First, take a breath.
Mint shut down on January 1, 2024. If you were one of the millions of users who got the email about it, you've probably been kicking the "find a replacement" task down your to-do list for a while now. That's normal. Money apps are annoying to switch.
Intuit pointed everyone toward Credit Karma (which they also own), but Credit Karma isn't a budgeting tool. It's a credit-score and product-recommendation app. If you were using Mint to actually plan and track your spending, Credit Karma doesn't replace that.
So: you do need a new tool. The question is which one, and how to make it stick this time.
Your real options.
There are basically three paths, and there's no universally right answer:
1. Another cloud-based subscription app. Monarch Money (~$99/yr), Copilot Money (~$95/yr), and YNAB (~$109/yr) are the most-recommended. They sync to your bank with Plaid, look great on phones, and feel familiar if you liked Mint. The trade: your data lives on their servers, and they're subscriptions you'll need to keep paying. If one of them shuts down too, you'll be in the same spot.
2. A privacy-first, one-time-purchase tool (like Ambit, which is why we made it). Your data stays on your device, you pay once instead of forever, and no one can take it away from you. The trade: no automatic bank sync — you paste a monthly CSV from your bank instead. For a lot of people that's a fair swap; for some it isn't.
3. Back to a spreadsheet. Plenty of former Mint users went this way. It works if you're disciplined enough to keep up with it, and it costs nothing. The trade: spreadsheets don't automate, don't categorize, and don't forecast — you build all of that yourself.
The honest read: option 1 if you really need automatic bank sync. Option 2 if you'd rather own your tool and your data. Option 3 if you like building things from scratch and don't mind the upkeep.
💡 Pro tip: If you still have your Mint export.
Mint gave users a window to export their data during the wind-down (around June 2023 to March 2024). If you grabbed a CSV before access ended, you can still bring that history into a new tool. Most budget apps accept Mint's CSV format with a column-mapping step.
In Ambit specifically: open the Import page, paste or upload the CSV, and the column mapper figures out which Mint columns map to Date, Description, Amount, Category, and Account. Your old transactions become the starting point for your new tracking.
If you missed the export window, don't worry — you can still build forward from current bank statements. Most banks let you download 30–90 days at a time as CSV. Start with that, set up your categories, and you'll have a working budget in an evening.