from Hacker News

Mint sucks, so why aren't there any real competitors in that space?

by antonpug on 11/3/13, 11:15 PM with 58 comments

• by EdgarVerona on 11/4/13, 12:17 AM

  Note that this is just my gut opinion on it, imagining the nightmares I've seen in healthcare integration and contrasting that with what I see as an end user of Bank integration. I've not actually seen the business deals and effort in the backend as a developer in the latter case, but as an end user of Mint I've seen missing integrations that hint strongly at the difficulties they must experience.

  I think the reason why is because it's a pretty large integration undertaking. To compete with Mint at this point, you'd have to offer similar levels of integration with banks, credit card companies, investment companies etc...

  The problem is that there are literally tens of thousands of these companies, each exposing their own APIs and each with their own unique caveats as to data they require, throttling limits, back-room deals for access, hesitation to even let people access their systems etc.

  For an anecdotal end-user example, I have an account with one provider who refuses to cooperate with Mint in integrating - ECSI. This is a small lending company for student loans, one of thousands of such companies. They decided for reasons that are not publicly available to not even allow Mint to integrate with them anymore, after having let them do so for the first couple of years. What sorts of negotiations were occurring in the back end between these companies, and what caused it to fall apart? The public doesn't know, but needless to say there was some level of custom integration effort for them, some level of business negotiation, and then finally something fell apart and made customers mad as a result. Now, all of this integration work and business negotiation had to happen between Mint and ECSI - and that is just one of the tens of thousands of companies out there. It is a very tall order to ask a new company to come forward and make that much upfront work in order to get on par with Mint so that it can start competing.

  The real fight that would make more innovation in the field would probably have to start with getting companies to standardize and expose their APIs without (or with common and well understood) strings attached. If this happened - as has been struggling but slowly improving in the Healthcare field - it'll become more feasible for a company to realistically compete with Mint. And then you can get to those enhanced features that Mint suffers for want of. (however, at that point Mint's significant engineering force could be redirected from integration efforts to these same features, and then you'll find yourself fighting against a much larger machine now bent on feature improvement)

• by SEJeff on 11/4/13, 12:13 AM

  I've been a mint user for over 5 years and actually love it. The web ui isn't amazing, but it is pretty good. The IOS app is excellent and let's me quickly get a grip on my financials. I couldn't disagree more with the author of this post. I've often had mint send me alerts when I mix up something stupid and get low balances or forget to pay credit card bills. To me, mint is simply a life saver. It isn't something I use every day, but when I need it, it really helps. I'm about as big of a mint fanboi that there could be.

• by robbfitzsimmons on 11/4/13, 12:26 AM

  I think actually the basic problem with Mint isn't those mentioned in the article (UI is meh, miscategorized transactions, data import customization).

  It's actually as mentioned in Wesabe's postmortem (http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint/); for most people Mint doesn't actually get you to change your behavior. It just provides twentysomethings with some feeling that they're managing their finances, in return for getting pitched credit cards.

  Harder and more worthwhile than UI or functionality fixes are changing twentysomethings' behavior, or doing something interesting for older people with more complicated financial situations. [Mint's useless for my parents, with multiple bank accounts, investments, retirement, education and health savings accounts, etc.]

  One problem (and barrier to good competitors) are that aggregating finance data sucks. Mint started with Yodlee, which is nothing but a scraper for bank sites, and now runs on something Intuit built internally. It's hard to imagine many startups meaningfully tackling the problem.

• by nilkn on 11/4/13, 12:36 AM

  This isn't a direct answer to the stated question, but personally I use Mint just to keep watch on my transactions and You Need A Budget (www.youneedabudget.com) to budget and plan future transactions.

  YNAB doesn't connect to any of your accounts. You have to enter in transactions manually. That limits its audience and makes it not really a direct competitor to Mint. But I find manually entering your past transactions really, really forces you to think about how you're spending money.

• by WesleyJohnson on 11/4/13, 1:52 AM

  Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I loved Microsoft Money. Yes, it was bloated and had tons of features I'd never use, but it did everything I needed it to. My biggest issue with Mint is the lack of proper Bill Payments. I don't necessarily need to be able to pay bills from Mint, but when it tells me a bill is due tomorrow and I don't pay it tomorrow, I want it to keep telling me it's past due until I mark it as reconciled or something of that nature. Instead, Mint just assumes I pay everything on time and stops reminding me. There again, perhaps I'm in the minority, but I'd imagine it's a pretty large minority in this economy that doesn't always have the luxury of paying everything right when it's due. I know they're more geared towards analyzing what you've spent, but I wish they'd consider adding more features outside of that specialization.

• by jaxn on 11/3/13, 11:52 PM

  Mint was the competitor. Then Intuit (Quicken) bought them.

• by ktcoupon on 11/3/13, 11:27 PM

  Every budgeting application is going to have some problems with missed or incorrect data. And they've been consistently working on improving their connections with most of the major banks.

  The other stuff that the author talks about are simple website changes that the Mint team could make if he just send them suggestions and ideas for improvement. I don't think they're anything serious that would warrant the claim that Mint 'sucks'.

• by tekalon on 11/4/13, 12:30 AM

  My issue with Mint is that it is an OK budgeting/finance tracking app, but not too good with debt payoff. If I could use the integration of accounts (with all the interest and what not) and be able to show when interest is added to a loan or how long it would take to pay off (all automatically) would be nice. Yes I know I can do it myself (and do) but why have two+ apps/systems to do what one can do?

• by loupeabody on 11/3/13, 11:51 PM

  There is some noteworthy competition to Mint. I don't have any experience with these, but they seem promising.

  Level - https://levelmoney.com/

  22seven - https://www.22seven.com/

  There are likely others, but I just rarely hear about money management apps.

• by toddh on 11/4/13, 5:43 AM

  I think people want a quicken like tool that will track all their finances...budgeting, tracking and stocks. mint never did that and users were spammed with too many ads.

  It's a hard thing to do. Intuit should had never bought mint and kept working on its online offering of quicken. Now the only thing that's any good is the desktop version of quicken.

• by colinloretz on 11/4/13, 12:54 AM

  Yodlee gave them their initial connections and I assume many of them were built as one-offs afterwards.

  I'm looking forward to seeing what companies like Standard Treasury (http://standardtreasury.com/) can do to modernize this area.

• by chrsstrm on 11/4/13, 12:11 AM

  Better security because Intuit is a larger company? No one is invincible, see Adobe's latest incident. My major complaint with Mint is I don't get email alerts until I log into my account. Nothing gets sent to me when the event triggering the alert occurs. That is frustrating.

• by pbreit on 11/4/13, 1:13 AM

  I don't love Mint but I would never say it "sucks". Also, it is a pretty difficult category. Being able to safeguard the data and credentials alone severely limits the universe of people/groups who might try to do it.

• by pathikrit on 11/4/13, 12:15 AM

  I use this - https://www.personalcapital.com/ - it is Mint minus all the ads and let's you add private equity and custom vesting periods

• by possibilistic on 11/4/13, 1:19 AM

  I would like something like Mint that comes with a consumable personal API that is safe to call. I want to generate my own reports, but I certainly don't want to handle banking-level security.

• by innguest on 11/3/13, 11:56 PM

  Because it's a boring problem to solve?

• by gburt on 11/4/13, 12:10 AM

  Wave is much better than Mint for business.