What happened to Mint
Intuit shut Mint down on March 23, 2024, after more than a decade as one of the most widely used budgeting apps around. Users were pointed to Credit Karma, also owned by Intuit, as the official next step. The migration carried over connected accounts and a net-worth view, but not the budgets, categories, goals, or transaction history people had built up over years. For a lot of people, Credit Karma was never really a replacement: it's a credit-monitoring product with some account aggregation bolted on, not a budgeting home.
If you're reading this because you typed "Mint alternative" or "what happened to Mint" into a search bar, you're not alone, and you didn't do anything wrong. The app just isn't there anymore.
What Mint actually was
Worth saying plainly, since it's easy to romanticize a tool the moment it's gone: Mint was free, and it paid for itself with ads and financial-product referrals. That business model quietly shaped the product. Categorization was automatic but often approximate, budgeting tools were thin compared to what people actually needed, and the app's real job, underneath the dashboards, was aggregating your accounts in one place so it had something to show you between the ads. It did that aggregation well. It was never built to be a serious goal-tracking or categorization-transparency tool, because that wasn't the business it was in.
None of that is a knock on the people who loved it. A free tool that got you looking at your money regularly did real good. It just wasn't built to last as a business, and it wasn't built to go deep.
Why Bao is a reasonable next home
The part of Mint worth keeping is the habit: connecting your accounts once and having your money show up automatically, without re-entering anything by hand. Bao keeps that. Connect your accounts and balances and transactions stay current on their own: the same convenience, minus the ad model underneath it.
What's different is what happens after the sync. Every transaction shows whether it was sorted automatically, suggested, matched by a rule, or typed in by hand (UNCATEGORIZED → SUGGESTION → RULE → MANUAL) — so you can always see why something landed where it did, and a category you set by hand is never quietly overwritten later. That's categorization you can check, not a guess you have to take on faith. Goals carry real projections, with the assumptions shown, so you can see whether you're actually on track instead of just watching a balance move. And the design is calm on purpose — no ad units competing for your attention, no dashboard trying to upsell you a credit card.
Bao does the hard part: the sync, the sorting, the flagging of what needs your eye — so checking in takes minutes, not a monthly project.
Then vs. now
| Mint (2007–2024) | Bao (now) | |
|---|---|---|
| Business model | Free, funded by ads and financial-product referrals | One plan, 30-day free trial (card required, first charge at day 30) — see pricing |
| Categorization | Automatic, but a black box — no visible reasoning, easy to feel wrong and hard to fix for good | Clear and visible: every transaction shows how it got sorted (UNCATEGORIZED → SUGGESTION → RULE → MANUAL), and a manual call sticks |
| Budgeting & goals | Thin — aggregation-first, budgeting tools were an afterthought | Real goal tracking with honest, illustrative projections based on your own numbers |
| Net worth | Available, and one of the few pieces that carried over to Credit Karma | Real-time, alongside categorized spending and goals, not a standalone feature |
| Design | Ad units and cross-sell prompts throughout | Calm by design — one clear action at a time, no ads |
| Status | Shut down March 23, 2024 | Actively built and supported |
Goal projections are illustrative estimates based on your own inputs and stated assumptions, not guarantees of future results.
Picking the habit back up
You don't need to have loved everything about Mint to miss the habit it gave you — a few minutes, now and then, actually looking at where your money stands. That habit is worth keeping even though the app that started it is gone. Bao is built to be the place it continues: automatic sync so nothing depends on you remembering to update it, categorization you can actually see the reasoning behind, and goals that tell you the truth about your trajectory instead of just showing you a chart. Wherever Mint left off, Bao picks it back up.
Frequently asked questions
Intuit shut Mint down on March 23, 2024, after more than a decade as one of the most widely used budgeting apps. Users were pointed to Credit Karma, also owned by Intuit, as the official next step.
No. Mint shut down in March 2024 and Intuit has directed its users to Credit Karma instead — there's no indication Mint itself is returning.
Bao doesn't import a Mint export file directly. The way to get going is connecting your bank accounts — from there, syncing and categorization start working automatically.
It depends what you need. Credit Karma is a genuinely good, free place to check your credit score, but it's a credit-monitoring product with account aggregation added on, not a purpose-built budgeting home the way Mint was.
Bao has no permanent free tier, but every new subscription starts with a 30-day free trial (a card is required, and the first charge is on day 30). After that, there is one plan: $10 per month, or $96 billed once a year (the equivalent of $8 a month). Every feature is included, there are no ads, and you can cancel at any time.
See Bao for yourself.
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