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Comment by roywiggins | Hacker News Reader

Mint never really lost its soul. It always seemed like it was going to try and upsell me on stuff, but that was fine by me because I'm not in the market for new credit cards or whatever. But I guess that's part of the problem, and they're just not making much money off referrals and therefore can't be bothered to improve the product?

The problem for me with Mint is that it just... stopped getting any updates, and the visualizations are not configurable at all, so if you want something that looks a bit different, or doesn't use a pie chart, or shows more things at once, you just can't do it. And it's all in Flash! I ended up building a crappy set of graphs in Excel and using Mint's csv output to try and get a more useful view of the data.

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To me, the lack of updates is Mint losing its soul.

What was refreshing and different about Mint for me is that they said, "Hey, what if we really look at how people deal with their money and design accordingly?" It was a huge, innovative leap forward. It was far from perfect, but if they just kept iterating with the same spirit, I knew it would get to be something I loved. Alas, alas.

Exactly. Mint gave you a modern way to look at your finances instead of using your bank's terrible website.

But if it's not a modern way to look at finances....

Founder of Lunch Money (https://lunchmoney.app) here! I encourage you to check us out– we aim to be that personal finance app that was built for the modern-day spender.

Transaction tagging is also super bad.

I used to use it pretty regularly, but I'd spend so much time categorizing transactions, one pulldown menu at a time. I got sick of it and haven't logged in in a long time.

This is the main reason I stopped using it. I don't know if they pushed an update to transaction tagging, but it got really bad all of a sudden making the product much less useful to me.

Agreed. I don't know what they did but having to consistently re-categorize rent payments from whatever nonsense they were auto-categorized as killed it. Automation is great when it doesn't get things comically wrong.

I always assume that once I categorize a recurring bill as something, it will always be categorized that way. If feels like it takes recategorizing it many times before the category sticks. Which is really annoying.

If you use the web version of Mint there's an option to explicitly tell Mint to categorize it that way in the future. It works for me.

If you use the web interface you can set rules to automatically categorize recurring transaction the same way in the future by hitting the details button as you categorize transactions. It works for me. Oddly I don't think the app has that feature.

Same here. Tracking where my money was going was the only reason I signed up for it - having to put all that time and energy into making it actually do that killed its entire value proposition for me.

Credit Card referral was/is a big business. I remember personal finance bloggers were making $50 dollar for each referral. If mint can convince each customer to get a new card every year, it will be a 500 million dollars business. It is not huge but a sustainable business.

Mint is vastly under capitalizing on its spending data. The recs are all generic / not personalized. Not like “hey you spent $10k on groceries, you could’ve gotten $300 back with amex blue cash everyday. Sign up now and earn a $150 welcome bonus”.

I'm super interested in this solution, can you expand a bit on your motivations and help me better understand the problem?

I see a lot of times, people export to Excel to do their own analysis. I think there is something about doing it "my way" that helps me connect with the data, whether it's budgeting or (my current project) fantasy sports.

Specifically, what value do you get from exporting and creating your own graphs? How much time do you spend / how frustrating is it to have to export and build the graphs?

Specifically I wanted a stacked bar chart so I could see spending over time broken out by category. So if I had a spike, I could see "oh, I bought a plane ticket that week" and I could toggle categories on and off, and just have a graph with, say, groceries and fast food over time. Excel makes this reasonably easy to do, but you can't do it at all in Mint.

One day I will throw it into an instance of http://redash.io and have more fluent access to the data, since I write SQL-backed graphs in my actual job I'm much better with it than Excel.

You and I sound very familiar! I also have plans for personal dashboards using redash for everything from weather to a shared calendar. Also plan on putting it in a display in a Magic Mirror for aesthetics... but who has the time!

Couple questions, if you don't mind taking the time:

1) What makes you want to use Redash, instead of a spreadsheet?

2) If you had a service that (securely) sync'd data into your spreadsheet, would that provide all of the value of Redashing it?

> And it's all in Flash!

I think they moved away from Flash, I see svg now for charts

They moved the "Trending" section charts to something SVG based. The "Investment" section charts throws up a "You need Flash error" and now blocks you from navigating to other "Investment" section information even if you just wanted to look at the tables rather than graphs, making the entire "Investment" section a broken window.

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