June 13, 2026 · Austin
Best Mint Alternatives in 2026 (Free + Doesn't Wait for You to Log In)
Mint shut down in March 2024. The best free replacement is Herbert: it texts you about subscriptions and savings instead of waiting for you to open an app.
Quick answer: The best free Mint alternative in 2026 is Herbert. Mint was free and showed you your finances when you logged in. Herbert is free and comes to you. It texts you when a subscription is worth canceling, when savings are sitting at near-zero interest, or when a charge looks unusual, and you reply with what you want to do. Most Mint replacements cost $8-15 a month and still require you to open an app. Herbert doesn't.
Mint officially shut down on March 23, 2024. Intuit, which owned it, pushed its users toward Credit Karma. The Mint community migrated to r/mintuit and has been sorting through alternatives ever since. If you're still looking, here is what actually compares.
How Herbert compares to the main Mint alternatives
| Herbert | Empower | Monarch Money | Simplifi | YNAB | Copilot | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free | $8.33/mo annual | $2.99/mo | $14.99/mo | $13/mo |
| Proactive (texts you) | Yes | No | No | No | No | No |
| Read-only | Yes | No | No | No | No | No |
| Cancel subscriptions by text | Yes | No | No | No | No | No |
| Full budgeting tools | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Net worth tracking | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Investment tracking | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| Native mobile app | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | iOS/Mac only |
Herbert and Empower are both free. Monarch, Simplifi, YNAB, and Copilot are paid. Herbert is the only one on this list that reaches out to you instead of waiting for you to check in.
What happened to Mint
Mint launched in 2006. Intuit acquired it in 2009. For fifteen years it was the default free personal finance app for millions of people: link your accounts, and Mint aggregated everything in one place, categorized your spending, sent alerts, and showed your net worth.
In November 2023, Intuit announced the shutdown and directed users to Credit Karma. The app went offline on March 23, 2024.
The Credit Karma redirect frustrated people for a concrete reason: Credit Karma is a financial product marketplace, not a budgeting tool. It shows your credit score, credit card offers, and loan recommendations. It does not aggregate spending across bank accounts or let you track budget categories. Multiple r/mintuit threads describe the experience as being sent somewhere that serves Intuit's cross-sell goals rather than the user's budgeting needs.
The result: Mint's actual use case, aggregated accounts, spending by category, subscription visibility, has no single free replacement that matches it feature-for-feature. The options below each cover part of what Mint did.
The alternatives, honestly ranked
Herbert: free, proactive, SMS-first
Herbert is free and doesn't have a dashboard. It connects to your bank accounts and credit cards read-only via Plaid, watches the full picture in the background, and texts you when something is worth a look: a subscription you haven't used in 90 days, savings earning near-zero while high-yield accounts pay around 4%, or a charge that's larger than usual.
You reply to act. If a subscription isn't worth keeping, one word handles it. Herbert never moves your money without an explicit text reply from you, and it never charges a monthly fee.
What Herbert doesn't replace from Mint: it won't let you build monthly budget categories and plan your spending before the month starts. There are no annual spending charts or budget envelope views. If you used Mint primarily for those features, you'll want Monarch Money or Simplifi.
What Herbert does better than Mint: Mint waited for you to open it. If you checked in once a month, you'd see three weeks of things you'd missed. Herbert tells you within days when something changes. For the part of Mint that most people actually relied on, catching money quietly disappearing into subscriptions and accounts you weren't watching, Herbert is faster.
Try Herbert free at tryherbert.com.
Empower: free dashboard, investment tracking
Empower (formerly Personal Capital, renamed in 2022) is the strongest free option if you want a dashboard that functions like Mint. It aggregates bank accounts, credit cards, and investment accounts in one place, tracks your net worth, breaks spending into categories, and runs projections on your retirement plan.
The free tier is genuinely functional, not a stripped-down trial. The catch is the business model: Empower uses its free dashboard as a lead generator for its wealth management service, which charges around 0.89% annually. Expect outreach if you have significant assets linked.
Some users on r/PersonalCapital have also noted that UX changes since the Empower rebrand have made the interface harder to navigate than the original Personal Capital design. The core account aggregation still works. The experience is less polished than it used to be.
Best for: former Mint users who want a free, Mint-style dashboard with investment and net worth tracking, and who can tune out the wealth management upsell.
Monarch Money: the closest to Mint, $8.33/month
Monarch Money is the most frequently recommended replacement in r/mintuit. It is the closest to Mint in concept: link your accounts, set budget categories, track spending, see your net worth. It handles shared finances for couples well and lets you collaborate under one subscription.
The cost is $8.33/month billed annually ($99/year), or $14.99/month on a monthly plan. Mint was free. For people who budgeted actively in Mint, the question is whether a budgeting tool is worth a few dollars a month. A meaningful share of r/mintuit says yes; many others decided to stop tracking rather than pay.
One thing Monarch does better than Mint: transaction categorization is more accurate. Mint's auto-categorization was notoriously unreliable, and Monarch's custom category rules give you more control.
Best for: former Mint heavy users who want the most Mint-like replacement and don't mind paying for it.
Simplifi by Quicken: lowest-cost paid option, $2.99/month
Simplifi is $2.99/month billed annually. It focuses on spending tracking and what Quicken calls watchlists: flexible views of your spending by category, merchant, or tag. It identifies recurring subscriptions automatically and has a cleaner interface than the full Quicken product.
At $2.99/month it costs less than a third of Monarch Money's annual plan. The tradeoff is that it doesn't replace Mint's investment overview or net worth dashboard. For straightforward budgeting and subscription visibility, it covers the core use case at the lowest price of any paid option here.
Best for: former Mint users who want a traditional budgeting app at the lowest subscription price.
YNAB: zero-based budgeting, $14.99/month
YNAB (You Need a Budget) uses a specific method: every dollar you earn gets assigned to a category before you spend it. You allocate income to rent, groceries, subscriptions, savings, and everything else until it's fully accounted for, then reconcile as you spend.
It works well for people who commit to the method. YNAB users who follow it consistently tend to report real behavior changes. The catch: it requires active participation several times a week. Mint users who want something they can set up and largely ignore will not get value from YNAB.
At $14.99/month or $99/year, it's also the most expensive option here.
Best for: people who want to change how they think about and allocate money, and who are willing to put real time into it.
Copilot: best interface, $13/month, Apple only
Copilot is consistently rated as having the most polished interface of any budgeting app. It uses machine learning to categorize transactions more accurately than most, and the visual presentation is cleaner than Monarch or Simplifi.
Two meaningful limitations: it costs $13/month, and it runs only on iOS and Mac. If you're on Android or Windows, Copilot isn't an option.
Best for: Apple ecosystem users who want the most polished budget dashboard and are willing to pay for it.
Credit Karma: not actually a Mint replacement
Intuit pointed Mint users to Credit Karma after the shutdown. Credit Karma is not a budgeting tool.
It is useful for monitoring your credit score and credit reports. It does not aggregate spending across your bank accounts. It does not let you set or track budget categories. It serves Intuit's interest in cross-selling credit products more than it serves your interest in understanding where your money goes.
Most former Mint users who moved to Credit Karma at Intuit's direction have since migrated to something else or stopped tracking their finances altogether. For credit monitoring, Credit Karma does that job. For the spending visibility and subscription awareness Mint provided, look at the other options on this list.
What the paid alternatives share
Every paid Mint replacement, Monarch, Simplifi, YNAB, and Copilot, shares one thing with Mint itself: they wait for you. You log in, you see your data, you make decisions based on what you find. That is a reasonable model if you actually log in.
The honest pattern from r/mintuit is that many people used Mint in a mode closer to "mostly forgot about it but checked every few weeks." For those users, a paid subscription is hard to justify, and a dashboard they have to open is solving the wrong problem.
Herbert starts from a different premise: what if the app texted you instead of waiting? Subscription charges that silently compound are exactly the kind of thing that hides in a dashboard you open infrequently. A text that you see within minutes doesn't have that problem.
For people who budgeted actively in Mint, Monarch Money or Simplifi is the right replacement. For people who used Mint as a safety net, something to catch problems before they got out of hand, Herbert covers that use case without a monthly fee and without requiring you to remember to check.
FAQ
What is the best free Mint alternative?
Herbert and Empower are both free. Empower is a full dashboard app that aggregates accounts, tracks spending categories, and monitors net worth. Herbert is SMS-first: it texts you when a subscription looks wasteful, savings are idle, or a charge is unusual, and you reply to act on it. Which fits better depends on whether you want a dashboard to log into or a text when something actually needs attention.
Did Mint shut down permanently?
Yes. Mint shut down on March 23, 2024 and is no longer accessible. Intuit discontinued the product and encouraged former users to migrate to Credit Karma. Transaction history from within the app is no longer retrievable, though some users were able to export CSVs before the shutdown cutoff.
Is Credit Karma a good replacement for Mint?
For credit score monitoring, Credit Karma is fine. For the spending visibility, account aggregation, and budget tracking that Mint provided, it is not a replacement. Credit Karma does not aggregate bank account spending or support budget categories. Intuit directed Mint users there because it fits Intuit's financial product strategy, not because it replicates Mint's use case.
What is the closest app to Mint?
Monarch Money is the most frequently cited Mint-like replacement in the r/mintuit community. It aggregates accounts, tracks spending by category, and shows net worth, similar to how Mint worked. It costs $8.33/month on the annual plan. The main difference from Mint is the price: Mint was free, Monarch is not.
Is there a personal finance app that sends text alerts instead of push notifications?
Herbert is built around SMS. Instead of sending push notifications that require you to open an app, it texts you directly when a subscription hasn't been used in 90 days, when savings rates are significantly below what's available in a high-yield account, or when a charge looks unusual. You reply directly to act, without opening anything.
See also: Best Rocket Money Alternatives in 2026 and Best Truebill Alternatives in 2026. For more on why Herbert texts you instead of waiting, see Money you don't even know you're losing.