What changed for you
- You lost the net-worth screen. The one view that told you, at a glance, whether your financial life was moving up or down — gone overnight.
- You lost the aggregator. One place that pulled banks, cards, loans, and investments into a single total. Now it is a folder of separate apps and logins.
- The obvious replacements are budgeting apps. Monarch, Copilot, Rocket Money — all good at spending categories, all built to make budgeting the daily habit. If you never used Mint that way, most of the product is overhead.
- Crypto still does not fit. If part of your net worth is on-chain, the Mint-style tools either ignore it or make you type balances in by hand.
What Ascend does
- Read-only account sync. Brokerages through SnapTrade, banks and 401(k)s through Plaid — connections that can see balances but can never trade or move money.
- Keyless crypto across 11 networks. Bitcoin, Ethereum and its major layer-2s, Solana, and more — read by public wallet address only. No seed phrase, no private keys, no exchange login.
- Real estate that updates itself. Your home is valued with the official FHFA House Price Index and appreciates forward each sync, with a one-tap override whenever you get a real appraisal.
- No budgeting required. There are no spending categories to maintain and no transactions to clean up. The total number is the product.
- A genuinely useful free tier. Your full net worth, a net-worth percentile, and a basic retirement projection — free, before you pay anything.
- Pro at $99/yr adds automatic brokerage sync, real return-vs-market, a stock watchlist, and deeper planning — not a budgeting workflow.
How it compares
| Net-worth-first | Budgeting | Free tier | Crypto support | Real estate | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ascend | Yes | No · by design | Yes | Keyless · 11 networks | Yes · FHFA index |
| Monarch | No · budgeting-first | Yes · core | No · 7-day trial | Coinbase only | Yes · Zillow |
| Copilot Money | No · budgeting-first | Yes · core | No · trial only | BTC/ETH + exchanges | Yes · Zillow |
| Empower | Yes · investing | Basic cash flow | Yes | Manual entry only | Yes · Zillow |
The honest read: Ascend and Empower are the two net-worth-first options here, and Empower is excellent and free — if you mostly hold stocks and funds. The gap Ascend fills is crypto. Empower is manual entry, Monarch is Coinbase-only, Copilot skips Solana, layer-2s, and DeFi. If your net worth spans traditional accounts and on-chain, that is the seam.
If you want the full field — including the budgeting-first tools and the spreadsheet route — read our Mint alternatives guide or the side-by-side net worth tracker comparison.
If you opened Mint for the net-worth number and skipped the categories, this is the replacement built for exactly that. It is read-only, keyless on crypto, free to start, and it will not ask you to start budgeting again. Ascend is invite-only while we scale — requesting an invite is free and takes a few seconds.