What to do now that Mint is gone

Intuit announced the end of Mint in late 2023 and shut it down in March 2024, pointing users toward Credit Karma — a credit monitoring product that was never really a budgeting app. For a lot of people that meant losing years of categorised transactions and the only financial habit they’d managed to keep.

If you’re still sorting out the aftermath, or you’ve been limping along on a spreadsheet since, here’s a practical way through it.

First: find out what you actually still have

Before anything else, check whether you exported. Mint offered a CSV export of transactions in its final months, and a lot of people took it and then forgot where it went. Look for a file called something like transactions.csv in your downloads folder, or search your machine for files containing merchant names you recognise.

If you have it, you have almost everything that matters. A transaction export typically includes date, description, amount, category and account — which is enough to reconstruct your spending history in any decent app.

If you don’t have it, you’re not stuck. Most banks let you download 12 to 24 months of transactions as CSV directly. It’s more work — one file per account — but it gets you to the same place.

Second: decide what you actually want from a replacement

This is the step people skip, and it’s why so many Mint refugees have now bounced through three apps. Mint did several unrelated things at once, and you probably only cared about two of them.

Work out which of these you’re actually replacing:

• Seeing all your accounts in one place. Nearly every option does this.
• Categorising spending automatically. Most do it; they differ enormously in how much re-categorising you end up doing by hand.
• Actually budgeting — setting limits and being told when you’re near them. Mint was surprisingly weak here, which is why many people used it as a dashboard rather than a budget.
• Credit score tracking and offers. This was Mint’s business, not a feature for you. If you want a credit score, get it free from your card issuer or a dedicated service, and don’t let it drive your choice of budgeting app.

If your honest answer is “I want to see my accounts and know when I’m overspending,” you need much less app than you think.

Third: understand why Mint was free

Mint didn’t charge you because you weren’t the customer. It made money by recommending credit cards and loans, and by the value of the aggregate financial data of millions of households. That model is also, ultimately, why it closed: when it stopped being the most profitable use of Intuit’s attention, there was no subscription revenue tying the company to the people using it.

This matters for choosing what’s next. An app funded by the people using it has a straightforward reason to keep existing and to keep your interests aligned with its own. An app funded by advertising has a reason to keep you looking at offers. Neither is a moral judgement — but you should know which arrangement you’re entering.

Fourth: set it up so you’re never in this position again

Whatever you choose, do these three things in the first week:

1. Check the export button before you need it. Sign up, add a few transactions, and confirm you can export them as CSV. If you can’t, or if export is behind a paid tier, that tells you something.
2. Import your history rather than starting fresh. Two years of history is what lets an app suggest realistic budget amounts instead of asking you to guess. Starting from zero is the single biggest reason people abandon a new budgeting app in month two.
3. Keep your own copy. Export once a year and put it somewhere you control. It takes two minutes and it makes any future migration a non-event.

A note on categorisation

The thing that made Mint tiring wasn’t the setup, it was the endless re-categorising of the same merchants. When you’re evaluating a replacement, test exactly this: recategorise one transaction from a merchant you use often, then check whether the app offers to apply that to past and future transactions from the same merchant.

If it doesn’t, you’ll be doing it forever. If it does, the first month is the only hard one.

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Tavera Money imports Mint-style CSV exports with column mapping and duplicate detection, and can generate a starting budget from the history you bring with you. It’s funded by subscriptions and never sells your data — more on why that matters. And if you’re weighing it against where most Mint refugees ended up, there’s an honest side-by-side with Monarch Money, including the places Monarch is ahead.