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Comment by falsestprophet | Hacker News Reader

This could be an excellent opportunity to start a competing outfit. I bet Inuit will have choked on Mint by the time a new competitor is launched.

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There is a good competitor, Wesabe. Disclosure: I helped get that product launched and still have some stock.

They have many of the same features, are catching up in the polish area, and have a strong data privacy angle.

There's also http://www.buxfer.com, a YC company.

Talk about not giving up- the Buxfer guy just keeps going.

Anybody know how Buxfer is doing?

Not well if you trust compete.com: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/buxfer.com+mint.com/

I like Buxfer, and hope that it will prosper

Nice, I like this one better already. For one, it has more options for getting bank account information -- including doing it manually if necessary.

Unlike Mint, the Buxfer name is terrible. Like a combination of "busted" and "fked", not associations want with my money. The "bucks for" association does not come through online and is too clever by half. Of course I wish them well-- hopefully the Mint sale will give them a good valuation and they can upgrade the domain name.

Wesabe is not a good competitor IMO. When it first released it had a lot of promise (philosophy of data freedom, etc). Unfortunately that's pretty much completely been lost, which I guess to some extent because some of it was too hard to be realistically accomplished with limited resources and time (pulling your account data with software controlled by you rather than giving Wesabe your account password).

The core app itself has gotten continually worse. The "v2" that launched some months ago now was less usable, removed functionality (which may have been restored by now to some extent), was full of bugs, and was glacially slow and balky.

The only possible draw for Wesabe over Mint is the "community" part, which never interested me.

I guess I really see Wesabe as a money-management community with an app attached, not as a money-management app.

I thought the same thing at the beginning of the v2 release, but the features that were important to me came back quickly. There's something pretty nice about seeing your accounts aggregated in one place and then being able to tag them. Mint did a great job, but I always preferred to have my financial data stored with people I trust, even if sometimes the software was rough around the edges (hey, it's a startup!).

This line of thinking is what spawned 100 me too YouTube clones.

Google is a more innovative home for tech companies than Inuit

I would have they or MS would buy Mint, maybe even Yahoo.

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