Mint

» see mint.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

mint launched on 19 september 2007 at the techcrunch40 conference. aaron patzer, the founder, won the $50,000 first prize on stage and walked off with a working free product that did something nobody else was doing for free. you handed mint your bank credentials and it logged into every us account you had, pulled the transaction history, categorized everything by merchant, and showed you a single dashboard of where your money actually went. before mint this was the job of quicken or microsoft money on a desktop. after mint it was a webpage and a phone app for free.

intuit bought mint in november 2009 for $170 million. patzer became a vp at intuit, ran mint and quicken for three years, then left in late 2012. mint kept growing. by 2016 it had over 20 million registered users in the us. for a long stretch it was the default answer when an american wanted a budget app. it was also one of the cleaner versions of intuit's "buy the disruptor before it threatens quickbooks" reflex.

mint was always a us product. the bank-aggregation layer it ran on (yodlee at first, then plaid) only had clean integrations into us and a few canadian institutions. for someone in turkey on a turkish bank, mint never had your accounts. i read about it through tech press in the late 2000s the way you read about a tool you cannot use because the api ends at a border.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

mint's pitch was simple and the timing was right. by 2007 most us banks had online portals you could log into, and aggregator apis like yodlee had figured out how to log in for you and pull csv-style transaction data back. mint was the first consumer product that built a clean ui on top of that data. you saw a pie chart of where last month's money went. you set a budget for groceries and got an email when you went over. it did the boring spreadsheet work for you.

mint also built an alert system that turned out to be the actual hook. low balance, unusual charge, bill due, fee charged on a checking account. those notifications kept users coming back. the budget pages got the magazine coverage but the alerts were the daily-active driver.

~ the unraveling ~

intuit ownership did to mint what intuit ownership tends to do. the product froze. the ui got minor refreshes but the core experience in 2018 was recognizably the 2011 product. the mobile apps were buggy in ways that did not get fixed across whole years. account connections broke and stayed broken because plaid's relationship with banks changed faster than intuit allocated engineers to keep up.

the ad layer kept getting more aggressive. mint's revenue model was credit card and loan recommendations, and by the late 2010s the recommendation modules were taking up most of the dashboard real estate. by 2021 only 3.6 million of the registered user base were active monthly per bloomberg. the product was still alive but it had stopped mattering as a daily habit for most of the people who had once relied on it.

~ what really happened ~

intuit acquired credit karma in 2020 for $7.1 billion. credit karma already had the credit-score and tax-prep flow plus a much larger active user base. for a while intuit ran mint and credit karma as separate consumer brands. the consolidation announcement came on 1 november 2023: mint would shut down at the end of december, users would be migrated to credit karma. the deadline was later pushed to 23 march 2024 to give people time to export their transaction history.

the migration was lossy. credit karma was a credit-score product, not a budget product. budgets, custom categories, savings goals, transaction tags, none of it crossed over. users who had ten years of history in mint got a dashboard at credit karma that watched their accounts but did not show them what they had built. it was an asset transfer dressed as a product upgrade. intuit got the user base. the users did not get mint.

~ what it left ~

mint normalized account aggregation for consumers. before mint it was something only quicken users on a windows desktop did, and only the small subset who would type bank credentials into a desktop app. mint made it a phone-app default for a generation of americans. every fintech that came after (ynab, copilot, monarch, rocket money) is selling into the demand mint created and then surrendered.

mint also showed how an acquired free product gets harvested. intuit bought it for the user base, ran it as a feeder for credit-card affiliate revenue, did the minimum to keep it running, then folded it into credit karma the moment the broader product strategy needed the seats. it is the standard playbook now. mint was the version most people watched happen.

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