Mint shut down in March 2024. Two years later, the post-Mint landscape is largely the same shape: most "Mint alternatives" use the same bank-aggregator model that Mint did. You connect your bank through Plaid, MX, or Yodlee, and the alternative gets read access to every transaction on every linked account, in real time, forever.
For most people, that tradeoff is fine. Convenience for surveillance is the default exchange in consumer software. But if you've ever wondered whether you could get the categorization, subscription tracking, and historical view without handing a third party your banking credentials — there is a smaller, less marketed category of tools that does exactly that. Here's the short list, with who each is best for.
What people actually miss about Mint
Worth naming, because it's what you should be shopping for. Mint's draw was rarely budgeting — it was that everything landed in one place automatically, arrived pre-categorized, and had enough history to show trends. It was free, and it made forgotten recurring charges visible.
Almost nobody misses Mint's budgeting features specifically. If you separate “see my spending, sorted, over time” from “run a budgeting methodology”, the shopping list gets much shorter — and a statement-based tool covers the first without touching your credentials.
What bank linking actually involves
The mechanics matter here, because “connect your bank” covers two quite different things.
- Token-based connections. Where a bank supports it, you authenticate on the bank's own site and it issues a scoped token. Your password isn't shared, and you can usually revoke access from the bank.
- Credential-based connections. Where it isn't supported, you hand your username and password to the aggregator, which stores them and signs in as you on a schedule. This is the model people picture, and it's still common at smaller institutions.
Either way there are three parties holding your data — the bank, the aggregator, and the app — and access typically persists until you revoke it, not until you stop using the app. That's the thing worth deciding deliberately rather than by clicking through a setup flow.
How to read this list
Every tool here works from statement uploads, not bank linking. You'll need to spend 30 seconds per month downloading PDFs from your bank's website. In exchange, your bank credentials never leave your bank, and no third-party aggregator is sitting between you and your money.
1. Sortlumo
Best for: people who want Mint's categorization and forgotten- subscription detection without bank linking, and who value Excel export.
- Upload bank or credit card PDFs. 22 categories assigned automatically.
- Subscription detection with annualized cost.
- Multi-account view (free=1, personal=5, pro=unlimited).
- Excel export on every plan, including free.
- Web app and iOS app.
- Pricing: free for 1 statement/month, $4.99/mo Personal and $12.99/mo Pro — or $4.17 and $8.33 a month billed annually.
Where it loses: No real-time sync. No credit score tracking. No investment portfolio analytics. If those matter to you, look at Monarch or Empower.
Try Sortlumo free — no card, 1 statement/month, no bank login.
2. Monavio
Best for: people who want a Mint-style dashboard with net worth and investment tracking, especially outside the US, and who want it cheap.
- PDF and CSV upload model like Sortlumo, in any country or currency.
- Dashboards for spending, budgets, investments, net worth, and FIRE planning.
- AI-driven extraction with manual override.
- $3/$5/$7 a month billed annually, with a 14-day trial.
Where we lose to it: Monavio is cheaper than us at every tier and covers more ground — net worth, portfolio tracking, and retirement projections are things Sortlumo simply doesn't do. If that breadth is what you're shopping for, it's the better buy.
Where it loses: its plans cap how many statements you can process each month, and data export is reserved for the top tier — Sortlumo includes Excel export on every plan, including free. It also runs a trial rather than a permanent free tier, so there's no indefinite $0 option.
3. Spend & Invest
Best for: people who want AI-powered analytics on top of uploaded statements and like a chat-style "ask questions about my spending" interface.
- Upload bank statement PDFs, AI categorizes every transaction.
- Natural-language queries on your spending data.
- Dashboards built from your uploaded statements.
- Free tier with unlimited uploads; paid plans announced but not yet launched.
Where we lose to it: it's free, with unlimited statement uploads — a more generous starting point than our one-a-month free tier, and it includes subscription detection and natural-language queries at $0.
Where it loses: the free tier keeps only about three months of history, and spreadsheet export sits on a paid plan that hasn't launched yet. It's in beta, so both the feature set and the pricing are still moving.
4. Lunch Money
Best for: people who are comfortable importing CSV and want a flexible, opinionated budget app.
- CSV import (not PDF — you'll need to convert first).
- Excellent budgeting features and tags.
- Active development, indie team.
Note: Lunch Money also supports Plaid-style linking, but you can ignore that and run it entirely from CSV uploads. If you want strict no-aggregator, skip the Plaid setup. Getting statements into CSV shape is exactly what converting a statement is for.
5. Tiller
Best for: spreadsheet people who want their financial data in Google Sheets or Excel directly.
- Uses Google Sheets as the front end.
- Templates for budgeting, debt tracking, net worth.
- Full control over data and formulas.
Note: Tiller's default mode uses bank aggregator sync. You can use it CSV-only, but you'll be working against the grain. Best if you're already a spreadsheet-driven person.
The bank-sync alternatives, for honesty
If you decide bank linking is fine after all, the well-reviewed options for 2026 are:
Monarch Money
The closest thing to Mint's UX, with serious investment in design and reliability. Bank-aggregator model. Around $99/year.
Copilot Money
Beautiful Apple-only app, bank-aggregator model, $13/mo. Best-in-class iOS experience. Not available on Android or web.
YNAB (You Need a Budget)
Less a Mint replacement, more a budgeting philosophy with software. Zero-based budgeting, steep learning curve, devoted users. $99/year.
Empower Personal Dashboard
Free dashboard with net worth and investment focus. Owned by a wealth-management firm that will eventually call to sell you advisory services.
Every price on this page, ours included, was checked in August 2026 and will drift. Treat the figures as a starting point and check the vendor before you commit — we keep longer side-by-sides on the comparisons page.
Five questions to ask before you connect anything
- Where do my credentials go? Bank-hosted login and a revocable token is a materially different deal from typing your password into an app.
- Who else sees the data? The app, its aggregator, and any analytics it sells to are three separate answers.
- How do I revoke it? And does deleting the account actually delete the transaction history, or just your login?
- What happens when I stop paying? Some tools keep the data and lock the view. Ask before you have two years of history inside.
- Can I get my data out? A CSV or Excel export is the difference between using a product and being stuck in one.
The hybrid nobody mentions
These aren't exclusive. Plenty of people link the checking account they watch daily and keep the credit cards — where the forgotten subscriptions actually live — on statement uploads. You get the convenience where it pays and keep the aggregator away from the accounts you care most about. Nothing about linking one account obliges you to link them all.
Picking from this list, in 30 seconds
- Want Mint's vibe without bank linking → Sortlumo. Try the free tier first.
- Want the cheapest way to do this → Spend & Invest while it's free, or Monavio at $3/mo if you want net worth and investments too.
- Want Monthly cost view in a beautiful iOS app, OK with bank linking → Copilot Money.
- Want serious budgeting → YNAB.
- Want it in a spreadsheet → Tiller, or roll your own with Sortlumo's Excel export.
- Want net worth + investment focus → Empower (free, with tradeoffs).
The privacy framing, one more time
The bank-aggregator model isn't evil. It's a real, regulated industry. But it also means that every aggregator-linked tool can theoretically see every transaction on every linked account, indefinitely. That's not how most people think of "tracking my spending" — and once you notice it, it's hard to unsee.
The PDF-upload model is more work. The tradeoff is that the data path is: bank → you → the tool. No third party in the middle, no API key with read access to your bank, nothing happening behind the scenes when you're not looking. That's the whole reason this list exists.