What should you use now that Mint has shut down?
It depends on which half of Mint you miss. If it was the automatic feed, the replacements are paid and sync-based. If it was the free, no-nonsense record of where the money went, that half is cheaper to replace than people expect.
What happened to Mint?
Intuit shut Mint down in March 2024 and pointed its users at Credit Karma, which tracks accounts and credit but is not a budgeting app in the sense Mint was.
The redirect is the reason the search volume never went away. People who moved to Credit Karma found it did the balance-watching part and not the budgeting part — no categories they controlled, no envelopes, no monthly plan — so a large number of them went looking a second time, months later, which is why "Mint alternative" is still a live query years after the shutdown. Mint had been free and advertising-supported, which also set an expectation of price that most of its replacements do not meet.
What are the actual alternatives to Mint?
Monarch Money and Quicken Simplifi are the closest paid like-for-like replacements with bank syncing, YNAB is the strongest budgeting method rather than a tracker, Actual Budget is the free self-hosted option, and Accountable is the manual, private one.
Sorting them by what you are replacing is more useful than ranking them. If you want the automatic feed and the dashboards, Monarch (~$100/yr) and Simplifi (~$72/yr) are where most former Mint users land, and both import a Mint CSV. If Mint never actually changed your behaviour and you want something that does, YNAB (~$110/yr) is a method with software attached rather than the reverse. If free and private matters most and you are comfortable running software yourself, Actual Budget is genuinely free and genuinely yours. If you want free and private without hosting anything, and you are willing to type entries in, Accountable is that — $0 to track, and no bank connection in the product.
Can you import your Mint data into a new app?
Yes if you exported it before the shutdown — Mint’s export was a CSV, and most replacements including Accountable read that file directly.
If you have the file, this is a two-minute job rather than a project. Accountable recognises Mint’s column layout by name, so you do not have to map anything: it reads the date, description, amount, direction and category, previews every row before writing, and flags anything that duplicates what is already in your ledger. If you did NOT export before March 2024, the data is gone and no app can recover it — Intuit deleted it, and any service claiming to retrieve it should be treated with suspicion. The consolation is that starting fresh is less of a loss than it feels: a budget is about the next month, and historical categories from an app you no longer use rarely survive the move intact anyway.
Is there a free Mint alternative?
Yes, but "free" now means one of two things: free because you host it yourself, like Actual Budget, or free because you enter transactions yourself, like Accountable.
It is worth understanding why free-with-bank-syncing largely stopped existing. Mint was free because Intuit sold you financial products against it — the advertising and the lead generation were the business model, and the data was the input to it. The aggregator connection that made the feed work costs real money per user per month, so any app offering it now either charges for it or is monetising you the way Mint did. That is the actual trade behind every "free Mint alternative" list: not a company being generous, but a feature not being bought. Removing the connection removes the cost, which is what the genuinely cheap options have in common — including this one, which is a subscription rather than free, and is a fraction of the syncing apps because it is not paying an aggregator.
What did Mint do that a manual app cannot?
It filled itself in — transactions appeared without you doing anything, and no manual app replaces that.
Say plainly what you would be giving up. Mint pulled every account nightly, categorised automatically, and tracked balances and credit score without being asked. A manual app does none of it. What it gives back is the thing a lot of former Mint users say they wanted and never got: Mint’s categorisation was wrong often enough that people stopped correcting it, at which point the dashboard was confidently wrong and the whole thing quietly became decoration. Entering things yourself is slower per transaction and produces a record you actually believe. If you never opened Mint and it therefore never changed anything, the automatic feed is not the feature you are missing.
How long does it take to switch budgeting apps?
About twenty minutes if you have a CSV to import, and about one month before the new app is telling you anything useful.
The import is the fast part and the least important. What actually takes time is accumulating enough of your own months for the numbers to mean something — a first month in any budgeting app looks alarming, because it catches the annual bills and the one-offs and has no earlier month to compare against. This is where most switches die: somebody imports, sees a chaotic first month, concludes the app is not working, and leaves. It is worth deciding in advance to give it two full months before judging, whichever app you pick.
Is Credit Karma actually a replacement for Mint?
No, and that is the single most common thing former Mint users discover the hard way — Credit Karma watches accounts and credit, and does not do budgeting in the sense Mint did.
Intuit owns both, and moving Mint users into Credit Karma was the cheapest possible migration for Intuit and the wrong destination for a large share of the people it moved. What survived is balance aggregation and credit monitoring. What did not is the part people actually used: categories you control, a monthly plan, spending limits, and a view of a month that answers "did I overspend". That gap is measurable in search behaviour — a large second wave of "Mint alternative" queries appears months after the shutdown, from people who tried the official answer first. If you went to Credit Karma and felt like something was missing, nothing is wrong with you; the budgeting half is genuinely not there.
How do Monarch, Simplifi and YNAB actually differ?
Monarch and Simplifi are trackers that show you what happened, and YNAB is a method that tells you what to do with money before you spend it — which is a difference in kind, not in features.
Monarch is the closest to what Mint looked like: accounts pulled in automatically, categorised, charted, with budgets available if you want them and ignorable if you do not. Simplifi is similar in shape with a stronger emphasis on a forward-looking spending plan and a lower price. Both will feel familiar within an evening. YNAB is a different proposition — every dollar is assigned a job before it is spent, which is genuinely effective and genuinely demanding, and its reputation for a steep first month is deserved. The useful question is not which is best but which failure mode you recognise: if Mint sat unopened because it only ever told you about the past, a better tracker will sit unopened too. If Mint was fine and you just want it back, a method you have to learn is more friction than you asked for.
How much do Mint alternatives cost per year?
The paid ones cluster between roughly $70 and $110 a year, and the free ones are free because they either have no bank connection or are hosted by you.
As checked in September 2026: YNAB is about $14.99 a month or $109 a year, Monarch about $14.99 a month or $99.99 a year, and Copilot about $13 a month or $95 a year. Simplifi is typically the cheapest of the syncing options. Confirm any of these before buying, because they move on somebody else’s schedule and a price quoted on a comparison page is a claim about the day it was written. What that spread tells you is that the aggregator connection is the cost: every app charging in that band is paying a third party per user per month for the bank feed, and every app that is genuinely free has removed that line item somehow. Actual Budget removes it by making you host the software. Accountable removes it by having no connection at all, which is why it can be $40 a year against their $95 to $109 while being a subscription like the rest of them. The saving is the line item that is not being paid, not a promotional rate.
What should you actually check before committing to a Mint replacement?
Check that your data can leave, that you understand exactly what happens on the day the trial ends, and that the app supports the specific banks you use — in that order.
Export first, because it is the thing you will need if this choice turns out wrong and it is the thing nobody checks. An app with no export, or with export behind the top tier, has made leaving expensive on purpose. Then read what "free" means, because a free trial and a free plan are different products and the word is used for both. The questions worth asking are whether a card is taken up front — if it is, the default outcome is that you pay — and what the account becomes afterwards. "Read-only, everything still exportable" and "locked until you pay" are very different answers, and only one of them is compatible with the export point above. Then bank support, which only matters for syncing apps and matters a great deal — an aggregator that cannot reach your credit union turns an automatic app into a manual one at full price. Two smaller things worth a minute: whether categories are yours to rename and restructure, and whether the app is a business that can plausibly still exist in three years. Mint was shut down by one of the largest financial software companies in the world, which is the reminder that "too big to disappear" is not a category that exists here.
Do you actually need an app, or would a spreadsheet do?
A spreadsheet genuinely works and is free, and the honest reason most people should not use one is that nobody maintains a spreadsheet on their phone in a queue.
For somebody comfortable with formulas, a spreadsheet does everything a budgeting app does and costs nothing — and for a small number of people it is clearly the right answer, because they will actually keep it up and they want total control over the structure. The failure is almost always capture rather than analysis. Transactions happen away from a desk, and a system that requires a laptop to record a coffee gets updated on Sunday from memory, which produces a plausible and wrong record. What an app buys is a four-second entry at the moment of spending, and a total that was calculated by something that cannot make an arithmetic error. If you have tried a spreadsheet twice and it lapsed both times, that is the diagnosis rather than a lack of discipline.