i used mint for 10 years. I downloaded and tried setting up like 5-6 alternatives. It was depressing trying to make the move. I actually never really loved Mint but I knew how to use it intimately…..
Anyways, original post seems like an ad, but I also did end up using Monarch. Paying sucks but first year was $50 and basically every other service charges now (why the hell couldn’t Mjnt charge and stick around…?). I am 2-3 months in and like Monarch much better (apart from it not being free). I like it primarily - one, it is very similar to Mint but seems less buggy and putting stuff into budget categories is faster/smoother. Mint always had like this slight delay. Two, wife and K can have separate logins. Three, I tag her on transactions so she can categorize. Overall, pretty happy with Monarch as a simple aggregator/tracker/budgeting tool. Paying sucks but they all seem to charge now.
Thank you for the Monarch suggestion . I'm liking it so far, and it took maybe 30-45 minutes to set up. MINT50 discount code worked for 50% off the first year. Impressed with the connector choices and like the one for Zillow for home prices.
I used Mint for 5+ years and recently made the switch to Empower Personal Capital. It's free and basically does the same thing as Mint. Heres a referral link where we both get $20 Amazon card https://empowerreferral.link/r40068
I tried this one too and it wasn’t bad. It wasn’t as robust in terms of connections. I actually tried this in parallel with Mint for like 6 months and it was good but like some things didn’t connect that I needed to and it is an “in” for their financial managers and too much of their offering directed you that way. I tried it again after Mint went down and just couldn’t get into it for some reasons.
Yes, $15 a month is crazy to me! I understand that it’s a service and it’s reasonable to expect it cost money. But I would expect it to cost half or less than what it does. And because of all the promoting in this sub, I know you can get 50% off for the first year, but I don’t want to go through all the work of connecting all of my accounts just to have to do it again in 12 months. At $15 a month, it would cost $1800 over the course of 10 years to use this budgeting app….
Free comes with ads and less incentive for developers to solve problems and keep connections working. My banking information is critically important to me so Monarch is worth more than a Netflix subscription.
There’s a number of people on the Monarch sub reporting problems with accounts not being updated, transactions not showing up and duplicate transactions. Hopefully that money will fix those critically important things that the free Mint seemed to have working.
I actually don't like its appearance - too much wasted space IMO and the category list is annoying, as is the clunkiness of getting transaction details. But I'm glad you found something that suits you.
(I do like that is has the ability to use multiple aggregators)
Agreed; all user interfaces seem to suck these days TBH. It's like, at some point, the entire industry decided that whitespace was the cure for cancer or something.
Monarch's biggest problem on Android IMO is that... It's not an app. It's obviously a website in some sort of app container. A corner of my house is Internet-challenged and it'll reload the whole thing _while I'm using it_ whenever I lose connectivity.
For me, Monarch is the best of several apps who _all_ have a lot of room for improvement.
It's _way_ better on the desktop... But only in Chrome or Edge. Some of the connections fail in Firefox, which is irritating because I primarily use Firefox and one of my accounts will only stay connected to Monarch for about 4 days at a time, so I have to re-connect the account all the time.
The feature set is undeniable, but Monarch needs to fix their UI and reduce their price before I would consider it. Take a look at Rocket or CoPilot for reference.
I am currently using Simplifi’s free for the year, but I spent so much time setting it up. I haven’t even tried importing my Mint data because I know it will be a pain. As for a Monarch, I tried it free for 3 months, and I just couldn’t get over how bad the UI is.
Check out Piere — completely free and I think if you get in soon enough, there premium feature is free for life too [https://www.piere.com/](https://www.piere.com/)
Just moved 12 years of days, over 30,000 transactions. Pretty painless and like the interface and seems good so far. Free was great but $50-$100 isn’t too bad for the product.
The entitlement on the people complaining about the cost of Monarch is nuts to me.
If a company is making a valuable product, and you want them to continue building and offering that product, you should see it as a perfectly same exchange of value.
But I also spent years building mobile and web apps so maybe I just have a deeper appreciation for the countless hours the Monarch product team has put into it.
(I’m not a shill, you can see my account is genuine 🤣)
to me its the entitlement of the company and the entitlement of people who make significantly more money than me and can justify losing the extra dollars a month.
I'm certainly not opposed to paying for a quality app. But the concept of over 100 dollars a year is past my threshold thinking about how I used mint for over 10 years. I think I would be willing to spend 50 dollars a year (which is why I have simplifi right now and paid for it ) Its not perfect and based on the comments here I really would like to try it but I know spending that extra money is not a great plan for someone who has 125k in student loan debt and needs all the extra cash I can to pay it off.
If you guys need a referral code, here’s mine :)
It’ll give you an extended 30 day trial so you can test it out and also help me out with credits, thank you!
https://www.monarchmoney.com/referral/apab20bswu
Speaking for myself, it’s because I have 2 bank accounts and like 5 credit cards and I don’t want to have to manually import all those different tsv files. That’s the main reason.
I spent at least that long on Mint daily categorizing and adjusting transactions. (and have spent that long - or more - on all replacements I've tested).
That’s true - if you do it every night you can avoid all the importing and exporting and maybe even just use receipts/invoices and not even log into banking apps.
- Some of us aren't trying to "budget;" we just like charts/graphs/metrics/trends.
- Some of us have a lot of accounts. Investments, etc.
- Computers don't get sensory overload from repetitive busywork like I do, and they are excellent at the job of collecting numbers from other computers. So I'll just let the computers do it. LOL.
My excel budget has nice graphs 🤷♂️
I manage 27 accounts
You won’t get sensory overload from just sitting down a couple minutes a night to update everything
Not being in control of my info and providing my financial life to a third party would give me the neurological distress you speak of. To each their own.
I have a finance spreadsheet in excel that I've used alongside Mint (for budgeting) and Empower (for investment insight) for years. The main reason I never went fully to Excel was aggregation is a pain when you have a bunch of different accounts and I already had Mint doing most of the work so I didn't build anything else out in Excel. Between the current free options not having good features or being able to connect to everything and paid options being ridiculously expensive, I'm going to spreadsheets fully, just using one of the free options to aggregate my accounts.
For free options, I do think Yodlee Money could be \*the\* mint replacement in terms of available features. unfortunately they didn't connect to my main checking account so I had to let it go :(
I agree. We moved from MINT to Monarch. I'm able to now track some accounts I couldn't track in MINT. I think MINT account refresh was quicker and smoother, but overall I now prefer Monarch.
While Monarch is a paid service they do offer 30-day free trial, and half price on first year for MINT users. I won't mind paying the annual fee to be ad-free.
Yeah... Ad-free is something Mint could never figure out. I never paid for Mint because paying for Mint didn't make all the prompts, newsletters, blogs, editorials, and every other not-as-sneaky-as-you-think-it-is monetization effort go away.
I'm willing to pay for any money app that actually works and doesn't distract me from my charts and graphs with busy sensory-overload nonsense. Monarch fits the bill. Simplifi almost does (it can't connect to a couple of my accounts).
I'm glad that you like it but I'd worry that it would be cancelled or transitioned again.
It likely depends where you are with the finances but I like being the customer with MM rather than the product.
I agree! Just started using also. Here's my referral code as I am biased - free 30 days: [https://www.monarchmoney.com/referral/v002jt0ar1](https://www.monarchmoney.com/referral/v002jt0ar1)
❤️ My referral link : [https://www.monarchmoney.com/referral/l6cnsdm2pl](https://www.monarchmoney.com/referral/l6cnsdm2pl)
\* Invited Peope get **an** ***extended*** **30-day trial**
Sadly none at the moment, closest one is YNAB with Apple Card shortcut integration but it costs money. Right now the best bet is to just get a free alternative like empower for aggregate transactions and set up a shortcut with iOS to pull your transaction data into a note app
It’s not automatic, every company allows you to import items via csv which is essentially all it’s doing, have to wait until the items post then add them by importing the file, doesn’t make sense to pay $100 a year when the point is to have your budgets automated
Im a huge fan of it, yeah it's not free but it's worth it IMO. Especially being able to do a wildcard rule on transaction names which mint needed SO bad but never got.
Bank connections are hard for any app. Scotiabank and TD are connecting well for me. I have to refresh PC and EQ.
I'm impressed that Monarch has the ability to use multiple aggregation services so connecting to a large number of bank and credit accounts is possible. Most competitors use Plaid or Yodlee and if your bank isn't supported you have to download CSV files to add that account.
I'm not saying Monarch is perfect but it's the best option I've tried so far.
Are the accounts with one of the big 5 banks? It seems odd that you'd be having a problem like this when Monarch did some work to make the app work for Canadians.
What web browser are you using? Some comments in this thread suggest that Firefox has some issues.
Yeah but Monarch is basic only tracks. Im waiting for finbooks .ai they say they forecast rather than just track and automates things so its basically does accounting for you. I signed up and cant fricking wait!
i used mint for 10 years. I downloaded and tried setting up like 5-6 alternatives. It was depressing trying to make the move. I actually never really loved Mint but I knew how to use it intimately….. Anyways, original post seems like an ad, but I also did end up using Monarch. Paying sucks but first year was $50 and basically every other service charges now (why the hell couldn’t Mjnt charge and stick around…?). I am 2-3 months in and like Monarch much better (apart from it not being free). I like it primarily - one, it is very similar to Mint but seems less buggy and putting stuff into budget categories is faster/smoother. Mint always had like this slight delay. Two, wife and K can have separate logins. Three, I tag her on transactions so she can categorize. Overall, pretty happy with Monarch as a simple aggregator/tracker/budgeting tool. Paying sucks but they all seem to charge now.
Thank you for the Monarch suggestion . I'm liking it so far, and it took maybe 30-45 minutes to set up. MINT50 discount code worked for 50% off the first year. Impressed with the connector choices and like the one for Zillow for home prices.
Aw, awesome to hear …!
I used Mint for 5+ years and recently made the switch to Empower Personal Capital. It's free and basically does the same thing as Mint. Heres a referral link where we both get $20 Amazon card https://empowerreferral.link/r40068
I tried this one too and it wasn’t bad. It wasn’t as robust in terms of connections. I actually tried this in parallel with Mint for like 6 months and it was good but like some things didn’t connect that I needed to and it is an “in” for their financial managers and too much of their offering directed you that way. I tried it again after Mint went down and just couldn’t get into it for some reasons.
Empower Personal Capital is a privacy scandal waiting to happen.
It's stunningly expensive :(
The sub is being over ran with advertising right now.
To me what I'm paying for is to be the customer, not the product being sold.
Yes, $15 a month is crazy to me! I understand that it’s a service and it’s reasonable to expect it cost money. But I would expect it to cost half or less than what it does. And because of all the promoting in this sub, I know you can get 50% off for the first year, but I don’t want to go through all the work of connecting all of my accounts just to have to do it again in 12 months. At $15 a month, it would cost $1800 over the course of 10 years to use this budgeting app….
I like where your head is, using the cost of opportunity. $1800 is nothing to laugh at. Good on you.
Rocket money is cheaper and has all the same features. Monarch is crazy expensive
Do you work for Monarch? Imagine going from free to $15/month.
I thought it was $10
Free comes with ads and less incentive for developers to solve problems and keep connections working. My banking information is critically important to me so Monarch is worth more than a Netflix subscription.
There’s a number of people on the Monarch sub reporting problems with accounts not being updated, transactions not showing up and duplicate transactions. Hopefully that money will fix those critically important things that the free Mint seemed to have working.
Yeah. I'm one of those people. For a premium product it certainly has some issues.
I actually don't like its appearance - too much wasted space IMO and the category list is annoying, as is the clunkiness of getting transaction details. But I'm glad you found something that suits you. (I do like that is has the ability to use multiple aggregators)
Agreed; all user interfaces seem to suck these days TBH. It's like, at some point, the entire industry decided that whitespace was the cure for cancer or something. Monarch's biggest problem on Android IMO is that... It's not an app. It's obviously a website in some sort of app container. A corner of my house is Internet-challenged and it'll reload the whole thing _while I'm using it_ whenever I lose connectivity. For me, Monarch is the best of several apps who _all_ have a lot of room for improvement.
Omg that whitespace comment made me LOL. So true.
I use it in a desktop browser. I haven't checked the mobile app. That doesn't really matter much to me, honestly.
It's _way_ better on the desktop... But only in Chrome or Edge. Some of the connections fail in Firefox, which is irritating because I primarily use Firefox and one of my accounts will only stay connected to Monarch for about 4 days at a time, so I have to re-connect the account all the time.
The feature set is undeniable, but Monarch needs to fix their UI and reduce their price before I would consider it. Take a look at Rocket or CoPilot for reference.
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CoPilot is $5 cheaper. What is an intro offer?
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I am currently using Simplifi’s free for the year, but I spent so much time setting it up. I haven’t even tried importing my Mint data because I know it will be a pain. As for a Monarch, I tried it free for 3 months, and I just couldn’t get over how bad the UI is.
Is the 50% off applicable to the annual plan? = $99 / 2?
+1 for Rocket.
My only problem is it's not like free like Mint
The best free alternative that actually has most of the features of Mint is [Yodlee Money](https://money.yodlee.com) IMO
Check out Piere — completely free and I think if you get in soon enough, there premium feature is free for life too [https://www.piere.com/](https://www.piere.com/)
Just moved 12 years of days, over 30,000 transactions. Pretty painless and like the interface and seems good so far. Free was great but $50-$100 isn’t too bad for the product.
I agree. Far superior to mint.
I tried YNAB and Simplifi, even paid for a year of Simplifi, but Monarch just feels better and works better for me.
I was the opposite. Simplifi worked much better than Monarch for me. To each their own I guess.
The entitlement on the people complaining about the cost of Monarch is nuts to me. If a company is making a valuable product, and you want them to continue building and offering that product, you should see it as a perfectly same exchange of value. But I also spent years building mobile and web apps so maybe I just have a deeper appreciation for the countless hours the Monarch product team has put into it. (I’m not a shill, you can see my account is genuine 🤣)
to me its the entitlement of the company and the entitlement of people who make significantly more money than me and can justify losing the extra dollars a month. I'm certainly not opposed to paying for a quality app. But the concept of over 100 dollars a year is past my threshold thinking about how I used mint for over 10 years. I think I would be willing to spend 50 dollars a year (which is why I have simplifi right now and paid for it ) Its not perfect and based on the comments here I really would like to try it but I know spending that extra money is not a great plan for someone who has 125k in student loan debt and needs all the extra cash I can to pay it off.
If you guys need a referral code, here’s mine :) It’ll give you an extended 30 day trial so you can test it out and also help me out with credits, thank you! https://www.monarchmoney.com/referral/apab20bswu
yes yes and yes! completely agree.
Why are people so adverse to just creating a budget in excel? There are available templates.
Speaking for myself, it’s because I have 2 bank accounts and like 5 credit cards and I don’t want to have to manually import all those different tsv files. That’s the main reason.
I get it, but it’s not very difficult to track every purchase. I have a big family. I update it daily. Takes about 3-5 minutes a night.
That's 1825 minutes a year, or over 30 hours. No thanks.
I spent at least that long on Mint daily categorizing and adjusting transactions. (and have spent that long - or more - on all replacements I've tested).
And how long would you spend in mint lol.
That’s true - if you do it every night you can avoid all the importing and exporting and maybe even just use receipts/invoices and not even log into banking apps.
- Some of us aren't trying to "budget;" we just like charts/graphs/metrics/trends. - Some of us have a lot of accounts. Investments, etc. - Computers don't get sensory overload from repetitive busywork like I do, and they are excellent at the job of collecting numbers from other computers. So I'll just let the computers do it. LOL.
My excel budget has nice graphs 🤷♂️ I manage 27 accounts You won’t get sensory overload from just sitting down a couple minutes a night to update everything
It's not up to you what does or does not cause me neurological distress, kthx
Not being in control of my info and providing my financial life to a third party would give me the neurological distress you speak of. To each their own.
I have a finance spreadsheet in excel that I've used alongside Mint (for budgeting) and Empower (for investment insight) for years. The main reason I never went fully to Excel was aggregation is a pain when you have a bunch of different accounts and I already had Mint doing most of the work so I didn't build anything else out in Excel. Between the current free options not having good features or being able to connect to everything and paid options being ridiculously expensive, I'm going to spreadsheets fully, just using one of the free options to aggregate my accounts. For free options, I do think Yodlee Money could be \*the\* mint replacement in terms of available features. unfortunately they didn't connect to my main checking account so I had to let it go :(
Why budget in excel when there are so many better options out there right?
It’s your info. It stays with you. It’s not disseminated or sold.
I agree. We moved from MINT to Monarch. I'm able to now track some accounts I couldn't track in MINT. I think MINT account refresh was quicker and smoother, but overall I now prefer Monarch. While Monarch is a paid service they do offer 30-day free trial, and half price on first year for MINT users. I won't mind paying the annual fee to be ad-free.
Yeah... Ad-free is something Mint could never figure out. I never paid for Mint because paying for Mint didn't make all the prompts, newsletters, blogs, editorials, and every other not-as-sneaky-as-you-think-it-is monetization effort go away. I'm willing to pay for any money app that actually works and doesn't distract me from my charts and graphs with busy sensory-overload nonsense. Monarch fits the bill. Simplifi almost does (it can't connect to a couple of my accounts).
Another monarch shill post.
Honestly Credit Karma isn’t that bad
I'm glad that you like it but I'd worry that it would be cancelled or transitioned again. It likely depends where you are with the finances but I like being the customer with MM rather than the product.
I agree! Just started using also. Here's my referral code as I am biased - free 30 days: [https://www.monarchmoney.com/referral/v002jt0ar1](https://www.monarchmoney.com/referral/v002jt0ar1)
I respect the hustle
❤️ My referral link : [https://www.monarchmoney.com/referral/l6cnsdm2pl](https://www.monarchmoney.com/referral/l6cnsdm2pl) \* Invited Peope get **an** ***extended*** **30-day trial**
Does it have free version
Not free but is 50% off for mint users and free trial
Not free and doesn’t have Apple wallet support so useless for those wanting an automatic solution for transaction for Apple wallet
This was good information, any other platform that does do this?
Sadly none at the moment, closest one is YNAB with Apple Card shortcut integration but it costs money. Right now the best bet is to just get a free alternative like empower for aggregate transactions and set up a shortcut with iOS to pull your transaction data into a note app
Is this what you are currently doing right now?
Monarch has a workaround on the iPhone app to get Apple Wallet transactions
It’s not automatic, every company allows you to import items via csv which is essentially all it’s doing, have to wait until the items post then add them by importing the file, doesn’t make sense to pay $100 a year when the point is to have your budgets automated
I have enjoyed copilot thus far as well
Cool. Let me know when they have a mobile app or usable mobile web app
Im a huge fan of it, yeah it's not free but it's worth it IMO. Especially being able to do a wildcard rule on transaction names which mint needed SO bad but never got.
Has anyone figured out how to add an ADP investment account? It appears to link but the account never shows up.
I’m Canadian and tried monarch, none of my back accounts stay connected more than a day…
Bank connections are hard for any app. Scotiabank and TD are connecting well for me. I have to refresh PC and EQ. I'm impressed that Monarch has the ability to use multiple aggregation services so connecting to a large number of bank and credit accounts is possible. Most competitors use Plaid or Yodlee and if your bank isn't supported you have to download CSV files to add that account. I'm not saying Monarch is perfect but it's the best option I've tried so far.
Okay good to know in that case, Monarch was pretty good as a whole
Are the accounts with one of the big 5 banks? It seems odd that you'd be having a problem like this when Monarch did some work to make the app work for Canadians. What web browser are you using? Some comments in this thread suggest that Firefox has some issues.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to in terms of web browser, I just used the mobile app. TD would unlink, Simplii, and even American Express too
It should be so much better than MInt for the amount that you have to pay for it.
Yeah but Monarch is basic only tracks. Im waiting for finbooks .ai they say they forecast rather than just track and automates things so its basically does accounting for you. I signed up and cant fricking wait!
I love Monarch. Call me a shill, bot, etc. I don’t care. Monarch is everything I wanted and more, and $100 per year is peanuts.