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Mint is gone. What should you replace it with?
Intuit discontinued Mint and directed users toward Credit Karma. Pick your replacement by naming which part of Mint you actually miss: if it is automatic transaction import or the spending reports, choose a bank-syncing budget app, not us. If Mint mostly showed you charts that never changed what you did, a manual envelope app is a different kind of tool and worth trying.
Start by naming what you are replacing
We make Envelope Budget, an envelope app, so we have an obvious interest here. Given that, the most useful thing we can do is tell you when not to pick us. Mint did three separate jobs and most people are only mourning one of them. The first was automatic transaction import: it connected to your accounts and pulled everything in without you doing anything. The second was after-the-fact reporting: categorized spending, charts, month over month. The third, for a large number of people, was the feeling of being on top of money without any behavior actually changing. Decide which of those you lost. The answer determines the whole rest of the decision and it takes about thirty seconds of honesty.
If you miss the import, use a syncing app
If what you valued was that everything showed up on its own, go get a bank-syncing budget app and do not let anyone talk you into manual entry. There are several mature ones covering iPhone, Android and the web, most on paid subscriptions now. Yes, that is a change from Mint, and it is worth understanding why: Mint was free because it monetized offers and advertising alongside your financial data, and the current generation of tools mostly charges a subscription instead. You are not being gouged, you are seeing the price that was always there. Compare a few, take the trials, and pick on whether the categorization is good enough that you will not spend every Sunday correcting it.
If you miss the charts, same answer
Reporting is a syncing app's strength, not ours. If your use of Mint was opening it once or twice a month to see where the money went, an app that imports and categorizes automatically will reproduce that experience, and we will not. We have no import, no aggregation and no month-over-month category report built from your bank data. What we have is a record of what you typed in, which is only as complete as your typing. A budgeting tool that gives you an incomplete report is worse than one that gives you a complete one, so do not choose us for reporting.
If Mint never changed what you did, this is different
This is the group we are actually for. A lot of people had Mint installed for years, watched the categories fill in, felt vaguely bad in the restaurants row, and spent the same amount the next month. That is not a failure of discipline, it is a structural feature of reporting: the information arrives after the decision. Envelope budgeting inverts the order. You assign your take-home pay across envelopes before the month starts, then log each purchase as it happens, so the number you see is what is left rather than what is gone. The cost is that you have to type. The benefit is that the typing happens at the register, which is the only moment the number can still change anything.
What the manual trade actually costs
Be clear-eyed about this before you install anything. Manual entry takes a few seconds per purchase, and it fails completely the week you stop doing it, with no partial credit. There is no import to catch you up, and if you go dark for two weeks your envelopes are fiction. The compensations are real but narrow: no banking credentials leave your phone because there is nothing to connect, forgotten subscriptions become visible because you have to type them, and the act of logging is itself the awareness. Ours is iPhone only, with a home-screen and lock-screen widget, savings goals with a vision board and six themes. Current Plus pricing lives on our comparison page rather than here, so it cannot go stale in a page nobody remembers to update; the App Store listing is always authoritative.
Rebuilding your Mint categories as envelopes
If you go the envelope route, do not recreate Mint's category tree. Mint had dozens of categories because it was sorting transactions after the fact, and fine-grained sorting is cheap when a machine does it. Envelopes are decisions you have to make and remember, so the list has to be short. Look at your last three months in whatever export or statement you still have, find the four or five categories where the amounts moved the most from month to month, and make those envelopes. Everything fixed and automatic goes in one Bills envelope, because you do not decide about rent at a register. Start with six envelopes. You can add a seventh when you miss it.
Common questions
What happened to Mint?
Intuit discontinued Mint and directed users toward Credit Karma, another Intuit product. That is the fact of record; we are not going to speculate about the business reasons. Practically, it means the accounts you had linked are no longer feeding a budgeting view, and anything you want to keep should be exported if you still have access. If you have already lost access, your bank's own transaction export for the last twelve months is usually enough to rebuild a category picture.
Is there a free replacement for Mint?
There are free and freemium options, but understand what free meant in Mint's case: it was supported by advertising and offers presented alongside your financial data. Current tools mostly charge a subscription instead. If free is a hard requirement, a spreadsheet is genuinely the strongest free option and always will be. It requires manual entry too, and if you are willing to maintain one, an app is a convenience rather than a necessity.
Do I have to link my bank to any of these?
No. Manual-entry budget apps, including ours, have no connection to your accounts at all, so there are no credentials to hand over and nothing to breach on our side. The cost is that nothing appears without you typing it. If your reason for wanting no bank link is privacy, that trade is probably worth it to you. If your reason is that you forgot your bank password, that is not a reason to take on manual entry. Some people run both: a syncing tool for the record, envelopes for the two categories that leak.
Run this budget on your phone
Envelope Budget puts these envelopes in your pocket. Assign every amount, log spending as it happens, and see what is actually left.
Get Envelope BudgetiPhone · manual entry, no bank connection · 7-day free trial