Mint Is Dead. Long Live… Something.
In January 2024, Intuit killed Mint. Fifteen million users suddenly had nowhere to send their bank credentials. The eulogies were brief, most people knew Mint had been neglected for years, but the scramble to find a replacement was real.
Monarch Money was sitting there with its hand raised.
It had been building quietly since 2021, and the Mint shutdown was basically a five-alarm marketing event it didn’t have to pay for. If you haven’t checked it out yet, here’s the full picture: what it does well, where it falls short, and whether it’s the right tool for your financial situation.
What Monarch Actually Does
Monarch is a personal finance dashboard. You connect your bank accounts, credit cards, investment accounts, and loans, and it pulls everything into one place. The core features:
- Account aggregation: connects to thousands of financial institutions via Plaid and its own integrations
- Net worth dashboard: real-time snapshot of assets minus liabilities, with historical tracking
- Transaction feed: every transaction from every account, automatically categorized
- Budgeting: set monthly budgets by category, track spending against them
- Cash flow reports: income vs. expenses over any time range, broken down by category
- Investment performance: portfolio value, allocation breakdown, return tracking
It’s a solid set of features. Nothing on that list is surprising, but Monarch executes all of it cleanly enough that the experience doesn’t make you feel like you’re wrestling with 2015-era fintech.
The Price Tag
Monarch costs around $99/year (about $8.25/month), or $14.99/month if you go monthly. There’s a 30-day free trial. No free tier, this is a paid product from the start, which is actually a feature: when you’re not the product, they have actual incentive to keep the data connections working.
Compare that to Mint, which was free and showed you credit card ads until Intuit gave up. You get what you pay for, etc.
Where Monarch Does the Work
The Net Worth Dashboard Is Genuinely Good
This is the feature most people open the app for, and Monarch nails it. Every account shows up in a clean sidebar, checking, savings, brokerage, 401k, mortgage, credit cards, with a running total at the top. The historical chart shows your net worth over time, and you can see the trend over the last month, year, or since you started tracking.
If you’ve been logging net worth manually in a spreadsheet (no judgment, most of us have), this is the part that makes you close the spreadsheet and not look back.
Multi-User Support Is Genuinely Rare
One subscription covers two users. You and your partner both get full access to the same dashboard, each with your own login. You can see all accounts, all transactions, all budgets. Neither of you is screenshotting the budget page to text the other.
YNAB technically supports this too but the implementation is clunkier. Mint never did it properly. Monarch built this in from the beginning, and it shows. If you share finances with anyone, this alone might justify the $99.
The Mobile App Is Actually Good
This sounds like a low bar, but plenty of fintech apps have great web products and broken mobile experiences. Monarch’s iOS and Android apps are fast, the net worth dashboard loads in under two seconds, and you can pull up a transaction history mid-conversation with a financial question (“wait, did we actually spend $400 at restaurants last month?”) without fighting the app.
Passive Tracking Just Works
Here’s the honest value proposition for most tech workers: you don’t need someone to tell you to spend less on coffee. You need to see your complete financial picture in one place, without logging into seven different accounts. Monarch does that. Set it up once, connect your accounts, check it when you feel like it. The transaction feed refreshes automatically. Your net worth updates daily.
If this is 80% of what you want from personal finance software, Monarch delivers it cleanly.
Where Monarch Falls Short
Budgeting Methodology Is Weak
Monarch has budgets, you set a monthly amount per category, spending gets tracked against it. Fine. But if you want to actually control your spending with a deliberate system, it’s not the right tool.
Monarch uses a loose, passive-tracking approach to budgeting. It tells you how much you’ve spent vs. your budget, after the fact. YNAB’s zero-based budgeting approach, where every dollar is assigned a job before you spend it, is fundamentally more effective if your goal is to change behavior rather than observe it.
If you’ve blown your dining-out budget by the 15th, Monarch tells you that you’ve blown it. YNAB makes you look at your budget before you spend, decide whether to cover the overage from another category, and actively make the choice. The friction is the point.
Monarch won’t break your spending habits. YNAB has a decent shot at it.
Transaction Categorization Requires More Work Than Expected
Mint auto-categorized transactions reasonably well out of the box. Monarch’s categorization is decent but requires more manual cleanup, especially in the first few months as it learns your patterns. You’ll spend time splitting transactions, correcting miscategorized charges, and teaching it what “AMZN Mktp US” means in your specific life.
This settles down after a few months, but the initial setup is more work than Mint was. For a paid product, that’s worth noting.
Investment Tracking Is Surface-Level
Monarch shows you your portfolio value and a basic allocation breakdown. That’s useful, knowing whether your 401k gained or lost value last month is information. But it’s not a replacement for dedicated investment tracking.
You won’t get tax lot tracking, dividend reinvestment analysis, factor exposure, or anything approaching what a tool like Empower (formerly Personal Capital) gives you on the investment side. Monarch’s investment view is better than nothing and considerably worse than good.
If investment performance analysis is your primary concern, pair Monarch with Empower’s free dashboard (which is actually excellent for that specific use case).
Monarch vs. the Alternatives
vs. Mint (RIP)
Monarch is strictly better than Mint was in 2023. The net worth dashboard is cleaner, multi-user support actually works, and the mobile app is faster. Mint let its product decay for years while prioritizing ad revenue; Monarch is building a product people pay for.
The transition is mild culture shock, Mint’s categorization was better out of the box, and the free price was obviously more comfortable, but if you’re evaluating on the merits, Monarch wins.
vs. YNAB ($109/year)
These tools have different philosophies. YNAB is a behavior-change tool that happens to track your finances. Monarch is a financial visibility tool that happens to have budgets.
YNAB costs about $109/year (slightly more than Monarch), has a steep learning curve, and requires active engagement every few days. If you go a week without checking YNAB, it falls apart. That’s by design, the friction is the mechanism.
Monarch’s passive tracking model means you can ignore it for a month and come back to a coherent picture. That’s either a feature or a limitation depending on what you need.
Pick Monarch if: You want a complete financial dashboard, you share finances with a partner, and your goal is visibility rather than behavior change.
Pick YNAB if: You have a spending problem you want to actually fix, you’re willing to engage with your budget actively, or you’ve already tried passive tracking and found it doesn’t change anything.
Use both if: You’re an engineer and $200/year for complete financial coverage seems reasonable, which it probably does.
vs. Empower (free)
Empower’s free tier is excellent for net worth tracking and investment analysis. It’s genuinely competitive on both of those dimensions, the investment dashboard is better than Monarch’s, and the net worth tracking is comparable.
The tradeoff: Empower’s business model is connecting you with financial advisors. Expect outreach. The budgeting features are an afterthought. Monarch’s overall product is more coherent.
Empower as a second dashboard specifically for investment tracking: genuinely a good idea. Empower as your only financial tool: fine if you just want net worth + portfolio, limited if you want cash flow and budgeting.
The Bottom Line
Monarch Money is the best Mint replacement for the majority of users, the ones who want to see where their money is going without building a system around it. The net worth dashboard is excellent, multi-user support is legitimately useful, the mobile app is fast, and the passive tracking just works.
At $99/year, you’re paying for a product that has actual incentive to maintain its data connections and ship improvements. That’s a better arrangement than the free-ad-supported-neglect-until-sunset model you had with Mint.
The caveats: if you want to actively control your spending rather than observe it, YNAB is still the better tool. If investment analysis matters to you, pair Monarch with Empower’s free dashboard. And budget a few hours for initial setup, the transaction categorization will need some manual attention before it settles in.
But for “show me my complete financial picture in one clean app that my partner can also access”, Monarch is the answer.
