wrighters.net

Mint.com bought by Intuit. Oh no!

I was a happy user of Quicken on the PC years ago, and after moving to Mac was very unhappy with Intuit’s Mac offerings.  I briefly used iBank but was pretty unhappy with the limited feature set.  The reporting and graphing was very basic, and there was not automated integration with banks and brokerage firms.  I think this is changing in newer versions, but I gave up on waiting for this feature.  I switched to Quicken on the Mac, but found the product to be absolutely horrible.  Most Mac apps have a well thought out user interface, and usability is a primary concern.  Not so with Quicken.   The Mac version is much harder to use than the PC version, and costs more to boot.  I limped along on it for a year, before discovering mint.  Mint.com, even in its earlier stages, was a joy to use.  It had a simple interface and nice basic reports.  It gave you the high level information you needed to track your spending without forcing you through 500 required fields like Quicken does.  And the latest update is even better, with more flexible budgeting tools and better reporting.

And now this: I saw the bad news this morning, Mint.com was selling out to Intuit. You have to read the comments, it seems like half of the people are really upset.  I really hope this ends well, but it’s hard to say.  I think it will be very hard for the Mint team to move over to Intuit and keep innovating.   Quicken has their own online version,  but obviously it must suck or they wouldn’t spend $170M to buy another company.  I imagine this experience will be a little bit like the past 15 bank mergers I have had the privilege of living through.

Some Mint users are deleting their accounts immediately.   I think I might want to stick things out for a while and hope for the best.