Comparison
Arden
Mint
The migration path Intuit didn’t give you.
By Tyler · May 13, 2026 · ~7 min read
Mint shut down on March 23, 2024. Intuit migrated users to Credit Karma — also Intuit-owned — which doesn't budget, doesn't track net worth the way Mint did, and doesn't let you set savings goals. The five years of transaction history a lot of people had built up in Mint arrived as a CSV in their email and a vague suggestion to “try Credit Karma.”
I was one of those users. This page exists because none of the obvious replacements were the right shape, so I built one.
What Mint did well
It was free, and it connected to every bank. Those two things together are why Mint had 25 million users at peak. Open the app, see every account, see what you spent on groceries this month, get a vague net worth number. The friction was zero. The value was real. For about a decade Mint was the default answer to “how do I see all my money in one place,” and that wasn't an accident — the product was genuinely well-designed for that job.
It also pioneered the category. The model of “aggregate-via-bank-credentials, categorize-via-rules, show-spending-in-charts” is what every other personal finance app — Monarch, Empower, Rocket Money, Simplifi, all of them — built on. The category exists because Mint proved it could.
What it didn't do well, in retrospect: it was free because you were the product. Mint made money by recommending credit cards, loans, and high-yield savings accounts in the sidebar, and Intuit knew exactly what you spent on plywood at Home Depot, which made those recommendations very targeted and very profitable. That was the trade. When Credit Karma's version of that trade started making more money than Mint's, Intuit shut Mint down. It wasn't malice. It was a spreadsheet.
What Arden does differently
Privacy is structural. Arden's Privacy plan is $5/mo or $50/yr and never asks for a bank credential. CSV import is a first-class flow — the import walkthroughcovers every major US bank's export format. Plaid is an option on the Plus plan, never a requirement. Mint's whole architecture assumed your bank login was the entry point. Arden's whole architecture assumes the opposite.
You pay us. Advertisers don't.Two prices, both honest. Privacy at $5/mo. Plus at $12/mo. No “free” tier funded by recommending you a Chase Sapphire. No credit-card sidebar. No high-yield-savings affiliate. The why page is the longer essay on why I picked this trade.
Your data is yours. Mint gave users a CSV when it shut down — three years of transactions, no budget history, no goal history, no category metadata. Arden ships full CSV andJSON export to every user, today, from Settings, before there's any reason to leave. If Arden ever winds down, you get 90 days notice and the export keeps working through the shutdown window. That's written in the privacy policy, not just promised here.
It still feels like Mint where Mint was right. Net worth view, account aggregation, automatic categorization, transaction-level search, monthly spending breakdown — all there. The Sankey diagram on the cash flow page answers the question Mint always almost-answered: “where did the money actually go this month.” The product page walks the surfaces one by one.
Honest comparison
| Feature | Mint (RIP) | Credit Karma (today) | Arden Privacy | Arden Plus |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Status | Shut down March 2024 | Active (replacement?) | Active | Active |
| Price | Free (ad-funded) | Free (lead-gen-funded) | $5/mo / $50/yr | $12/mo / $120/yr |
| Sells your spending data to advertisers / lenders | Yes | Yes | No, never | No, never |
| Envelope / zero-based budgeting | No (category limits only) | No | Yes | Yes |
| Net worth tracking | Yes | Limited (credit-score-focused) | Yes (19 asset classes) | Yes + Plaid auto-refresh |
| Investment holdings (shares, prices, allocation) | No | No | Yes (manual + CSV) | Yes (Plaid investment sync) |
| Plaid bank sync | Built-in | Yes | No (by design) | Yes |
| Works without bank login | No | No | Yes — every feature | Yes |
| Savings goals | Yes | No | Yes (three goal types) | Yes |
| Subscription detection | Limited | Limited | Yes (nightly detector) | Yes |
| Monthly review email | No | No | Yes (the 1st of every month) | Yes |
| Full data export (CSV + JSON) | CSV only, at shutdown | Limited | Yes, anytime | Yes, anytime |
| Behavioral analytics on website | Heavy | Heavy | None | None |
Pricing current as of May 2026.
Credit Karma isn't a Mint replacement. Intuit kept the brand goodwill, the user emails, and the data, and pointed them at a credit-product marketplace. If you migrated because you didn't want to lose your transaction history, the migration mostly didn't go the way you thought it did.
Where they win, where we win
Mint won on free and on bank breadth. Nothing wins on free anymore — the bar has moved, and the ad-funded model has gotten obviously worse for users as the data-broker industry has matured. Credit Karma's free dashboard is fine for credit monitoring but it isn't a budget app and isn't trying to be.
Arden wins on the things Mint users actually liked (net worth, account aggregation, automatic categorization, Sankey cash flow) and adds the things Mint never had (envelope budgeting, real investment tracking, share-precision math, monthly review email, full JSON export). The trade is $5/mo for a Privacy plan that genuinely doesn't have your bank login, or $12/mo for a Plus plan with Plaid that still doesn't sell your data anywhere.
The pitch is short: I built Arden for the version of me who watched Mint disappear, opened Credit Karma, and realized Intuit had spent a decade collecting transaction data and was now redirecting that data at a product that wasn't actually for budgeting. There had to be a better answer.
FAQ
Common questions.
Can I import my Mint CSV into Arden?
- Yes — Mint's final export was a CSV with date, description, amount, category, and account. The Arden import flow accepts that format directly, runs merchant cleaning on the descriptions ("AMAZON.COM PAYMENT 1234" → "Amazon"), and applies any category-rule learning you build going forward. Most users get a clean three-to-five-year history into Arden in about 20 minutes.
What's the difference between Arden Privacy and the "free" Credit Karma path?
- The honest answer is $5/mo. The longer answer is that Credit Karma's product is built around recommending credit cards, loans, and savings accounts — that's where the revenue comes from. Arden's product is built around helping you see your money and not having a financial reason to recommend anything to you. The $5/mo is the cost of not being the product.
Did Mint actually sell my data?
- Mint, under Intuit, made money primarily through affiliate offers — recommending financial products and earning commissions when users signed up. Whether that meets your personal definition of "sold my data" is up to you. Privacy researchers consistently flagged Mint's data flows as among the most extensive in the consumer-finance category. The why essay walks through the architectural difference between "we don't show ads" and "we don't have your data to ship to anyone."
I just want the spending pie chart and the net worth number. Is Arden overkill?
- Possibly. If you genuinely just want passive spending tracking and a net worth pulse, Empower's free dashboard does that without charging — though the trade is heavy advisor outreach starting at $100K AUM (see the Empower comparison). If you want the spending pie plus envelope budgeting, monthly review, goals, and full data export, Arden Privacy at $5/mo is the cheapest non-ad-funded option I know of.
Will Arden still be here in five years?
- That's the real question, and the honest answer is "I'm building it to be." Arden runs as a sole-proprietor product on a paid subscription model — no VC pressure to grow into a different business, no acquisition logic that turns into a Credit Karma rerun. If Arden ever does need to wind down, the terms commit to 90 days of advance notice and continued export access through that window. Mint's three-year CSV was the legal minimum. Arden's commitment is that you leave with the whole shape of your financial system, including budgets, goals, and category metadata, in CSV and JSON.
Import your Mint CSV. Keep the history.
$5/mo Privacy for CSV-only. $12/mo Plus if you want Plaid bank sync. 30-day money-back on either.