FOSS/self hosted preferred, but open to anything!
I went from Mint to Money in Excel to Tiller. Tiller has been the best for me. Very stable and highly customizable if you know Excel or Google Docs.
Downside is that it’s $79/year
Upside is that it works really well, has a deep user community and they aren’t selling your data (which Mint definitely did).
For me, the killer feature of Mint is that it connected to my accounts and aggregated all my transactions automatically. I cannot and will not input transaction data manually, so things like YNAB are absolutely useless to me.
I’ve never heard of any other app, free or paid, that can do what Mint can do.
It looks like ynab does do this now. I remember when it was just software on your computer, but it’s a full cloud app now (complete with $15/month price tag).
I’m on the hunt for a new solution, too. I may try it.
YNAB pulls in most transactions programmatically if you connect accounts. Some accounts don’t sync (eg Apple) and other accounts will only do an initial sync (most 401ks and loan accounts). I think the sync restrictions are a factor of the accounts themselves and not YNAB; I’d love to know if I’m wrong there.
YNAB does not categorize things for you. It’s a different approach where you define money buckets, assign funds to the buckets, and categorize transactions into those buckets. I moved over when Mint got acquired because fuck Intuit and I haven’t really put a ton of time into trying to understand the different paradigm, so I’m not sure I’m explaining it properly. I didn’t use YNAB before because the paradigm isn’t how I’m used to thinking about my spend.
Don’t start the trial unless you’ve got time to think about setting up your buckets and spending targets. Or, if you just want to test the import because you’ll make time later to set it up, it’s probably worth the trial. There is a “family” plan that allows an account owner to share things; I think that’s worth it if you’ve got some people you share financial info with who also budget and you want to keep costs down.
Fuck Intuit. I wish they never bought mint and I hope they go bankrupt
Wow, this is news to me. I found it so useful to be able to see all of my financial information in one place. I don’t want to have to open up 4 or 5 sites all the time just to make sure my bills are getting paid and I don’t have any fraudulent transactions.
There is a thread on HN about this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38114512) which includes a link for https://ghostfol.io which I have not tried, but it is open source / self hostable.
That’s for wealth management primarily, not budgeting
Actual Budget is very good. I’m self hosting but you can host with pikapods or other public services and be up and running very quickly.
It’s YNAB -esque in implementation.
Mint never worked well for me, would regularly fail to load the data from my bank and sometimes it would even create duplicates.
I just use a spreadsheet now. Pretty much all banks have an export feature, i setup a column with category dropdowns
Mint was useful to me for a while until it started forcibly recategorizing stuff with no way to fix it. Tech support was aggressively worthless to the point that I fully shut down every Intuit account I had (they have their tentacles in some surprising businesses). Fuck Intuit and their data hoarding and their anti-taxpayer lobbying and their cold-blooded murder of what was once the only half-decent money tracking app.
I use YNAB (you need a budget) it’s not free but it’s GREAT for setting savings goals, paying back debt, etc.
It’s also flexible if you need to break your budget for some reason. You can pull from another bucket easily (gas bill is high, pull from emergency savings or cut from gaming), or just overspend and it goes on a report to keep track and plan better.
The best part is peace of mind on big bills - when it comes time to pay taxes or pay for my 6mo car insurance I’ve already been saving 1/12 or 1/6 of that total every month leading up to it. I can put everything in auto pay and never have to worry about the money being there.
My wife and I use Monarch Money. It’s good, but not free.
