Mint was many people's first budgeting app: free, automatic, pleasantly charted. Then Intuit shut it down, users got funneled toward other products, and millions of people learned three lessons at once: your finance app can simply end; "free" was always being paid for somehow; and years of financial habit can evaporate with a deprecation notice.
If you're here, you're probably choosing Mint's successor. Before comparing features, it's worth naming what Mint's ending actually taught, because the lesson should shape the choice.
What Mint's ending proved
Free had a business model. Mint monetized aggregated financial data and product cross-sells. When that stopped penciling out, the app stopped existing; the deeper story of what bank-linking apps do with your data explains why this is a category risk.
Automation built shallow roots. The quieter lesson: an app that does the categorizing never asks you to learn the categories. The sync watched your money so you didn't have to. And you didn't. When the app vanished, so did the awareness, because the awareness was never yours; it was outsourced.
Data held hostage-ishly. Export existed, but years of auto-categorized history proved messy to move. Portability turned out to be a feature you check before you need it.
The successor checklist
| Question | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| What's the business model? | If you're not paying, you're the product — again. If it's a subscription, price the decade. |
| Can the model shut down on you? | One-time purchases and open formats survive their vendors' pivots far better than free tiers. |
| Sync or manual-first? | Sync rebuilds the Mint experience — including its passivity and privacy surface. Manual-first rebuilds your awareness instead. |
| Full export, anytime? | Check it exists AND covers everything: accounts, history, budgets, rules. |
The case for the opposite of Mint
Wealth Mutant is, deliberately, Mint inverted: you pay once and own it for life (the model can't quietly resell you because there's nothing to resell: no bank linking exists in the product); you record your money yourself in seconds, which rebuilds the awareness Mint's automation atrophied; and everything exports (transactions as CSV or your complete data as a ZIP), so the exit door is permanently open and clearly marked.
What you get beyond the Mint feature set: honest credit-card cycle modeling, a real loan engine, goals backed by actual account money, a nine-level progression that gives the tracking a destination, and long-horizon projections. What you give up: the sync. In its place, each transaction gets entered by hand. That entry is the part that changes the behavior.
Moving in takes one afternoon
Your Mint CSV export (or any spreadsheet of your history) goes through the template workbook: accounts, categories, and years of transactions in one import, duplicates skipped, 30-day undo. The README sheet even includes an AI-conversion prompt that reformats any export for you.
This time, own the app instead of renting it. Mint closed; a licence you bought cannot be taken off you the same way. See how it works if you want the walkthrough first.
$99 once, and it is yours.
No subscription to cancel, no renewal to forget, and your whole history exports to a spreadsheet any day you ask.
or try it free for 7 days · no card neededBuying after a trial is final; buying without one has a 7-day refund.