Budgeting app Mint is shutting down, to the disappointment of loyal users: ‘This is the peril of relying on free services’

Raj Giri was “blown away” to learn that his favorite budgeting app, Mint, will be discontinued in 2024, which was announced last week.

“I was really surprised because the app is so popular,” says Giri, an entrepreneur in Denver who says he uses the app “every day” to track his finances. “I just started researching other apps, but still haven’t found anything that I’m totally sold on yet.”

“It’s a big bummer that it’s going away,” he says.

Other loyal Mint users on Reddit echo the sentiment; there seems to be no consensus on a free app that offers all the same budgeting features as Mint.

Jeremy Gaines, a communications professional in Washington, D.C., says his initial reaction to the news was “disappointment,” as he’s used the app for the last 10 years. He currently logs into Mint about two times per week.

But he wasn’t surprised, either. “To some degree, the app has been abandoned for years,” he says, referring to what felt like increasingly minimal software updates over time.

“This is the peril of relying on free services,” says Gaines.

Mint owner Inuit says it’s “reimagining” the app as part of Intuit Credit Karma, which is known more for its credit monitoring services. The Mint app will shut down on Jan. 1, 2024, and users are encouraged to migrate over to Credit Karma, according to a company spokesperson.

Mint users will be notified both in the app or by email when they can move their account data to Credit Karma as part of a phased rollout, the company says.

The app had an estimated 3.6 million active users as of 2021, according to Bloomberg.

But unfortunately for Mint users, “Credit Karma does not currently provide budgeting features the same way that Mint has in the past,” the company says.

However, Credit Karma does have a few similar features. According to a company FAQ, users can view the following:

• Monthly spending broken down by category
• Average spending for each category
• How much monthly spending differs from the…