What the End of Mint Means for Users and the Future of Budgeting Apps
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Here's your money briefing for Monday, November 20th.
What is happening with Mint and why is it shutting down in 2024?
I'm Arianna Aspuru for The Wall Street Journal. Budgeting app Mint is shutting down, leaving millions of users searching for a new place to track their spending.
What should Mint users do now — how can they export or safeguard their data?
Next year, it'll join a packed graveyard of apps that have struggled to stay afloat.
The market's not that big. People don't want to pay for their budgeting. You know, it's kind of counterintuitive. It's hard to monetize for that reason.
Why did Intuit decide to retire Mint and push users toward Credit Karma?
It's something that a few people like, and the few people who like it, they're usually not willing to pay for it.
We'll speak to WSJ personal finance reporter Imani Moise after the break.
This podcast is brought to you by ReliaQuest. Cyber criminals are constantly attacking. They want your data.
What Mint features are users losing when the app goes dark?
They want your identity. They want your innovation. ReliaQuest fortifies your business with agentic defense, AI that detects, contains, and eliminates cyber threats in minutes. It helps your security team move faster at the work that matters most to protect the business now and delivers insights to help them predict what's next. ReliaQuest, agentic defense for the enterprise. Learn more at ReliaQuest.com.
How did Mint make money and why was its ad/referral model a problem?
That's R-E-L-I-A-Q-U-E-S-T.com.
Mint, one of the most popular budgeting apps, is preparing to shut down at the start of the new year. So what does this mean for its users and people on the hunt for a new budgeting app to help them with their finances? WSJ personal finance reporter Imani Moise joins me. So Imani, before we get into the bigger picture here, tell me what's happening with Mint.
Mint is shutting down.
Which other budgeting apps have failed or been shuttered, and why did they struggle?
So that means if you have an account, you should probably download all of your data just so that you could have it for safekeeping because it's really unclear what's going to happen to it once the app goes dark. So why is this happening? Mint was bought in 2009 by a company called Intuit. You may have heard of it, the company behind TurboTax. And they've made the decision that they're shutting it down. And they've invited all of the Mint users to transition to Credit Karma, where they can do some expense tracking, but they won't be able to categorize or have monthly budgets in the same way that Mint allowed. So Credit Karma can do some of the things, but not all of them. Right. It's primarily a credit monitoring site where you can check your credit score and kind of compare different offers if you're looking for loans.
What are some of the things that the app did offer that users are now losing out on?
So what was really cool about Mint, especially when it first started, was that it allowed you to see your entire financial life in one place. You link your different bank accounts, and then it shows you your balance, the different transactions, so where you've been spending money, and it could calculate your net worth and show you where you are over time. A lot of people, especially the ones who have used it for a really long time, they said it's been really cool to see themselves go from a negative net worth to positive net worth in a visual chart form.
So how did Mint make its money?
Which budgeting and personal-finance apps still exist and how are they monetizing today?
Its primary revenue driver were ads and referrals from those ads. So if you log on to Mint, either online or on the app, you would probably see a whole bunch of offers for either different credit cards or brokerage accounts. And Mint got paid every time a customer successfully signed up for those accounts in the ads. And the problem with that was that the people who would log into Mint, so the people most likely to see those ads, were for the most part the people least likely to need those ads.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:36
2
What is happening with Mint and why is it shutting down in 2024?
0:36–0:48
3
What should Mint users do now — how can they export or safeguard their data?
0:48–1:00
4
Why did Intuit decide to retire Mint and push users toward Credit Karma?
1:00–1:31
5
What Mint features are users losing when the app goes dark?
1:31–1:52
6
How did Mint make money and why was its ad/referral model a problem?
1:52–2:26
7
Which other budgeting apps have failed or been shuttered, and why did they struggle?
2:26–3:41
8
Which budgeting and personal-finance apps still exist and how are they monetizing today?
3:41–8:40
Speakers
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