Mint, one of the first budgeting apps, is shutting down
Mint, one of the first and most popular personal finance apps, is shutting down and its owner, Intuit, is encouraging users to switch to Credit Karma, the platform that offers free credit scores and helps users keep track of their money.
Intuitive said Tuesday that it was “reimagining” Mint as part of Credit Karma and that Mint users could switch to Credit Karma. Credit Karma will acquire Mint effective Jan. 1, Intuit said in a statement Friday.
Mint has been one of the best online budgeting tools for years, with 3.6 million active users in 2021. according to Bloomberg. It was introduced in 2007 and was a game changer in the world of personal finance. It became increasingly popular as more people turned to free online services to create budgets and track their income and expenses.
The news that Mint would close caused widespread outrage from loyal Mint userssome of whom said they were especially upset that Credit Karma wouldn’t offer the same budget tools.
Steve Kim, a software engineer in Seattle, said he had been using Mint for three years and was disappointed when he found out on TikTok that it was closing. Mr Kim, 42, said he was looking for alternatives but would consider Credit Karma.
“I just looked it up and it doesn’t look great,” he said. “But I might try if it’s an easy transfer.”
Intuit said in its statement Friday that it was “giving Mint users sufficient time to prepare for this change before their access to Mint ends.”
Intuit, the owner of widely used financial software applications such as TurboTax, bought Mint from its founder in 2009 for $170 million. At the time of the acquisition, privately held Mint had 1.5 million users tracking nearly $50 billion in assets and $200 billion in transactions.
Credit Karma helps its 130 million users improve their credit scores and access personalized loan recommendations. Mint users will be able to transfer their linked financial accounts, historical balances and wealth charts to Credit Karma, and they will be able to continue to track their expenses and assets and view cash flow over time, Intuit said.
But Credit Karma doesn’t offer a budgeting tool that lets users set a monthly budget and budgets by category, a favorite feature of Mint users. Mint allowed users to link their spending accounts to the service so that purchases could be automatically categorized as restaurants, groceries, or bills, making it easier to track spending.
In August, Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi said Credit Karma had revenue of $1.6 billion in the fiscal quarter ended July 31. a decrease of 9 percent compared to the same period a year earlier. He said in an investor conference call that the company expects annual revenue growth of 20 to 25 percent in the long term.
Other popular budgeting apps include PocketGuard, Simplifi, and You Need a Budget. In the days after Intuit announced Mint would close, Monarch, a subscription-based personal finance app, said it had seen an increase in new users coming from Mint.
Monarch CEO and co-founder Val Agostino said it made no sense for Intuit to continue investing in both Mint and Credit Karma given the significant costs of running data aggregation and personal finance apps.
“Mint has always been a money loser,” Mr. Agostino, a former product manager at Mint, said in an interview. “Given the revenue that Credit Karma generated, it makes sense to go that route.”
Consumer debt has reached worrying levels in recent months, with U.S. credit card balances rising to more than $1 trillion, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported in August, before student loan payments resumed. Credit card balances, the most common form of household debt, were more than 16 percent higher in the second quarter of this year than in the same period in 2022.