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Comment by Ozzie_osman | Hacker News Reader

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-cultu... 1: https://www.monarchmoney.com/blog/mint-shutting-down

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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.

Apparently revenue model is more important than a lot of things.

ouch

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.

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.

> 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.

Tracking behaviour on a marketing homepage is a bit different than tracking in the app. It's probably just conversion pixels for ad networks (ie, you need to determine if advertising on tiktok actually works). Not sure if you need to install JS from their specific networks, probably not. But generally I'm not against the idea if it's restricted to marketing sites.

Yeah this is on the public inbound signup pages, not in the app itself (although I can't confirm that it's not in the app - I didn't sign up).

This is pretty standard stuff, and while I'm not a fan of trackers and I personally block them, I don't resent companies that want to understand their traffic and prospects.

As a business you want to know which paid channels are working and where your traffic is coming from.

A question for you then, if this is "completely inexcusable": How else do you propose that companies monitor their sales and marketing efforts?

Referrer header? Or don't these services pass a query param when they send a user in? Why do you need to call back into their js?

This is a good point. But it would mean more work on the Monarch side (and possibly more support for the analytics team when their customer messes up etc).

I would bet that the JS is an implementation shortcut, and a way for the analytics service to avoid doing customer-side implementation support. Keep things as simple as possible (which is a reasonable business goal).

Plus it means that the service you're using can refactor or change around how they handle things and you don't need to be updating your code all the time?

But the tradeoff is that you end up in this situation where people ask "why do you need to load a JS file from a third party?"

> A question for you then, if this is "completely inexcusable": How else do you propose that companies monitor their sales and marketing efforts?

By simply asking users how and where they found out about a service? Sure there is a possibility that some users might not respond truthfully (or at all), but I believe that the quality of data collected in this (respectful) way still trumps that of data snitched from unsuspecting users but skewed by those who use adblockers (not unlikely in the case of a fintech service because of expected higher user awareness of privacy concerns).

So you're going to intercept and ask every single user who lands on your inbound signup page before you let them sign up?

That doesn't feel like a great user experience. As a user, I would just button past that pop-up or form.

The goal with these kinds of analytics is not to get referral information from only users who sign up, but for anyone who lands on the page - maybe just to read about you at first - so you have a sense of where they came from and how your marketing spend is doing.

Most paid traffic doesn't convert. If you want to know how much of it is converting, you need to also know how much didn't convert.

> How else do you propose that companies monitor their sales and marketing efforts?

There are several ways:

  - Have a specific URL for each entry into the sales funnel - you see this on YouTube with things like "go to blahblahblah.com/witty-tag to sign up and get my discount"

  - Look at the referrer URL if you don't want separate incoming links per entry

  - Ask for a referral code when someone is creating their account - this allows you to track entry from people referred into the product

  - Have a field on the signup page where you ask this question instead of invading the user's privacy to get it

There are many ways that don't involve sticking a ton of trackers on a signup page, a page that by definition, all of your users must go through at least once and part of the face of your company. To me, it's not a good look that these trackers are there and invasive.

>> either they're trying to get acquihired or they have no idea about privacy.

This is my fear for any finapp I try now, as I was on Mint, and now left. At what point will Monarch be acquired and/or begin to sell me things I don't want to increase profits?

> begin to sell me things I don't want to increase profits?

What financial service, new or old, doesn't do this already?

90% of the communication from my bank is them trying to push additional services on me. It's never about what's good for me, it's what's good for them.

> 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.

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.

> 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!

> 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?

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

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?

So we do have a Mint import flow: 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.

Would be nice for Mint to relax this limit between now and sunset.

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!

What about Monarch is less involved than YNAB? I’ve been considering changing since they’ve increased the annual cost.

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

I use YNAB, and I totally agree that broad categories are preferable. It's really easy to proliferate categories, but rarely do I find the granularity useful in hindsight

I think you and I are pretty similar. I started using when I was in college and overdrafting on my account was a real risk, so tracking every dollar made sense. Now I'm at the point where I'm fine with transactions being automatically categorized so I can focus on the bigger picture and longer term goals. So at first it felt like Monarch would be great.

I just can't wrap my head around the Goals feature. I've noticed the following:

1. Monarch expects specific accounts to be used for specific Goals, for example, a savings account for a vacation fund.

2. A transaction can only be associated with a goal if it is from the account attached to the goal.

I actually completely agree with Monarch on this. If you're using a savings account for your vacation fund and you buy plane tickets with checking, you should have to transfer money to match. In YNAB you don't have to. I choose to regularly create transfers so my account balances match the category balance in YNAB, but YNAB doesn't require me to.

However, this completely breaks down with:

3. Some account types don't support transactions. Retirement accounts show your portfolio but not transactions.

So if I have a Goal to contribute $100 to an IRA every month, and I debit $100 from my checking to transfer it to the IRA, it's impossible to mark this Goal as complete because there is no corresponding credit of $100 in the IRA. The balance of the portfolio increases but that doesn't matter.

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.

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

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

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.

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...

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.

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?

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.

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

We're working on it! Stay tuned.

I saw RBC on the Plaid's list, but it fell through because of two step authentication or something.

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.

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

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

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