Name: Keep the Diff
Author: Lee

Intuit announced on 2 November 2023 that it was closing Mint, and closed it to users on 23 March 2024. Everybody was pointed at Credit Karma. Two and a half years later the migration is over, and it is possible to say where people ended up, which is not the same as where the comparison articles sent them.

What actually closed

Mint launched in 2007, was bought by Intuit in 2009, and was free the whole time. It paid for itself with ads and referrals. It connected to your accounts, sorted transactions into categories, let you set budgets against those categories, and showed you a credit score. For a lot of people it was the first piece of personal finance software they ever used, and for some it was the only one.

Closing it was a business decision about a free product sitting inside a company that sells paid ones. It was not a failure of the software.

Credit Karma was not the replacement, and everybody noticed

Credit Karma, also Intuit, could aggregate accounts and show a net worth. At the moment of the move it could not do the thing most Mint users actually opened Mint for, which was budgets against categories. Some of that has been added since. It arrived after the people who wanted it had already gone looking.

The migration itself was the other problem. Years of categorized history either did not come across or came across in a form that was not the same as having it, and a tool whose whole value is the accumulated past is a strange thing to restart from empty.

Where the roundups sent everyone

Every "best Mint alternative" article published in the following year covered roughly the same set: Monarch, Quicken Simplifi, Copilot, YNAB, Empower, Rocket Money, PocketGuard. Monarch is the name that appeared most often and appears to have taken the largest single share of the people who moved deliberately.

They are good products. Two things are true of nearly all of them. They cost money, which Mint did not, and they are built on a bank feed, which means the first screen asks you to connect your accounts.

Where people actually went

Three groups, and only one of them is written about.

The ones who paid. They wanted what Mint did, decided a working version was worth five to fifteen dollars a month, and moved. This is the group the roundups are for, and it is real, and it is smaller than the volume of articles suggests.

The ones who went back to a spreadsheet. A surprising number, and a lot of them say they prefer it. No subscription, nothing connected, and typing an amount in yourself turns out to be a feature rather than a chore for the sort of person who liked Mint's reports in the first place.

The ones who stopped. This is the largest group and it is invisible, because nobody writes an article about the software you are no longer using. Their tool disappeared, they meant to pick a new one, they compared three of them, and then eighteen months went by. If you are reading this, there is a decent chance you are in it.

The lesson that had nothing to do with features

Mint's closing taught a lot of people something specific, and it was not about budgets. A free product holding a decade of your financial history exists at somebody else's discretion, and the connection to your bank is not between you and your bank. It runs through an aggregator you did not choose and whose name may appear nowhere in the app you did choose.

Once that has happened to you once, "just connect your accounts" reads differently. If that is the part of the move you have been stuck on, we wrote about Mint alternatives for people who never wanted the bank connected separately, and it is a longer answer than this paragraph.

The group no replacement was written for

There is a fourth group, smaller and quieter, and it did not go looking for a replacement at all.

These are people who used Mint faithfully for years, looked up at the end of it, and noticed that their spending had changed by approximately nothing. Mint was excellent at telling you what had already happened. A monthly report is a verdict delivered weeks after the decision it describes, and by then the money is gone and the decision is not available to make again.

For that group, a better Mint is not an answer to anything. The category was never the problem.

What we built instead, and what it is not

Keep the Diff is not a Mint replacement, and saying otherwise would waste your time. It has no bank connection, no transaction feed, no categories to maintain and no net worth screen. If you want those, buy one of the products above.

It records the other side. You log what you were ready to spend and what you actually spent, and the difference is kept as a running total. Planned spend minus actual spend equals the Diff. The takeaway you talked yourself out of, the jacket in the tab you closed, the cheaper option you took: none of those generate a transaction, so no product built on a bank feed can see them, and they are where the money you still have actually came from.

It works manually, which is not a limitation to apologize for. No data source in the world knows you nearly bought something.

If you are still in the third group

Three honest recommendations, depending on what you are actually missing.

If you want the Mint experience and you are willing to pay for it, look at Monarch or Quicken Simplifi and stop reading comparison articles, because they all say the same thing.

If what stopped you was the bank connection, a manual expense tracker or a spreadsheet will do more for you than any of them, and the manual ones are better than their reputation.

And if you tracked your money for years and it never changed what you did, try recording the decisions instead of the receipts for one month. Keep the Diff is free to log, on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Windows and Android, with no account and nothing to connect.

Mint shut down: where that crowd actually went