A Mint alternative for people who just want a budget

Mint shut down on March 23, 2024. Intuit pointed users at Credit Karma, and the migration famously did not bring the part most people used: budgets, custom categories, goals, bill reminders, and recurring transaction labels didn’t come across.

Two years on, the honest summary of the Mint alternative landscape is that no current product replicates Mint’s old combination of free and full-featured. Most of the well-regarded replacements are paid subscriptions.

What exists instead is three different kinds of product, and picking well means knowing which one you actually want.

The three camps

Aggregation dashboards — Monarch, Quicken Simplifi, Copilot. These are the closest thing to old Mint: link your accounts, watch transactions flow in, get categorized spending and net worth. All are paid subscriptions; check each one’s current pricing directly, since it changes.

Budgeting systems — YNAB, EveryDollar, Even Cents. These are about deciding where money goes before you spend it, not reviewing where it went. The tracking is in service of the plan.

Net worth and portfolio trackers — focused on what you own rather than what you spend.

If you used Mint mainly to see all your accounts in one place, you want camp one and you should probably be looking at Monarch or Simplifi rather than reading this page. If you used Mint’s budget tab and miss that, keep going.

Where Even Cents fits

Even Cents is a paycheck-first budgeting app. When you get paid, you assign that check to the bills, cards, and savings it needs to cover before the next one arrives, until nothing’s left unassigned.

What’s different from Mint:

No categories. Mint’s core loop was categorizing transactions and fighting its guesses. Even Cents has payees, not categories — you send money to “Mortgage” or “Amex” or “Savings,” and there’s nothing to maintain.
No bank linking. You enter transactions yourself. This is a real cost and I’ll come back to it.
Paycheck-based, not month-based. Your budget unit is the stretch between checks, not the calendar month.
Encrypted so we can’t read it. Your data is encrypted under a key derived from your password. The people running Even Cents can’t read your finances in the database or in backups.
Free to set up and use.

The bank-sync question

This is the real fork in the road, so let’s be direct about it.

Mint’s defining feature was automatic transaction import, and Even Cents doesn’t have it. If automatic import is non-negotiable for you, Even Cents is the wrong tool and you should stop here — Monarch or Simplifi will serve you better.

The reason it’s absent isn’t that it’s hard. It’s that bank linking and the encryption model are mutually exclusive. To import and categorize your transactions on a server, the server has to be able to read your transactions. The moment that’s true, the guarantee that only you can read your data is gone. You can have an operator who can’t see your finances, or you can have an operator who imports them for you. Not both.

Even Cents picked the first. That’s a real trade-off, not a feature list gap, and it’s a bad trade for plenty of people.

It’s also worth noting what the Mint shutdown taught a lot of people about linked accounts. Commonly reported frustrations with aggregation generally: connections break and need re-authenticating, automatic categorization needs correcting, and — as Mint demonstrated — the whole service can be switched off with a few months’ notice.

Manual entry, honestly

Manual entry is the thing most people assume they’ll hate, and opinion on it genuinely divides once they’ve tried it.

The case against is obvious: it’s work, and if you fall behind for two weeks the data is stale and you stop trusting it.

The case for is less obvious: entering a transaction is a moment of attention at the point of spending, and a lot of people find that’s where the behavior change actually comes from. Automatic import gives you an accurate record of decisions you already made without thinking. That’s useful for accounting and much weaker for changing anything.

A paycheck budget also needs far less entry than Mint did, because the recurring stuff — rent, car, insurance, subscriptions, the paycheck itself — is defined once and appears automatically each period. What’s left to enter by hand is the variable spending.

Who should pick something else

You want all accounts aggregated in one dashboard → Monarch or Quicken Simplifi
You want automatic import above all → anything with bank sync; not this
You want a native iPhone app with a polished mobile experience → Copilot
You want a rules-based envelope system with a large community and strong reporting → YNAB (comparison)
You want free, simple, and Ramsey-aligned → EveryDollar’s free tier
You want investment and net worth tracking → Even Cents doesn’t do this at all

Who should try Even Cents

You used Mint’s budget tab and Credit Karma took it away
You’re paid on a regular cycle and your problem is timing — enough money in the month, not enough in a specific week
Categorizing transactions is the exact thing that made you quit every previous budgeting app
You’d rather not hand your bank credentials to a third-party aggregator
You want the operator to be unable to read your financial data
You’re currently doing this in a spreadsheet and want something that handles the pay-period arithmetic for you

Getting your data over

If you exported your Mint data before the shutdown, you can import that CSV directly — Date, Description, Amount, and Transaction Type are read as-is, so a Mint export needs no reshaping.

Because a flat transaction list has no pay-period concept, the import shows you how many rows fall inside pay periods you already have and how many don’t, before writing anything. If you’ve set up a pay schedule, it can create the missing periods for you; if not, it imports what fits and tells you exactly what it skipped.

Spreadsheets work too: an .ods import maps historical pay periods and transactions, and the rounding fudge rows spreadsheets accumulate get dropped, since money is stored to the exact cent.

If the paycheck-first idea sounds right and manual entry doesn’t scare you off, the honest test is one pay period. That’s two weeks for most people, and it costs nothing.