Mint, one of the first and most popular personal finance apps, is closing and its owner, Intuit, is encouraging users to switch to Credit Karma, its platform that offers free credit scores and helps users track of your money.
To sense said Tuesday that it was “reimagining” Mint as part of Credit Karma and that Mint users could transition to Credit Karma. Credit Karma will absorb Mint by Jan. 1, Intuit said in a statement Friday.
Mint has been a top online budgeting tool for years, with 3.6 million active users as of 2021. according to Bloomberg. Introduced in 2007, it marked a turning point in the world of personal finance, and its popularity increased as more people turned to free online services to create budgets and track their income and expenses.
News of Mint closure sparked outrage from loyal Mint userssome of whom said they were especially upset that Credit Karma would not offer the same budgeting tools.
Steve Kim, a software engineer from Seattle, said he had been using Mint for three years and was disappointed to learn on TikTok that it was going out of business. Kim, 42, said he was looking for alternatives, but that he would consider Credit Karma.
“I looked for it briefly and it doesn’t look very good,” he said. “But I might try it if it’s an easy transfer.”
Intuit said in its statement on Friday that it was “giving Mint users sufficient time to prepare for this change, before their access to Mint ends.”
Intuit, owner of widely used financial software applications like TurboTax, bought Mint in 2009 from its founder for $170 million. At the time of the acquisition, Mint, which was privately held, had 1.5 million users tracking nearly $50 billion in assets and $200 billion in transactions.
Credit Karma helps its 130 million users improve their credit scores and access personalized loan recommendations. Mint users will be able to transfer their linked financial accounts, historical balances, and net worth graphs to Credit Karma, and will be able to continue tracking their spending and net worth and view cash flow over time, Intuit said .
But Credit Karma doesn’t offer a budgeting tool that allows users to set a monthly budget and budgets by category, a favorite feature of Mint users. Mint allowed users to link their spending accounts to the service, so purchases could be automatically categorized as restaurants, groceries, or bills, making it easier to track expenses.
In August, Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi said Credit Karma had revenue of $1.6 billion in the fiscal quarter that ended July 31. 9 percent less than in the same period of the previous year. He said on a conference call with investors that the company anticipated long-term annual revenue growth of 20 to 25 percent.
Other popular budgeting apps include PocketGuard, Simplifi, and You Need a Budget. In the days after Intuit announced the closure of Mint, Monarch, a subscription-based personal finance app, said there had been an increase in new users coming from Mint.
Monarch CEO and co-founder Val Agostino said it didn’t make sense for Intuit to continue investing in both Mint and Credit Karma given the significant cost of running personal finance and data aggregation applications.
“Mint has always been a money loser,” Agostino, a former Mint product manager, said in an interview. “Given the revenue Credit Karma was generating, it makes sense to go down that path.”
Consumer debt has reached worrying levels in recent months, with U.S. credit card balances rising to more than $1 trillion, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported in August, before payments resumed. of student loans. Credit card balances, the most common type of debt held by households, were more than 16 percent higher in the second quarter of this year compared to the same period in 2022.
