When Intuit announced Mint was closing, it recommended users move to Credit Karma — a product that couldn't budget and couldn't really track net worth, and that most Mint users bounced off quickly. So somewhere north of twenty million people went looking on their own. The early scramble was noisy: every finance app ran "Mint is shutting down" campaigns, referral offers flew around, and the same five or six names came up again and again. Two years later it's clearer where people actually settled, and why. This is a look back at where the major replacements ended up — and at a group the whole market quietly skipped.
Where the major ex-Mint apps ended up
Monarch Money
Monarch won the headline battle. Built by a former Mint product lead, it was the app most reviewers and most word-of-mouth pointed to, and it converted a large share of the budgeting crowd. It's ad-free, it does couples better than anything else, and its multi-aggregator syncing fixed the broken-connection frustration that dogged Mint's final years. The trade-off is that it's a paid, budgeting-first product with no free tier — so it captured the people who used Mint to budget, and asked everyone else to pay for a workflow they didn't want. We go deeper in our Monarch Money review.
Copilot Money
Copilot became the aesthete's choice — the best-looking budgeting app in the category, with smart AI categorization and a genuinely delightful feel on Apple hardware. It picked up design-conscious users who lived on iPhone and Mac. Its ceiling is its platform: there's still no native Android app, so it never captured the half of the market that isn't on Apple. Like Monarch, it's budgeting-first and paid-only after a trial, and its crypto stops at Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Empower
Empower (the former Personal Capital) absorbed the investors. Its dashboard stayed free — funded by an optional wealth-management service — and its portfolio tools are genuinely strong: retirement Monte Carlo, a fee analyzer, allocation checkups. For ex-Mint users whose real interest was their investments and net worth rather than budgeting, it was the natural home. The catches were the wealth-management sales calls and manual-only crypto, but for a free, net-worth-leaning dashboard it remained hard to argue with.
Rocket Money
Rocket Money took the users whose pain was subscription creep. Its hook — find and cancel the recurring charges you forgot about — is a concrete, immediate win, and it kept a real free tier that undercut the paid apps. It's lighter on true net-worth tracking and its crypto is manual, so it landed as a spending-and-subscriptions tool more than a Mint replacement in full. But for people who mostly wanted to plug leaks, it was enough.
YNAB
YNAB didn't chase the Mint crowd so much as absorb the subset ready to change their behavior. Its zero-based, give-every-dollar-a-job method is more demanding than Mint ever was, and the people who adopt it tend to be devoted. It has a net-worth report, but wealth tracking isn't the point — spending discipline is. It captured the ex-Mint users who decided the shutdown was a good moment to get serious about a budget, and left everyone else to the general-purpose apps.
What the migration revealed about personal finance apps
The clearest lesson of the last two years is that the market rebuilt itself around budgeting, not around Mint. Mint was a free, general-purpose ledger; almost everything that replaced it is a specialized, paid product with a point of view. The exodus proved that most people who say they miss Mint actually miss a habit — the daily check-in — and vendors monetized that habit rather than the underlying data.
That surfaced a free-versus-paid tension Mint had papered over. Mint was free because ads paid for it. Afterward only two credible free tiers survived, and neither is free the way Mint was: Empower funds its dashboard with a 0.89% advisory fee on managed assets, and Rocket Money leans on subscription-cancellation and bill-negotiation success fees. Every other serious option now sits around $95 to $110 a year. Someone always pays — the only question is whether it's you, an advisor, or an ad platform.
The quieter win was infrastructure. Mint's final years were defined by broken connections, and the survivors hedged: Monarch runs Plaid, MX and Finicity so a dead link can fail over instead of stranding an account. Crypto, meanwhile, stayed an afterthought — most replacements still take manual entry, and even Copilot's keyless support stops at Bitcoin, Ethereum and a handful of exchanges, with no Solana, L2s, or DeFi.
The slice that didn't get a real replacement
Notice the pattern: four of those five are budgeting tools, and the fifth is a free investing dashboard. That's not an accident — it's who Mint's replacements were built for. But a meaningful slice of Mint's users never used it that way. They opened Mint for the net-worth screen: total assets, total debts, one number, a line over time. They skipped the categories entirely.
That group got the worst of the exodus. The budgeting apps ask them to adopt a workflow they never wanted and pay for it monthly. Empower comes closest, but it's US-only, investment-centric, and treats crypto as a manual afterthought — and plenty of these users now hold crypto that Mint never touched. So they've been limping along on a spreadsheet plus three apps, or paying for a budgeting tool and ignoring 80% of it. Two years after the shutdown, the net-worth-first, no-budgeting, often-crypto-holding ex-Mint user still didn't have an obvious home. That's the exact gap Ascend was built to fill — a private net-worth number across traditional accounts and keyless crypto, with no budgeting attached. If that's you, start with our page for ex-Mint users.
Where that leaves you
The honest summary is that there's no single Mint successor — there are lanes. If you want to budget, Monarch or YNAB will serve you well. If you want a free investing dashboard, Empower is still the one to beat. If your problem was subscriptions, Rocket Money solved it. And if what you actually missed was the net-worth screen — the number, not the categories — the tool for that finally exists. For the full field, side by side, see our guide to the best Mint alternatives.
How to pick your own path now
If you're still searching, decide by the job you actually did in Mint rather than by which app has the loudest fans.
- You want to change how you spend. Pick a budgeting-first tool. YNAB if you're ready for a strict envelope method; Monarch if you'd rather categorize after the fact — and it's the clear choice if you're budgeting with a partner.
- You're on Android. Cross Copilot off the list; it's Apple-only. Monarch, Empower, and Rocket Money all ship native Android.
- You mostly plugged leaks. Rocket Money's free tier and cancellation tools cover that without a subscription.
- You opened Mint for the net-worth number and hold crypto beyond an exchange. That's the lane we built Ascend for. Be honest with yourself first: we don't budget, categorize transactions, or do couples yet. If you need any of those, one of the tools above will serve you better.
Common questions
What happened to Mint?
Intuit shut Mint down in March 2024 and pointed users toward Credit Karma, which couldn't budget or track net worth the way Mint had. Roughly twenty million people were left to find their own replacement, which is why the migration scattered across a dozen different apps.
What is the best Mint replacement?
There isn't one — it depends on the job. Monarch and YNAB are the strongest budgeting successors, Empower remains the best free investing dashboard, and Rocket Money is the pick if your real problem was forgotten subscriptions. If you used Mint mainly for the net-worth number, that's the gap we built Ascend to fill.
Where did most Mint users go?
The budgeters largely settled on Monarch, with Copilot taking the design-conscious Apple crowd and YNAB the people ready to change their habits. Investors gravitated to Empower's free dashboard, and the subscription-weary went to Rocket Money. The net-worth-first users were the last to find a real fit.
Bottom line: the Mint exodus split by job. Budgeters, investors, and subscription-cutters all found homes in the first year. The people who used Mint purely for net worth were the last to get a real fit — and the ones most likely to hold crypto the old apps still can't see.