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Mint alternatives if you never wanted your bank connected

By , who built Keep the Diff

Intuit closed Mint in March 2024 and pointed everyone at Credit Karma, which was not the same product. Two years on, the replacements everybody names are Monarch and Quicken Simplifi, with Copilot close behind, and the reviews still open by admitting that no free, full-featured Mint replacement exists.

All of those are good products. All of them start the same way: connect your bank. If that is the part you did not like about Mint, the standard comparison articles are not answering your question.

What the comparison articles actually cover

Read a few and the same three camps appear:

  • Budgeting-first apps, such as YNAB, Quicken Simplifi and Copilot. Every dollar assigned a job, categories, limits, a monthly review.
  • Aggregation dashboards, such as Monarch, Empower and Credit Karma. One screen showing every account you own.
  • Net worth and portfolio trackers.

Notice what all three have in common. Every one is built on the transaction feed, so every one needs the bank connection, and the interesting differences between them are differences in what they do with the feed once they have it.

If your objection was the feed, all three camps are the same product.

Why "just connect the bank" is a real objection

The objection is reasonable and widely shared.

The connection almost always runs through an aggregator, which holds ongoing read access to your transaction history. That company is not the one you chose, its name may not appear anywhere in the app's marketing, and its continued existence is not guaranteed. Mint's own shutdown is the argument: these arrangements end, on somebody else's schedule.

There is also a practical hole. A bank feed cannot see cash. Pay for anything in cash and the automatic tracker has a gap it does not know about and cannot warn you about.

And there is the thing everybody who used Mint for years eventually noticed: it was very good at showing you what had already happened, and it changed almost nobody's behavior. A monthly report is a verdict delivered weeks after the decision it describes.

What people actually moved to

Among people whose specific complaint was bank linking, the answers cluster in two places.

Spreadsheets. Complete privacy, complete ownership, no linking, and quite a few ex-Mint users report preferring the intentionality of typing transactions in themselves. The cost is that a spreadsheet is not in your pocket at the moment you are deciding something, and maintaining one is a chore that competes with every other chore.

Manual expense trackers. Small apps where you enter amounts yourself, no aggregator, usually storing everything on the device. There are a reasonable number of them now and this is the honest answer to "what replaced Mint if I never wanted my bank connected".

The third option nobody lists

There is a category the comparisons never include, because it does not compete with Mint on Mint's terms at all.

Every app above records money leaving. That is what a transaction is. The decisions that stop money leaving generate no transaction, so they are invisible to every product in every one of those three camps.

Yet those decisions are where the money actually comes from. The takeout you talked yourself out of, the jacket in the tab you closed, the cheaper option you took. A tool that records those decisions answers a different question. Mint asked "where did it go?", and this kind of tool asks "how much did I keep?"

That kind of tool can only work manually, which is convenient, because no data source in the world knows you nearly bought something.

Choosing between them honestly

Connect the bank if you want the complete picture: every account, every transaction, net worth, and a monthly report you can audit. Monarch is the usual recommendation and it is a good product. Accept that an aggregator holds your history.

Use a spreadsheet if you want total control and do not mind the maintenance. It is free, it is yours, and it will outlive any app in this article.

Use a manual tracker if you want the awareness more than the audit. You will miss entries; you will also think about the amount at the moment you commit to it, which is the only moment where thinking about it can change anything.

Record what you did not spend if the thing that was missing from Mint was any acknowledgement that you make good decisions. This option is the smallest of the four, and it sits alongside the others: it counts the part they cannot see.

What we built

Keep the Diff is the last of those. Two numbers per entry, a running total of money kept, no budget and no categorization of your spending, because it does not see your spending.

Selling Keep the Diff as a Mint replacement would be dishonest. It has no account balances, no net worth, no bill reminders and no transaction import. If those are what you lost when Mint closed, Monarch or Simplifi will serve you better and you should use one of them.

Keep the Diff has no bank integration to enable, no account needed, and nothing collected about you. It is free on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Windows, Linux and Android, and Premium exports everything as a CSV so you are never in the position Mint's users were in. There is a longer piece on manual versus automatic tracking, or you can try the method in your browser.

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