Monarch Money is a personal finance app built around budgeting. It was founded in 2018 by Val Agostino — a former product lead on the original Mint — and it became the default recommendation when Mint was retired in early 2024. The pitch is straightforward: a polished, ad-free place to see all your accounts, build a budget you'll actually keep, and track net worth over time, with unusually good support for couples managing money together. After spending real time in it, our short take is that it lives up to the reputation for the job it's built for — and that the job is budgeting, not net-worth tracking.
Quick verdict
Monarch is one of the best budgeting apps available and the most complete Mint replacement for people who used Mint to budget. It's ad-free, it handles couples better than almost anything, and its account syncing is resilient. The catches: there's no free tier, budgeting is the whole product, and crypto support is thin. If you want the net-worth screen without the budgeting workflow, it's more app than you need.
Best for: couples and hands-on budgeters with mostly traditional accounts. Look elsewhere if: you want net worth without budgeting, or you hold crypto beyond Coinbase.
Who Monarch is for
Three kinds of people get the most out of Monarch:
- Couples and households. This is Monarch's strongest use case. Partners each get their own login and a shared, real-time household view, on a single subscription. Very few apps do joint finances this cleanly.
- Hands-on budgeters. If you want to set category budgets, build rules, and forecast cash flow as a weekly or monthly habit, Monarch is designed for exactly that and does it well.
- Ex-Mint users who used the budget. If Mint's categories and transaction workflow were the part you missed, Monarch is the closest modern equivalent — cleaner, ad-free, and more flexible.
What Monarch does well
- Budgeting that's actually flexible. Category budgets, flexible/rollover budgeting, rules, and goals — the core budgeting experience is genuinely good, not an afterthought bolted onto a dashboard.
- Best-in-class couples support. Real-time shared households with separate logins, on one plan, is a standout that most competitors either charge extra for or don't do at all.
- Ad-free, and it doesn't sell your data. Monarch is a paid product precisely so it doesn't have to monetize your financial profile. No ads, no offer walls.
- Resilient account syncing. It connects through multiple aggregators — Plaid, MX, and Mastercard's Finicity — and lets you switch providers per institution when a connection breaks. That redundancy meaningfully reduces the "my bank stopped syncing" pain that plagued Mint.
- Cash-flow forecasting. Monarch projects income and spending forward so you can see the month ahead, not just the month behind. It also syncs home values via Zillow, so real estate and home equity sit in your net worth.
What Monarch is actually like to use
Setup starts with connecting accounts, and Monarch does something most tools don't: it routes through three aggregators -- Plaid, MX, and Finicity -- so if one can't reach your bank, another often can. In practice that means fewer permanently broken connections, though you'll still hit the occasional login that needs re-authenticating after a bank changes its security flow. Budgets are where Monarch earns its reputation. You set category targets, roll unspent amounts forward, and the monthly view makes it clear where money actually went. Editing categories and writing rules for transactions is quick, and the system learns your merchants over time.
The couples setup is genuinely good. You invite a partner, they get their own login at no extra cost, and you both see shared accounts in real time rather than one person exporting screenshots. Household budgeting is the feature Monarch is built around, and it shows.
Day to day, you'll bounce between the web app and mobile. The web app is the one for real work -- reviewing transactions, adjusting budgets, reading trends -- while mobile is better for a quick balance check or categorizing on the go. Sync is reliable more often than not; the friction, when it comes, is almost always a flaky bank connection rather than Monarch itself.
Where Monarch falls short
None of these are dealbreakers for the right user — but they're the reasons people go looking for an alternative.
- Crypto is thin. Real-time sync works with Coinbase only. Every other exchange or on-chain wallet has to be added and updated by hand, and there's no DeFi or multi-chain coverage. If a meaningful part of your net worth lives on-chain, that's a real gap.
- No free tier. You get a 7-day trial (usually with payment details up front), then it's a recurring subscription. Mint was free; Monarch is not, and for someone who just wants to glance at a number, that's a lot of app to pay for.
- Budgeting is the entire product. If you don't want to manage spending categories, most of what you're paying for sits unused. The net-worth view is competent, but it's a feature, not the center of gravity.
- Not built for deep investment analysis. Monarch tracks your investment balances, but it isn't a portfolio-analytics tool — there's nothing like Empower's fee analyzer or allocation checkup, and its retirement projection is light. Investors who want that depth will feel it.
Pricing
Monarch has no free tier — just a 7-day trial. Pricing is straightforward:
| Plan | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Core (monthly) | $14.99/month | Full budgeting, net worth, couples, syncing |
| Core (annual) | $99.99/year | Works out to ~$8.33/month |
| Plus (annual) | $199/year | Power-user tier: advanced forecasting/scenario tools, priority support |
Promo codes discounting the first year appear from time to time, and the annual plan is the sensible choice if you're committing. For a budgeting app you open several times a week, $99.99/year is fair. For a net-worth glance a few times a month, it's steep.
Monarch vs the main alternatives
Copilot Money is the design-led option, with sharp categorization and a polished interface -- but it's Apple-only, so an Android household is out. YNAB takes a different philosophy entirely: zero-based, every-dollar-assigned budgeting that changes how you spend rather than just recording it. If you want a method and not just a mirror, YNAB is the more opinionated pick, though its investment tracking is manual. Empower is free and leans toward investing -- a solid Monte Carlo retirement planner, fee analyzer, and allocation checkup -- but it monetizes by steering you toward its advisory service, and budgeting isn't really the point.
Then there's the net-worth-first camp, which is where we sit. Ascend isn't a budgeting tool -- no transaction categorization, no cash-flow forecasting, and no couples sharing today. What it does is track total net worth across brokerages, banks, 401(k)s, on-chain crypto by public wallet address, and real estate. If budgeting is your priority, Monarch is the better buy. If you mainly want to watch net worth grow, that's a different tool for a different job.
Who should look elsewhere
Monarch is the right tool for budgeting. It's the wrong tool for two groups.
The first is people who used Mint for the net-worth screen and never for the categories. If you don't want to maintain a budget, you'll be paying a recurring fee for a workflow you leave switched off, and the number you actually care about is buried a tab away from the point of the app. A net-worth-first tracker fits that job better — one clear total across accounts, with no spending categories to babysit. Our guide for ex-Mint users walks through that path in detail.
The second is people whose net worth includes crypto beyond a Coinbase balance. Monarch's manual-entry approach means multi-chain holdings, layer-2 balances, and DeFi positions are stale the moment you type them in. If on-chain assets are a real part of your picture, you want a tracker that reads wallets directly — keylessly, by public address — and folds them into the same total as your brokerage and 401(k). We lay out the specific trade-offs, and where each tool wins, in our Monarch Money alternative comparison.
To be clear, "look elsewhere" isn't a knock on Monarch. Many people happily run a budgeting app and a net-worth tracker side by side — Monarch for the monthly budget, something net-worth-first for the total. The mistake is buying a budgeting app when what you wanted was the number.
Verdict: Monarch Money is an excellent budgeting app — polished, ad-free, and the best option out there for couples. If budgeting is the job, it's hard to beat, and $99.99/year is fair for daily use. But it's a budgeting app first, its crypto support is thin, and it has no free tier. If you mainly want the net-worth screen back, or your money spans crypto and traditional accounts, a net-worth-first tracker will serve you better.
Common questions
Is Monarch Money worth it?
If budgeting is what you're after, yes. Monarch is one of the stronger household budgeting tools available, and the real-time couples sharing -- with a partner login included at no extra cost -- is worth the price on its own for two-income homes. At $14.99 a month or $99.99 a year for Core, it isn't cheap, and there's no free tier to fall back on. The question isn't whether Monarch is good; it's whether you'll actually use the budgeting features. If you just want to watch net worth, you're paying for capability you won't touch.
Does Monarch Money have a free version?
No. Monarch offers a 7-day free trial, but after that you're on a paid plan -- $14.99 a month or $99.99 a year for Core, with a Plus tier at $199 a year billed annually. If a genuine free tier matters to you, Empower's dashboard is free forever (monetized through its advisory service), and Ascend has a free tier that doesn't expire and isn't a trial. Monarch is worth trialing, but go in knowing the clock is short and a card comes due at the end.
Can Monarch track crypto?
Partially. Monarch syncs Coinbase balances in real time, but every other exchange or wallet has to be entered and updated manually, which gets stale fast if you hold anything on-chain. If crypto is a meaningful slice of your net worth, that's a real limitation. For comparison, Ascend reads on-chain holdings across 11 networks directly from your public wallet address -- no exchange login, no manual updates -- and flags DeFi positions. If you're mostly a Coinbase user, Monarch is fine; if you're self-custody, look elsewhere for that piece.
Monarch Money vs Mint -- how similar are they?
Monarch is one of the most common places former Mint users landed, and the resemblance is partly intentional: connected accounts, transaction categorization, budgets, and net-worth tracking in one place. The big differences are that Monarch is paid rather than ad-supported, its budgeting is more flexible with rollovers and custom categories, and it adds real-time couples sharing Mint never had. If you liked Mint's layout but wanted something actively maintained and without ads, Monarch will feel familiar and more capable.
Monarch pricing and features verified July 2026 against Monarch's official pricing page (Core $14.99/month or $99.99/year, Plus $199/year, 7-day trial, Coinbase-only real-time crypto sync, Plaid/MX/Finicity aggregators, Zillow real-estate values). Prices change — confirm before you subscribe.