8 ms·

It's always sad to see products that were truly innovative when they came out end up getting neglected and sunset due to large co M&A-based strategic decision-m

It's always sad to see products that were truly innovative when they came out end up getting neglected and sunset due to large co M&A-based strategic decision-making. Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders of Monarch Money, a (paid) competitor to Mint founded by the original PM on Mint.com. I had written a HackerNews front-pager a couple years ago about why Revenue Model is More Important Than Culture [0], and my co-founder wrote some thoughts about why Mint ended up going this route. Since this announcement, we've seen an unprecedented influx of "Mint refugees" moving over. I think a lot of Mint folks have felt like the product has been neglected for years, but it was free and they often had years of history in the product. This was kind of a forcing function for them. 0: https://somehowmanage.com/2020/09/20/revenue-model-not-culture-is-the-dominant-term/ https://somehowmanage.com/2020/09/20/revenue-model-not-cultu... 1: https://www.monarchmoney.com/blog/mint-shutting-down https://www.monarchmoney.com/blog/mint-shutting-down

alsodumb 3y ago
Thanks for working on Monarch! Does Monarch let you in some way import years of transactions data from Mint? From what I understand, if I signup on Monarch now and connect my accounts, there’s a limit on how far you can go into the history of my account to get the transactions, right? Or can you get every transaction from the first day of my bank account?
- Ozzie_osman 3y ago
  So we do have a Mint import flow: https://help.monarchmoney.com/hc/en-us/articles/4411877901972-Move-data-over-from-Mint-to-Monarch https://help.monarchmoney.com/hc/en-us/articles/441187790197... There are some quirks to it (ie Mint only lets you export up to 10K transactions at a time) but there are work-arounds to it. You can sign-up, link your accounts, then import from Mint to fill in the missing history. If you hit any issues, just Contact Support from within the app and our Customer Support team will work with you to get it sorted out.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - pauldavis 3y ago
    Would be nice for Mint to relax this limit between now and sunset.
joshuawright11 3y ago
Happy Monarch user here - Monarch is amazing. I think it's the only personal finance tool I've seen that gets web really, really right. Mobile first ones are nifty (used copilot for a bit), mainly for on the fly category updating, but after budgeting with Monarch on the web for a year and change now I don't think I can go back to a primarily app based one. Much easier to sit down once a week and crank through / review everything on web interface. Thanks for the great work you and the Monarch team are doing, it's helped my wife and I save a lot of cash since we started using it
vineyardlabs 3y ago
I switched to Monarch from YNAB a few months ago because I'd been using YNAB for years and wanted something a little less involved. I'm really loving it. Thanks for building it!
- gurchik 3y ago
  What about Monarch is less involved than YNAB? I’ve been considering changing since they’ve increased the annual cost.
  - vineyardlabs 3y ago
    I should say a lot of it comes down to the theory of the budgeting system, not the software itself. Monarch is a more traditional cashflow based system, as opposed to the cash system that YNAB uses. You're budgeting your income in a given month in Monarch, vs. budgeting only money you actually have in YNAB. In general the way you're encouraged to set up your budget is different. YNAB and the YNAB community seems to trend toward creating very granular catergories, and every single transaction has to be viewed and approved. In monarch, you start with a set of default categories that are fairly broad, and they encourage you to use these as they seem to have done a pretty good job at designing filters that automatically classify transactions into those categories. You can still add your custom categories though. Transactions get automatically put in categories and you don't need to review them except for certain circumstances where Monarch decides it can't confidentially categorizes them. Some things get improperly categorized sometimes but this isn't that big of a deal because your categories in Monarch are likely broader than they would be in YNAB, and it's also not like YNAB where the total of your budget represents money you literally have on hand so if the numbers don't line up perfectly it's not the end of the world. In the end Monarch isn't super different from more traditional budgeting apps like mint or rocketmoney, it's just the best executed. I still think YNAB is invaluable for people that have to really tightly manage money to make sure they have enough cash on hand at the end of the month to pay rent, for example. But now that I'm in a position where I have a little more cushion, I've grown tired of the constant queue of transactions to approve and the general micromanagement in YNAB
enumjorge 3y ago
> It's always sad to see products that were truly innovative when they came out end up getting neglected and sunset due to large co M&A-based strategic decision-making. It is sad, but is it sad enough that if a large co offers to buy your company and make you very wealthy, you're going to decline? Sorry for the cynicism but this cycle of adopting a software tool only for that to be bought out and subsequently shut down is getting pretty old. I'm sure Mint's initial sales pitch was also about passionate founders who cared about their customers. This is probably the nature of companies--no one will care as much about a product as much as the people who first created it, but the cycle seems so much faster with software.
- sbarre 3y ago
  I agree with you entirely. I was an early adopter of Mint, but the day they sold to Intuit I moved all my stuff out of there, because I knew it was never going to get better.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  > Sorry for the cynicism but this cycle of adopting a software tool only for that to be bought out and subsequently shut down is getting pretty old. This behavior has fully converted me from "optimistic early adopter" to "late majority" on the Adopter Categories chart. I honestly don't trust any startup's products anymore, because of the real risk that they're going to cash in their chips and let the product die, probably when it's least convenient for me the customer. To be fair, I don't trust a lot of bigger companies too--there is at least one example of a BigTech company notorious for trying things and then shutting them down within a years or months!
  - kaibee 3y ago
    > This behavior has fully converted me from "optimistic early adopter" to "late majority" on the Adopter Categories chart. Hadn't seen it put so clearly but yeah same. Not even limited to tech unfortunately, same issue with TV Shows. Why watch Season 1 set up a bunch of cool premises if there's not gonna be any pay-off?
city41 3y ago
It was so neglected (and buggy) that I ended up writing my own budget tool. Hey Ozzie, hope all is well :)
true_religion 3y ago
Definitely going to check this out. Does Monarch have rule based categorization, so we can set certain transactions to always fall under a category based on what is in the description? Mint partially supported this but QuickBooks did it better.
- Ozzie_osman 3y ago
  I think I can confidently say we have the best transaction rule system out there. You can set rules to rename, recategorize, add notes, require review, mark as reviewed, etc, based on name, amount, category, account, etc. It's one of our most cited features. https://help.monarchmoney.com/hc/en-us/articles/360048393372-Transaction-rules https://help.monarchmoney.com/hc/en-us/articles/360048393372...
  - true_religion 3y ago
    Thanks that seems great. If I had known about Monarch, I’d have switched earlier. I had always hoped Intuit planned on adding Quickbooks features into Mint, but they never did.
jonahhorowitz 3y ago
I switched over to Monarch a year or so ago and I've been pretty happy with it. I much prefer a paid product to an ad-driven one. The product isn't perfect, they have some work to do on categorization and de-duplication of recurring payments, but overall it's good enough and seems to be getting better.
gk1 3y ago
Hey Ozzie, have a promo code for HNers looking to switch?
- myth_drannon 3y ago
  if you sign up and abandon it, they send you 30% discount after a couple of hours.
geekifier 3y ago
I would love to use and pay for your service, but it's inexcusable than a service that charges $100+ / year has so many trackers that uBlock shows 87 elements blocked just in the account signup flow (/signup/connect-spending-account). A financial info aggregator is the one place where I would appreciate NOT having my data and behavior exfiltrated to third parties.
- dehrmann 3y ago
  Apparently revenue model is more important than a lot of things.
- metalliqaz 3y ago
  ouch
- sbarre 3y ago
  Hmm would be curious to know which block lists you have. I'm only blocking 27 things with most of them being Split.io (for A/B testing I presume) Sprig, Stripe and Sentry. Those aren't really third-party trackers (even though I am blocking most of them) in the marketing sense.. There's some analytics from Tiktok, Clarity, Reddit and Spotify(??), which make sense to block but don't feel that intrusive if they're tracking inbound referrals. I don't even see 50 other things that I could be blocking. Not arguing the point here, just wondering what I'm missing since I try to keep pretty extensive block lists myself.
  - geekifier 3y ago
    My count might include additional elements from going through signup flow with their bank connection providers. My lists are: - uBlock - EasyList - EasyPrivacy - Online Malicious URL Blocklist - Peter Lowe’s Ad and tracking server list - uBlock filters – Annoyances - AdGuard Annoyances filter - pl: Oficjalne Polskie Filtry > There's some analytics from Tiktok, Clarity, Reddit and Spotify Yeah, if my bank started embedding those on their account page, I would GTFO.
  - phone8675309 3y ago
    > There's some analytics from Tiktok, Clarity, Reddit and Spotify This is completely inexcusable from a fintech company. It shows me, as a potential customer, that they're not serious - either they're trying to get acquihired or they have no idea about privacy.
damvigilante 3y ago
Are you planning to add support for Canadian banks anytime soon? I checked out Monarch and ended up going with Mint just because they were one of the only ones supporting Canadian banks
- Ozzie_osman 3y ago
  We're working on it! Stay tuned.
- myth_drannon 3y ago
  I saw RBC on the Plaid's list, but it fell through because of two step authentication or something.
atlgator 3y ago
Anyone know how Monarch compares to Personal Capital? Since they got bought by Empower I’ve been looking for alternatives.
cainxinth 3y ago
I have meticulous notes for thousands of transactions in Mint over many years. What's the over/under on them surviving the migration? It's a real question. I'm considering doing it but, only if the notes get there.
lancewiggs 3y ago
Pocketsmith has been around for years, and built a properly sustainable business with essentially no funding. We've seen Mint refugees too, but also suspect there is a lot less there than the vanity metics might show. In this space we've seen companies come and go and the ones that stay have a business model that works every day. That means providing a great service, charging people reasonably prices for the product and avoiding selling data or advertising. Mint was never sustainable, but the founders did well to sell it to Intuit when they did. Pocketsmith uses Google Analytics and Mixpanel, and that's it - no remarketing and fully GDPR complaint. The company is strong in UK, Australia and New Zealand, with decent US support too. But I'd be interested to see what others see. (I'm the minor investor.) Edited for formatting.
graeme 3y ago
Have been using Lunch Money, hadn't heard of Monarch 1. Have you got an import function if we have csv or in other formats? 2. My only issue with Lunchmoney is my connections are often broken. They use Plaid. Is this one of those things where if they have a problem, you also will? Or does your implementation of plaid integration affect stability?

alsodumb 3y ago

Thanks for working on Monarch! Does Monarch let you in some way import years of transactions data from Mint? From what I understand, if I signup on Monarch now and connect my accounts, there’s a limit on how far you can go into the history of my account to get the transactions, right? Or can you get every transaction from the first day of my bank account?

Ozzie_osman 3y ago
So we do have a Mint import flow: https://help.monarchmoney.com/hc/en-us/articles/4411877901972-Move-data-over-from-Mint-to-Monarch https://help.monarchmoney.com/hc/en-us/articles/441187790197... There are some quirks to it (ie Mint only lets you export up to 10K transactions at a time) but there are work-arounds to it. You can sign-up, link your accounts, then import from Mint to fill in the missing history. If you hit any issues, just Contact Support from within the app and our Customer Support team will work with you to get it sorted out.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- pauldavis 3y ago
  Would be nice for Mint to relax this limit between now and sunset.

joshuawright11 3y ago

Happy Monarch user here - Monarch is amazing. I think it's the only personal finance tool I've seen that gets web really, really right. Mobile first ones are nifty (used copilot for a bit), mainly for on the fly category updating, but after budgeting with Monarch on the web for a year and change now I don't think I can go back to a primarily app based one. Much easier to sit down once a week and crank through / review everything on web interface. Thanks for the great work you and the Monarch team are doing, it's helped my wife and I save a lot of cash since we started using it

vineyardlabs 3y ago

I switched to Monarch from YNAB a few months ago because I'd been using YNAB for years and wanted something a little less involved. I'm really loving it. Thanks for building it!

gurchik 3y ago
What about Monarch is less involved than YNAB? I’ve been considering changing since they’ve increased the annual cost.
- vineyardlabs 3y ago
  I should say a lot of it comes down to the theory of the budgeting system, not the software itself. Monarch is a more traditional cashflow based system, as opposed to the cash system that YNAB uses. You're budgeting your income in a given month in Monarch, vs. budgeting only money you actually have in YNAB. In general the way you're encouraged to set up your budget is different. YNAB and the YNAB community seems to trend toward creating very granular catergories, and every single transaction has to be viewed and approved. In monarch, you start with a set of default categories that are fairly broad, and they encourage you to use these as they seem to have done a pretty good job at designing filters that automatically classify transactions into those categories. You can still add your custom categories though. Transactions get automatically put in categories and you don't need to review them except for certain circumstances where Monarch decides it can't confidentially categorizes them. Some things get improperly categorized sometimes but this isn't that big of a deal because your categories in Monarch are likely broader than they would be in YNAB, and it's also not like YNAB where the total of your budget represents money you literally have on hand so if the numbers don't line up perfectly it's not the end of the world. In the end Monarch isn't super different from more traditional budgeting apps like mint or rocketmoney, it's just the best executed. I still think YNAB is invaluable for people that have to really tightly manage money to make sure they have enough cash on hand at the end of the month to pay rent, for example. But now that I'm in a position where I have a little more cushion, I've grown tired of the constant queue of transactions to approve and the general micromanagement in YNAB

enumjorge 3y ago

> It's always sad to see products that were truly innovative when they came out end up getting neglected and sunset due to large co M&A-based strategic decision-making. It is sad, but is it sad enough that if a large co offers to buy your company and make you very wealthy, you're going to decline? Sorry for the cynicism but this cycle of adopting a software tool only for that to be bought out and subsequently shut down is getting pretty old. I'm sure Mint's initial sales pitch was also about passionate founders who cared about their customers. This is probably the nature of companies--no one will care as much about a product as much as the people who first created it, but the cycle seems so much faster with software.

sbarre 3y ago
I agree with you entirely. I was an early adopter of Mint, but the day they sold to Intuit I moved all my stuff out of there, because I knew it was never going to get better.
ryandrake 3y ago
> Sorry for the cynicism but this cycle of adopting a software tool only for that to be bought out and subsequently shut down is getting pretty old. This behavior has fully converted me from "optimistic early adopter" to "late majority" on the Adopter Categories chart. I honestly don't trust any startup's products anymore, because of the real risk that they're going to cash in their chips and let the product die, probably when it's least convenient for me the customer. To be fair, I don't trust a lot of bigger companies too--there is at least one example of a BigTech company notorious for trying things and then shutting them down within a years or months!
- kaibee 3y ago
  > This behavior has fully converted me from "optimistic early adopter" to "late majority" on the Adopter Categories chart. Hadn't seen it put so clearly but yeah same. Not even limited to tech unfortunately, same issue with TV Shows. Why watch Season 1 set up a bunch of cool premises if there's not gonna be any pay-off?

city41 3y ago

It was so neglected (and buggy) that I ended up writing my own budget tool. Hey Ozzie, hope all is well :)

true_religion 3y ago

Definitely going to check this out. Does Monarch have rule based categorization, so we can set certain transactions to always fall under a category based on what is in the description? Mint partially supported this but QuickBooks did it better.

Ozzie_osman 3y ago
I think I can confidently say we have the best transaction rule system out there. You can set rules to rename, recategorize, add notes, require review, mark as reviewed, etc, based on name, amount, category, account, etc. It's one of our most cited features. https://help.monarchmoney.com/hc/en-us/articles/360048393372-Transaction-rules https://help.monarchmoney.com/hc/en-us/articles/360048393372...
- true_religion 3y ago
  Thanks that seems great. If I had known about Monarch, I’d have switched earlier. I had always hoped Intuit planned on adding Quickbooks features into Mint, but they never did.

jonahhorowitz 3y ago

I switched over to Monarch a year or so ago and I've been pretty happy with it. I much prefer a paid product to an ad-driven one. The product isn't perfect, they have some work to do on categorization and de-duplication of recurring payments, but overall it's good enough and seems to be getting better.

gk1 3y ago

Hey Ozzie, have a promo code for HNers looking to switch?

myth_drannon 3y ago
if you sign up and abandon it, they send you 30% discount after a couple of hours.

geekifier 3y ago

I would love to use and pay for your service, but it's inexcusable than a service that charges $100+ / year has so many trackers that uBlock shows 87 elements blocked just in the account signup flow (/signup/connect-spending-account). A financial info aggregator is the one place where I would appreciate NOT having my data and behavior exfiltrated to third parties.

dehrmann 3y ago
Apparently revenue model is more important than a lot of things.
metalliqaz 3y ago
ouch
sbarre 3y ago
Hmm would be curious to know which block lists you have. I'm only blocking 27 things with most of them being Split.io (for A/B testing I presume) Sprig, Stripe and Sentry. Those aren't really third-party trackers (even though I am blocking most of them) in the marketing sense.. There's some analytics from Tiktok, Clarity, Reddit and Spotify(??), which make sense to block but don't feel that intrusive if they're tracking inbound referrals. I don't even see 50 other things that I could be blocking. Not arguing the point here, just wondering what I'm missing since I try to keep pretty extensive block lists myself.
- geekifier 3y ago
  My count might include additional elements from going through signup flow with their bank connection providers. My lists are: - uBlock - EasyList - EasyPrivacy - Online Malicious URL Blocklist - Peter Lowe’s Ad and tracking server list - uBlock filters – Annoyances - AdGuard Annoyances filter - pl: Oficjalne Polskie Filtry > There's some analytics from Tiktok, Clarity, Reddit and Spotify Yeah, if my bank started embedding those on their account page, I would GTFO.
- phone8675309 3y ago
  > There's some analytics from Tiktok, Clarity, Reddit and Spotify This is completely inexcusable from a fintech company. It shows me, as a potential customer, that they're not serious - either they're trying to get acquihired or they have no idea about privacy.

damvigilante 3y ago

Are you planning to add support for Canadian banks anytime soon? I checked out Monarch and ended up going with Mint just because they were one of the only ones supporting Canadian banks

Ozzie_osman 3y ago
We're working on it! Stay tuned.
myth_drannon 3y ago
I saw RBC on the Plaid's list, but it fell through because of two step authentication or something.

atlgator 3y ago

Anyone know how Monarch compares to Personal Capital? Since they got bought by Empower I’ve been looking for alternatives.

cainxinth 3y ago

I have meticulous notes for thousands of transactions in Mint over many years. What's the over/under on them surviving the migration? It's a real question. I'm considering doing it but, only if the notes get there.

lancewiggs 3y ago

Pocketsmith has been around for years, and built a properly sustainable business with essentially no funding. We've seen Mint refugees too, but also suspect there is a lot less there than the vanity metics might show. In this space we've seen companies come and go and the ones that stay have a business model that works every day. That means providing a great service, charging people reasonably prices for the product and avoiding selling data or advertising. Mint was never sustainable, but the founders did well to sell it to Intuit when they did. Pocketsmith uses Google Analytics and Mixpanel, and that's it - no remarketing and fully GDPR complaint. The company is strong in UK, Australia and New Zealand, with decent US support too. But I'd be interested to see what others see. (I'm the minor investor.) Edited for formatting.

graeme 3y ago

Have been using Lunch Money, hadn't heard of Monarch 1. Have you got an import function if we have csv or in other formats? 2. My only issue with Lunchmoney is my connections are often broken. They use Plaid. Is this one of those things where if they have a problem, you also will? Or does your implementation of plaid integration affect stability?