What happened to Mint users, and what it taught us

For over a decade, Mint was the default answer to "what should I use to track my money?" It was free, it connected to your bank, and tens of millions of people used it. Then Intuit announced it was shutting Mint down, and in March 2024 it closed, with users pointed toward Credit Karma.

If you were one of them, you already know how it felt. This is a look at what actually happened, where those users went, and the lesson worth carrying into whatever you use next.

Disclosure: we build Ledgerly, a budget app, and it appears near the end of this piece. Read the rest first; most of it is not about us.

Why Mint was free, and why that mattered

Mint did not charge users. It made money by recommending financial products, credit cards, loans, savings accounts, and earning a fee when users signed up. Your transaction data was what made those recommendations targeted.

That is not a scandal; it was disclosed and it is a normal business model. But it does explain the shutdown. When Intuit already owned Credit Karma, which does the same thing at larger scale, Mint became a redundant acquisition funnel. The budgeting features that users loved were never the product. They were the reason you showed up.

The lesson is not "free is bad." It is narrower and more useful: when you are not paying, the feature you value most may not be the feature the company is running the business on. Budgeting was Mint's front door, not its revenue, so budgeting is what got closed.

What the migration actually cost people

Credit Karma at the time of the transition was not a budgeting app in the sense Mint users meant. Users arriving there found a different product with a different purpose, and much of what made Mint useful, budgets by category, historical trends organised the way they had organised them, did not come along in a recognisable form.

Three specific losses came up over and over in those conversations:

Years of categorised history. Mint let users export transactions to CSV, and people who exported in time kept their data. People who did not, or who exported and found the categories they had spent years correcting did not survive the trip, effectively started over.

A system, not just an app. Budgeting is a habit built on an interface. Rebuilding it somewhere else costs weeks, and a lot of people simply stopped budgeting rather than pay that cost again.

Trust in the category. This is the quiet one. A meaningful number of people concluded that if the biggest, most established budgeting app could vanish on a corporate decision, the whole category was rented, not owned.

Where those users went

The migration scattered across the options that existed:

• YNAB, for people who wanted a method and would pay a subscription for it. The most common paid destination.
• Monarch Money and Copilot, subscription apps that replicated Mint's bank-connected experience with a business model that charges users rather than advertisers.
• Actual Budget, open source and self-hosted, for the technical slice that concluded the answer was to stop trusting third parties entirely.
• Spreadsheets, for a surprising number of people, often as a temporary measure that quietly became permanent.
• Nothing, for many. This is the outcome nobody counts.

The lesson that actually generalises

It is tempting to conclude "use a paid app, then the incentives align." That is partly right and it is the reason we charge for ours. But it is not the whole lesson, because paid apps also get acquired, shut down, and pivot.

The durable lesson is about where your data physically lives and how easily it leaves. Ask three questions of anything you use:

1. Can I export everything, right now, in a format that opens elsewhere? Not "is there an export feature on the pricing page" but have you actually done it and looked at the file.
2. Does the app still function if the company disappears tomorrow? For a bank-connected app the answer is almost always no: the aggregator connection dies with the contract.
3. What happens to my history if I stop paying? Some apps lock you out entirely. Some keep your records readable.

An app that answers those three well is one you can leave. Which, paradoxically, is the only kind worth committing to.

Where we come in, briefly

We built Ledgerly partly because of this pattern. It has no bank connection and no account, the ledger is a database on your phone, and nothing is uploaded unless you switch on backup yourself, to your own Google Drive or iCloud, or a local file. CSV export works whether you are paying or not, and keeps working after a trial or subscription ends, along with reading and searching; paying is what adds new transactions.

None of that makes us immortal. Companies end, including small ones. It does mean that if we ended tomorrow, your ledger would still be on your phone, your backup would still be in your own storage, and your CSV would still open in any spreadsheet. That is the specific promise the Mint episode taught us to make.

It also means we are the wrong choice for people who want their transactions imported automatically. If that is the feature you cannot live without, the honest comparison of what exists covers your options, most of which are not us.