Mint Is Gone — Where Millions of Users Went Next
By Ian, founder of ThriftyOwl.money
For fifteen years, "just use Mint" was the default answer to "how do I track my spending?" In March 2024, that answer stopped working. Mint didn't get sold to a rival, and it didn't fold for lack of users — at its peak it had more than 20 million of them. It was shut down by its own owner, folded into a different product, and its most-used feature was left behind in the process.
Two years on, there still isn't a single place all of those users landed. This is the story of what happened, why a free app with millions of loyal users still couldn't survive, and where the migration actually went.
How Mint got here
Aaron Patzer founded Mint.com in 2006, built around a simple pitch: connect your bank accounts and it would categorize your spending automatically, no manual entry required. It grew fast enough that Intuit — the maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks — bought it in 2009 for roughly $170 million, when Mint had around 1.5 million users.
Under Intuit, growth continued: Mint passed 20 million users by 2016 and still had around 13 million registered users as of 2020. But Patzer himself later described the app as having been "in maintenance mode" for much of that period — widely used, but not meaningfully developed.
In 2020, Intuit made the acquisition that would decide Mint's fate: it bought Credit Karma for roughly $7.1 billion. Credit Karma did the things Mint did — spending and net worth tracking — plus credit monitoring and lending products Mint never had, on a business already generating substantial revenue through loan and card referrals. Intuit now owned two products competing for the same users' attention, and only one of them made real money.
Why a free app with millions of users still couldn't survive
On November 1, 2023, Intuit announced Mint would close on December 31, 2023. The deadline slipped once — Mint's actual last day was March 23, 2024 — but the outcome didn't change: users were pushed to migrate their accounts to Credit Karma.
The clearest explanation for why comes from Val Agostino, Mint's first product manager, writing after the shutdown: "A free personal finance app is simply not a viable business." Connecting to thousands of banks and pulling transaction data isn't free — the aggregation fees Mint paid for every linked account were a real, recurring cost. Against that cost, Mint's only revenue was advertising and referral fees for financial products, the same model as Credit Karma, except Credit Karma ran it better and at greater scale. Once Intuit owned both, keeping the one that lost money in service of the one that made it stopped making sense.
Credit Karma's own support documentation confirmed what many users had feared: budgeting — Mint's signature feature, the reason most people had opened the app in the first place — did not carry over. Neither did custom spending categories. Users could see their linked accounts and transactions in Credit Karma. They could not build a budget around them.
Where users actually went
This is the part where a tidier story would name a single winner. There isn't one. Two years after the shutdown, new roundups of "best Mint alternatives" are still being published regularly — a reasonably strong sign that the migration never consolidated, and that a meaningful number of former Mint users are still looking.
What happened instead was fragmentation along the lines of what people had actually used Mint for:
- Credit Karma picked up a share of users by default — it was the path of least resistance, Intuit's accounts and data migrated automatically, and it's free. It just isn't a budgeting tool.
- Monarch Money, founded by Agostino himself after he left Mint, positioned itself directly at former Mint users, including a Mint data import tool. It's subscription-only, which is the point of his argument: a business model that depends on the user paying, not on selling their attention or data.
- YNAB (You Need a Budget) picked up users who wanted the opposite of Mint's after-the-fact spending reports — a forward-looking, "assign every dollar a job" system. It's also subscription-only, with no ad-supported tier.
- Empower (formerly Personal Capital) drew users who wanted investment tracking alongside budgeting, which Mint never handled well.
- Rocket Money attracted users mainly interested in finding and cancelling unused subscriptions, a narrower job than full budgeting.
- Goodbudget picked up a smaller, more deliberate group: people who wanted the classic envelope method and were fine entering transactions manually rather than linking accounts automatically.
The common thread across nearly every app that gained Mint refugees, other than Credit Karma itself, is that it charges a subscription. That's not a coincidence — it's the same economics that killed Mint, working in reverse. An app that depends on your subscription has a direct incentive to keep the feature you're paying for working. An app that depends on advertising or selling referrals has a direct incentive to do the opposite: harvest your data and route you toward whichever financial product pays the best commission.
The lesson underneath the shutdown
Mint's shutdown wasn't really a product failure. Twenty million people used it and, by Intuit's own numbers from years earlier, more than 90% said it changed how they managed money. It was a business model failure: a free tool that needed millions of dollars a year in data costs, funded by advertising and financial-product referrals, owned by a company that eventually built something that ran the same playbook better.
That's the specific gap ThriftyOwl was built into. No ads, no selling account data to third parties, and a subscription that pays for the aggregation costs directly rather than asking your data to cover them — the model Agostino himself now argues is the only sustainable one for this category. If you're still on Credit Karma wondering where your budget went, or you've been bouncing between two or three apps since 2024 trying to find one that sticks, that's worth trying instead of another temporary fix.
About the author: Ian is the founder of ThriftyOwl.money. He built its Microsoft Money import tools himself and writes ThriftyOwl's white papers on the personal finance software industry.
Sources: Intuit investor relations (Mint.com and Credit Karma acquisition announcements); Bloomberg, "Intuit Is Closing Personal-Finance App Mint, Shifts Users to Credit Karma" (Nov 2023); NerdWallet, "Mint App Closing: What It Means, How to Pick a New Budget Service"; Monarch, "Mint is shutting down. What should Mint users do now?" (Val Agostino); Wikipedia, "Intuit Mint."