about the ending?#Link to this section

Mint was free because you were the product. It ran ads and pushed credit card and loan recommendations, and when it stopped being strategically useful to Intuit it was closed and its users pushed toward another Intuit property.

That is not a scandal. It is just what free means when a company has shareholders and your data has resale value. But it is worth deciding what you want instead:

• A subscription is the honest version of the same deal. You pay, so you are the customer. Around $100 a year buys that.
• Software you host yourself removes the question entirely. Actual Budget is open source, free, and yours - at the cost of running it.
• Something in between is what we tried to build, and it is described below.

Where Hundo actually fits#Link to this section

Hundo has no bank connection. It does not ask for banking credentials, it does not use an aggregator, and it never will. Entries get in by being typed, photographed, forwarded to a personal receipts address, imported from a file, or drafted by an AI agent and confirmed by you.

That is a real cost and we are not going to talk around it. If you want the feed to do the typing, Hundo is the wrong tool and one of the apps above is the right one.

What it is good for is the case the list above cannot serve:

You are outside aggregator coverage. Hundo works in every country, because there is nothing to connect. That was the actual reason it exists.

You do not want to hand over bank credentials. There are no bank logins in the system, so there is no store of them to be breached or sold.

You hold more than one currency. Over 160 of them, converted at the rate for the day a transaction happened rather than today's. Accounts, assets and individual budgets can each sit in their own currency while your net worth still reports in the one you think in. This is the part we would defend hardest, and it is where the US-first apps are weakest.

You do not want to start with a subscription. The tracker is free forever and nothing in it is capped - unlimited accounts, transactions, budgets, assets, net worth, reports. Not a trial.

The paid layer is the AI: connecting your own Claude or ChatGPT to your ledger over MCP. It is pay what you want, a year is $36 at the minimum and $72 suggested, or a flat $8 monthly if you would rather. Every amount unlocks everything - there is no cheaper tier with features removed.

Why that shape: the honest problem with a $109 subscription is that a budgeting app is most valuable precisely to the people least able to spend $109. Servers and AI inference are not free, so it is not free either, but the number is yours.

The short version#Link to this section

Mint's closure was a reminder that a free product with no business model is a product with an end date. Whatever you move to, the useful question is not what it costs today, but who is paying for it and why.

Prices checked 10 September 2026 against each provider's own pricing page, and they move. Mint shut down 23 March 2024.