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Comment by jader201 | Hacker News Reader

With Mint being deprecated, I’ve been looking for something to replace it. I know there are a number of paid alternatives, but it seems like they all are missing at least one or two things that I liked about Mint.

Is there an OSS option that comes close? Seems like the biggest hurdle is finding one that is close to reliable when authenticating with other sites (and able to adapt to changes they make, 2FA, etc.).

I guess the good news is that most of the ones I use are fairly popular/big (e.g. Vanguard, Ally, Schwab, etc.). But I have a couple loans (home, car) tied into smaller institutions.

EDIT: related, a recent thread on Mint alternatives that I had missed:

Ask HN: Alternative to Mint.com?

(9 days ago, 44 votes, 71 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39275231

View on HN

After reading the comments in this thread I may consider open sourcing my side project porkybank.io. You can check out an example here: https://porkybank.io/example/overview

It's a simple daily budgeting app I put together for my wife and I to help us be more cognizant of our daily spending. Upvotes count as interest.

This looks like a great tool. Not sure what the crystal ball does.

Thanks for the feedback, it's like a forecasting feature. Say you want to spend over budget today, you can see how that changes your daily budget 1 day, 2 days, 3 days, etc. out from today. Or let's say you plan on being frugal for the next few days and will spend only $20.00 over the next 3 days, by the 4th day your daily budget will adjust accordingly: https://imgur.com/a/hD9R2zv

What a great feature! I also had no idea what it meant so for UI/UX reasons I'd add some alt-text explaining that.

The real question is: does your wife use it? I have an excel budget that I updated based on our real spending habits every couple months. I also use projectifi for the long term asset planning, using the budget as an input for our surplus cash.

My wife has never opened either and has vague anxiety (read: frustrating) about going on vacations or making big purchases even though we’re doing great. I’m the sole income for 5 so I suppose I have to take the mental load of ensuring things are budgeted, diversified, HSA/529 is funded etc.

Yes, she does! She checks it everyday and she loves the simplicity of it.

I also tried the spreadsheet approach since I was so frustrated with budgeting apps, but they're a bit overwhelming for some.

This is pretty much exactly what I have been looking for, I do this with paper/pencil on our fridge.

If you don't open-source it, where is the data stored?

Right now just unmanaged postgres instance hosted on fly.io

Actual Budget was a startup that didn't work out, so the founder open-sourced it. It's self-hosted at the moment (I think there are some 3rd parties you can spin up an instance on). My big hangup with it had been that it didn't automatically sync, but that's been fixed in NA and Europe (SimpleFin, a Plaid sync extension is in the works)

This is more a budgeting tool than a Financial analytics tool, but it'll sort and filter the data, and report features are being built out (They exist in the 'experimental' section)

https://actualbudget.org/

Are there any good paid ones, even, for Canadian institutions specifically?

We have 4 credit cards and two chequing accounts plus mortgage etc at different institutions. It would be worth some small amount of money for me, especially for a desktop not SaaS solution, to get a unified view I can categorize, filter, sort, graph, etc.

Only one I have been able to find is YNAB and I hate it. It’s expensive and forces a weird opinionated budgeting approach onto its users.

Thanks! Does YNAB actually plug into bank accounts like Mint used to? I thought you had to manually enter everything, but it may have evolved since I last looked at it.

It does - mostly (only?) using plaid. I tried YNAB for a few months. It's not really for me. But it was able to sync _most_ of my accounts without issue.

I've been trying out Monarch more recently (which seems to use plaid, mx, and other methods). They have a discount for people coming over from mint as well as a way to import mint history.

I'm still cleaning up my mint data before running the import. I've liked it thus far; I'd say it's pretty much what I hoped Mint would become when I started using Mint a decade ago.

BudgetSheet supports most US and Canadian banks: https://www.budgetsheet.com

You can try it for free to see if it work for you first, and if you want to upgrade you can pay either monthly or annually.

Disclaimer: I am the creator of BudgetSheet :)

Does it support Canadian credit cards?

Yes. By banks I meant "Financial Institutions", which includes credit cards and other types of loans as well.

I like Monarch Money and they support Canada (although idk if the Canadian bank coverage is as thorough as it is for the US). Although it's definitely on the SASSier side

Bank of America has/had a setup to integrate all your accounts in one.

IIRC, it had some caveats like it could only be viewed or edited on desktop. Now it’s called “my financial picture” accessible on mobile. All of my account links are broken but it worked at one time and probably could again with some work. It was nice to be able to use one service to find a transaction or pending transaction I couldn’t remember how I paid for.

I use HomeBank and have been happy with it. https://www.gethomebank.org/

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