Mint Was Free. Why Is Every Replacement $15 a Month?

Mint shut down in March 2024 and I spent probably two weeks looking for something equivalent that was also free. Didn't find it easily.

Every app that got recommended in the Mint refugee threads was either a 30-day trial that converted to $10-15/month, or it had a free tier that was basically broken - like 2 accounts linked, no categories, export locked behind paywall. I tried a few of them. The trials were fine. I just didn't want to pay $15 a month to track spending.

The weird thing is Mint was a real product. Full features, unlimited accounts, worked fine. It was free because Intuit was monetizing the data and the credit card recommendations. When that business model stopped making sense for them they just shut it down. So now we have this gap where the free option is gone and everything left costs money.

There's a fair argument that $10-15 a month for a financial tool is reasonable. If it saves you money it pays for itself, whatever. But a lot of Mint users weren't heavy power users. They just wanted a simple view of where their money was going. That doesn't need to cost $15 a month.

I landed on DrakeAI which has a real free tier - not a trial, actually free. You log expenses by typing, it categorizes them, you get summaries. It's not identical to Mint. There's no bank sync, so you're entering things manually instead of it pulling from your accounts. For me that turned out to be fine, I was always having to fix Mint's auto-categorization anyway so the manual logging isn't much more work.

But yeah, the Mint gap is still real two years later. The tools that existed to replace it mostly decided it was a premium problem worth charging for. Maybe that's right. Still annoying.