Mint Is Gone — Here Are Your Best Options in 2026

Mint, the personal finance app that once had over 20 million users, was officially shut down by Intuit on March 23, 2024. Users were migrated to Credit Karma, which has a fundamentally different purpose (credit monitoring, not expense tracking). This post answers the questions people actually ask after the shutdown.

When did Mint shut down and why?

Mint shut down on March 23, 2024 after Intuit announced its closure in late 2023. The app's business model — free in exchange for showing users targeted ads and partner financial product recommendations — collapsed once Apple's App Tracking Transparency and Google's privacy changes broke the ad-tech pipeline that Mint relied on.

By Intuit's own admission, Mint had become unprofitable to maintain. Rather than charge users a subscription, Intuit chose to redirect them to Credit Karma — a credit-monitoring product Intuit had acquired in 2020 — which serves a different (and more lucrative) advertising niche around credit cards and loans.

What happened to Mint users after the shutdown?

Existing Mint users were given the option to migrate to Credit Karma. Migration moved over connected accounts and net-worth tracking, but it did not bring across the budgeting and category-spending features Mint users actually relied on. Credit Karma is a credit monitoring product, not a budgeting app.

Many Mint users discovered after migrating that the budget tracking they came for simply was not there — sending them back into the market for a real budgeting app. Year-over-year search volume for "Mint alternative" remains elevated nearly two years after shutdown.

Is Credit Karma a good Mint replacement?

No, not for budgeting. Credit Karma is excellent at credit-score monitoring and credit-card recommendations — that is its core product. It does not offer envelope budgeting, custom categories, monthly budget targets per category, or savings goals in any meaningful way. If you used Mint primarily for those features, Credit Karma will not replace it.

What is the best free Mint alternative in 2026?

For a free, no-ads, no-data-selling alternative, Vento has the most generous free tier — unlimited local transactions, no bank-linking required, and analytics that match what Mint offered for category spending. For users who specifically want automatic bank import (Mint's headline feature), Empower's free tier is the closest match, though it leans toward investment tracking rather than budgeting.

Compared in detail: Vento vs Mint · Vento vs Monarch Money · Vento vs YNAB · Vento vs Goodbudget.

What should you look for in a Mint replacement?

Pick based on the trade-off you actually care about. Bank-linked apps win on convenience but require sharing credentials with a third-party aggregator (typically Plaid). Manual-entry apps win on privacy and offline use but ask you to log spending as you go. There is no neutral choice — every "free" budgeting app in 2026 makes money somehow, so always check the business model.

Concretely, ask these five questions before picking:

• Where is my data stored — on my device, or on the company's servers?
• Is bank linking required, or optional?
• How does the company actually make money? (Ads? Data resale? Paid subscriptions?)
• Does the app work offline?
• Can I export my data if I leave?

For the deeper why behind that first question, this post on local-first finance apps walks through the architectural difference between cloud-based and on-device storage. For a structural look at how to choose between methods rather than apps, see the five-method comparison.