ICYMI: Intuit is shutting down Mint.com by early next year
Honestly, this is a master class in misplaced incentives and misunderstanding of consumer preferences. Mint was once a beloved consumer app for managing your finances – but Intuit bought it and decided to use it to funnel leads toward its other services and partners, thus completely covering it in ads, thus killing the consumer experience.
I stopped using it years ago for this reason. Now (imo) it’s a barely usable product where the “offers” I see take more space up on the screen than actually useful features. It literally took me over a minute just to update a budget amount and see it take effect.
They say they’re killing it because “it didn’t generate meaningful revenues” – and if I think about it for more than a few minutes, it completely makes sense. Gut feeling, but I highly doubt most consumers who are using Mint to track their budget (ie. get clarity, save money, set goals and focus on them) are interested in distractions or services that risk further complicating their money situation.
It seems that budgeting apps surviving in a post-zero-interest-rates world are ones that either:
- Are premium and prioritize the best practices of a good, consumer-grade user experience (eg. @YNAB and @Copilot)
- Can be funded by institutions who make their money through other means and can afford to offer budgeting services as a retention/stickiness driver (eg. @Empower’s Personal Capital, all your banking apps that now have budgeting)
Interesting space to watch.