Ask HN: Alternative to Mint.com?
I confess: I was addicted to mint.com, and not that it's gone CreditKarma just doesn't do it.
What are the inexpensive/Free solutions out there? I need something that will sync automatically all of my and wife's accounts including retirement accounts. SaaS or McOs software will do.
A while back there was a tread in here where someone had an inexpensive one-time license mac software, but I cannot find it.
Thanks in advance.
77 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadAs I get older I'm also just doing fewer transactions in general, so it's easier for me these days to keep a hold on manual entry.
I liked personal capital but hated the sales pressure.
Personal Capital had problems maintaining connections to my accounts, especially to SoFi. Of course SoFi has no problems connecting to SoFi accounts. SoFi connects to 21 of my accounts; there's only 3 accounts that don't work: Apple Savings, Apple Card, and Treasury Direct.
I also wrote a web app to convert the SoFi relay summary into text that can be pasted into a spread sheet: https://tt.leftium.com/ (I just paste the HTML into the textbox, and the TSV data is copied to the clipboard)
[1]: https://www.sofi.com/financial-insights/
* One window to every account I have, which mostly automatically updates/syncs
* Envelope budgeting has forced me to look at every penny and figure out what it's for
* API to work with other tools (for me, Splitwise - https://github.com/vascopinho/split2ynab/)
And here's my referral code for a free month: https://ynab.com/referral/?ref=ASH303nViLPCKyr-
I recommend their Four Rules to budgeting to anyone that wants to learn how to manage money and expenses: https://www.ynab.com/the-four-rules
It can be as open-ended or as detailed as you like. And the tutorials / videos are worth watching, as well.
If I want to see my monthly expenses (total), it doesn't let me. It just shows me how much I need to save this much in each bucket.
Weird.
GnuCash can sync with some banks but I only had luck with one of mine, and never tried with other account types like investment and retirement accounts. If you're willing to do a bit of work, your banks will provide CSV or other export options and you can download that and import it into GnuCash. Doing that, I had to tidy things up a bit but it wasn't awful if I did this somewhat regularly so the number of transactions to examine wasn't high (like once every week or two, versus once every few months).
Before the MBA enshitification of software, you would buy an accounting program for $60 and use it for years. And it would work great because accounting is well established and hasn't really changed in the last 100 years.
I'm just so fucking sick of SaaS and peoples total complacency with it.
Think about it: if you are from the Western world, how many $10 do you waste each month? I spent $20 for pizza yesterday. How much money would you save if you could budget effectively (and get yearly discounts to all your subscriptions instead of paying monthly, for example?) How much is it worth it to you to get out of debt and increase your net worth by avoiding surprise bills?
I gladly pay the $100/yr to deal with my finances, especially now that I'm broke and with negative income.
If you wanted basic accounting functionality, could just use a spreadsheet. Plenty of free spreadsheet software out there. Why spend $60?
That's why we don't offer the ability to connect accounts within our app. Users don't understand or don't want to understand that such a feature alone would easily double the subscription price. Without VC you cannot give users the ability to connect their accounts for free without losing lots of money.
Then how is Quicken Simplifi, mentioned by some other folks in this thread, able to offer it for $2.99 per month? Volume??
But if it didn't have the syncing feature, it would easily be one of the first subscriptions I would eliminate. Instead of being a chore I do once or twice a month, I instead check in on all my accounts for a couple minutes every morning and know exactly where my finances stand. It allows me to have multiple credit cards and bank accounts for various different situations and not have to worry. Budgeting only money in my accounts is such a better system than trying to guess how much money I think I might have later.
Accounts that do not work with it usually actually aren't worth using. My Apple card is a massive manual pain with YNAB, but with my other cards it is only ever worth using for interest free and 3% back on Apple purchases, which aren't that often.
It also lets you add a second login, which is great for couples.
* In our case all transactions were flipped, showing a negative balance on our checking and brokerage accounts and positive on our CC.
I ended up using YNAB.
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/mintuit/
YNAB was a bit too opinionated and "hands on" for my tastes. Rocket Money seemed to be geared toward the "we'll cancel subscriptions for you" use case and was otherwise not configurable enough.
Quicken Simplifi seems much closer as a spiritual successor to Mint. It's mostly hands-off, though you can set up configurable rules and budgets. And it worked with all of my accounts.
My bank (PNC) was supposedly going to be making it harder for Plaid to connect so I went looking for a different tool. So far it seems like Simplifi will be able to connect multiple times a day for that extreme scrutiny fix! I'd rather banks just play as nice as possible with data aggregators, but I also didn't feel like moving to another bank just to keep using YNAB reliably.
I will give my experience with YNAB full credit for making me realize I need to be tracking expenses carefully, even if I don't need a tool built around YNAB's specific budgeting system.
I think you are looking for https://www.banktivity.com/
It feels a lot like Quicken which isn't a paradigm that works well for my brain and I moved to https://lunchmoney.app + a small app that consumes the API, does some transformations and exposes to Google Sheets' =IMPORTDATA formula.
This gives me: * full featured transaction syncing that I don't need to worry about * a nice UI for bulk editing, tagging, etc. * a programatic way to perform transformations and add features Lunch Money doesn't have: I like to use categories and tags in concerts to give me per trip breakdowns of expenses by category of my travel * the flexibility of a spreadsheet for reporting and quick iteration.
A very new player that I haven't tried fully yet is https://finwiseapp.io/
Link to site: https://www.monarchmoney.com/
If you are feeling charitable, my referral link: https://www.monarchmoney.com/referral/d8nz9odkbx
Fullview also is one of the few services not married to Plaid, if that's a factor for you.
The latest version actually supports SimpleFin for integration with U.S. banks. Simplefin costs $1/month, and has been working smoothly for me.
I'm not a power user. I used Mint mostly for a window into the current state of my accounts, and to check recent transactions. I find the Monarch UI to be snappier and less laggy than Mint, which makes sense given it seems like Mint was not a very well-funded project at Intuit.
I've toyed around a bit with Monarch's transaction tagging and grouping features and they seem to do what I expect. I've also played with their budgeting feature which is helpful as a way for me to try to keep tabs on my spending per-category month-to-month.
Personally I do prefer the idea of paying for a service like this, but that's because I know it will probably decay if it's not supported monetarily by users. I also prefer my data _not_ be sold to third parties (which Monarch promises.. for now). Unfortunately I suspect the end goal for Monarch is to get acquired by one of the FinTech giants which probably sadly means it sees a similar fate to Mint down the road.
Unfortunately the importers were just terrible compared to Mint's. I had to re-login to each account on Monarch every time I used it, and I would get constant spam SMS notifications from my bank as their importers would run in the background - often throughout the night.
I know that Monarch uses 3rd party importers, so its technically "out of their control" - but it is a key aspect to the usability of their product.
I also understand that there are security trade offs here - in terms of 2FA, but ultimately on the user side here - I need something that is usable, and "just works". Especially if I am going to pay a premium for it.
I tried moneydance for the cross platform/offline operation but it’s kinda clunky.
Free for a couple months, run by a husband/wife duo as a small business, lots of budgeting in addition to the basic account dashboard and transaction syncing you expect.
Instead, I've switched to software that requires me to manually input each transaction (firefly-iii with lychnos, a custom front-end I wrote). This keeps me aware of the budgets since I get in the habit of looking at them each time I make a purchase and record it.