Mint Alternatives in 2026: What Actually Replaced It
Mint shut down in early 2024. Intuit pointed everyone at Credit Karma, which is not a budgeting app and never became one. Two years on, the dust has settled enough to say what actually replaced it, what those replacements cost, and why every single one of them wants money when Mint did not.
What Actually Happened
Intuit announced Mint's shutdown in November 2023 and closed it on January 1, 2024. Users were offered a migration path to Credit Karma, another Intuit property, which imported account connections and some historical data.
The migration was technically smooth and strategically beside the point. Credit Karma shows you balances, transactions, and credit score. It does not do the thing Mint users actually relied on, which was setting category budgets and being told when you were about to blow through one. People did not leave Mint because the import broke. They left because the replacement was a different kind of product wearing a familiar login.
Mint Was Free Because You Were the Product
This is the part worth internalizing, because it explains everything about what came next.
Mint did not make money from budgeting. It made money from lead generation: credit card offers, loan referrals, and the affiliate revenue attached to them. Your transaction data was what made those recommendations targetable. The budgeting features were the reason you showed up; the offers were the business.
That model got worse over time for reasons that had nothing to do with Mint's engineering. Affiliate margins compressed, the product stagnated, and eventually it was worth more to Intuit as a funnel into Credit Karma than as a standalone app. A free product whose revenue comes from somewhere other than its users will eventually be optimized for wherever the revenue actually comes from. That is not cynicism, it is just arithmetic.
Why this matters for your choice: every serious Mint replacement now charges a subscription. That looks like the market getting greedier. It is closer to the opposite. When you pay directly, the product's incentive is to keep you happy rather than to keep you clicking offers. The tradeoff is real, and so is the bill.
What the Replacements Cost in 2026
Monarch Money
$14.99/mo or $99.99/yr (Core) / $199/yr (Plus)Monarch picked up the largest share of the Mint exodus and has kept building. It does account aggregation, budgets, net worth tracking, investment views, and shared household budgeting, which is genuinely rare and genuinely useful for couples. In 2026 it split into two tiers, adding a Plus plan aimed at people who want to model longer-term financial scenarios.
- Closest feature-for-feature Mint replacement
- Excellent shared and household budgeting
- Strong net worth and investment tracking
- Roughly $100/yr before you see anything
- Feature surface can feel heavy if you only want budgets
- The new two-tier split moves some features up a price band
YNAB
$14.99/mo or $109/yrYNAB is not really a Mint replacement, and treating it as one is how people bounce off it. Mint told you what you spent. YNAB asks you to assign every dollar a job before you spend it. For people stuck in paycheck-to-paycheck cycles it is genuinely transformative, and for people who just wanted a spending dashboard it is exhausting.
- The method actually changes behavior
- Outstanding educational material and community
- Mature, stable, well-supported
- Most expensive on this list
- Steep learning curve, and it demands ongoing effort
- Wrong tool if you wanted passive tracking
Copilot Money
$13/mo or $95/yrCopilot has the strongest design and the best automatic categorization in the category. Its long-standing limitation was that it only ran on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, which disqualified it for a lot of people. It added web access in December 2025, which makes it a real option for Android users for the first time, though the mobile experience is still clearly built for iOS first.
- Best-in-class design and interaction
- Very good automatic categorization
- Cheapest of the three premium options
- Still Apple-first despite web access
- No meaningful free tier to evaluate it
- Lighter on shared or household budgeting
Rocket Money
Free tier / roughly $48 to $60/yr for PremiumRocket Money is the closest thing to Mint's spiritual model: a usable free tier funded by other products, in this case bill negotiation and subscription cancellation, which take a cut of what they save you. The free tier caps you at two custom budget categories, which is the point at which most people upgrade. Premium pricing is unusual in that you choose your own price within a range.
- Genuinely useful free tier
- Subscription detection is excellent and often pays for itself
- Cheaper than the premium tier apps
- Budgeting is the secondary product, and it shows
- Two categories free is restrictive by design
- Bill negotiation takes a percentage of your savings
EveryDollar
Free (manual only) / $17.99/mo or $79.99/yr for PremiumEveryDollar implements the same zero-based method as YNAB, wrapped in the Ramsey framework and its debt snowball emphasis. The catch is the free tier: it is manual entry only, and bank connection sits behind Premium. If automatic import is what you are looking for, the free tier is not a trial of the paid product, it is a different product.
- Simple and opinionated, easy to start
- Strong debt payoff focus
- Free tier is fully usable if you do not want bank sync
- Highest monthly price on this list
- Bank connection is Premium only
- Comes with a financial philosophy you may not want
PocketGuard
Free tier / $34.99/yr for PlusPocketGuard reduces budgeting to a single number, what is left after bills, goals, and necessities. That narrowness is the whole design, and for people who found Mint's category grid overwhelming it works well. It is also the cheapest paid tier here by a wide margin.
- Cheapest paid option on this list
- Very low cognitive overhead
- Good for impulse-spending control
- Shallow if you want real category analysis
- Limited reporting and history
- Free tier is quite restricted
A Spreadsheet
FreeWorth saying plainly because the app industry never will: a Google Sheet costs nothing, never changes its pricing, never gets acquired, never sends a migration email, and does exactly what you tell it. The reason it is not the answer for most people is that it has no reminders, no phone-friendly entry, and no one to blame but yourself when you stop updating it.
- Free forever and fully under your control
- Infinitely customizable
- Cannot be shut down by an acquisition
- Entirely manual, with no nudges
- Painful on a phone
- You maintain it, forever
The Pattern Nobody Says Out Loud
Line the options up and something becomes obvious: you are no longer choosing between free and paid. You are choosing what you pay with.
Monarch, YNAB, and Copilot take dollars, roughly $95 to $110 a year. Rocket Money takes a cut of your negotiated bills and shows you offers. Mint took your data and sold your attention to lenders. The spreadsheet takes your time.
There is no option where budgeting software is genuinely free and nobody is paid, because bank connections cost real money per account per month. Any app offering automatic import to a large free user base is paying that bill somehow. Sometimes the answer is venture funding, which is a countdown rather than a business model. Sometimes it is your data. It is worth knowing which before you invest a year of history in a product.
How To Actually Choose
Most of these comparisons end with a feature matrix, which is the least useful possible output. Three questions will get you further:
Do you want to observe your spending or change it? Observation points to Monarch or Copilot. Change points to YNAB or EveryDollar. Getting this backwards is the single most common reason people churn out of a budgeting app in the first month.
How much friction will you actually tolerate? Be honest rather than aspirational. The app you will still be using in March beats the app that is theoretically better in January.
Do you want to connect your bank at all? If not, your list shrinks immediately, and most of it becomes free. Manual entry is a legitimate way to work and it happens to be the one that makes you notice each purchase. If you are undecided, I wrote a longer piece on whether it is safe to link your bank account to a budgeting app, including the questions worth asking first.
Where BudgetSimpler Fits, Including Where It Does Not
I built BudgetSimpler for a specific person: someone who tried Mint, found it fine, tried YNAB after Mint closed, and quit in the first week because it wanted more attention than they had to give.
It does income and expense tracking, category budgets with visual progress, recurring bills on a calendar, and debt payoff tracking. Manual entry is the default and a complete way to use it. Bank connection exists, is optional, and is off until you turn it on. There are no ads, no third-party analytics, and no data selling, and you can export everything as CSV, Excel, PDF, or JSON whenever you want.
Where it is the wrong choice, plainly: if you want investment portfolio tracking, it does not do that. If you want shared household budgeting with a partner, Monarch is meaningfully better and it is not close. If zero-based budgeting is the thing you actually want, use YNAB or EveryDollar, because a simpler app will not teach you the method. And if you want a mature product with years of polish behind it, I am earlier than the others on this list and it would be strange to pretend otherwise.
One practical note for ex-Mint users: whichever you choose, your Mint history is gone and no tool will recover it. Start from the current month rather than trying to reconstruct three years. Backfilled history you did not live through does not change behavior, and the reconstruction project is where most fresh starts quietly die.
Want the simplest option on this list?
BudgetSimpler takes about thirty seconds to start, works entirely on manual entry, and never requires a bank login. If it is not the right fit, export your data and delete the account.
Start tracking free