# Best Mint Alternative in 2025

Mint shut down in March 2024, leaving millions of users looking for a replacement. Here's why Ray is the privacy-first, AI-powered alternative worth considering.

## Looking for a Mint alternative?

Mint was Intuit's free personal finance app that tracked spending, set budgets, and monitored credit scores. After 17 years, it shut down in March 2024 and migrated users to Credit Karma — a product focused on credit, not budgeting.

Status: Shut down in March 2024

### What Mint did well

- Was free and easy to set up
- Automatic transaction categorization
- Credit score monitoring
- Bill payment reminders
- Large user community

### Where it fell short

- Shut down in March 2024
- Showed targeted financial product ads
- Data stored on Intuit servers
- Categorization was frequently wrong
- No AI or advisory capabilities

## Why people choose Ray instead

### Privacy-first architecture

Mint monetized your financial data through targeted ads. Ray stores everything locally in an encrypted database. No cloud, no ads, no data selling.

### AI advisor, not just a dashboard

Mint showed you what happened. Ray tells you what to do about it — with AI-powered analysis of your actual financial data.

### Can't be shut down on you

Mint disappeared overnight. Ray is open source and runs on your machine. Even if the managed service stopped, you'd still have the software and your data.

### Free self-hosted option

Like Mint, Ray can be free. Self-host with your own API keys and pay nothing. Or use the managed option at $10/mo for instant setup.

## How Ray compares

| Feature                       | Ray                               | Mint                              |
|-------------------------------|-----------------------------------|-----------------------------------|
| AI financial advice            | Yes — conversational AI advisor    | No — dashboards only              |
| Bank sync                     | Yes (Plaid)                       | Yes (was Plaid/Yodlee)            |
| Data storage                  | Local only (encrypted)            | Cloud (Intuit servers)            |
| Open source                   | Yes (MIT)                         | No                                |
| Pricing                       | $0 self-hosted / $10/mo managed   | Free (ad-supported) — discontinued |
| Privacy                       | No cloud storage, PII-masked AI calls | Data monetized through ads        |
| Mobile app                    | No (CLI-based)                   | Yes (was polished iOS/Android)    |
| Budgeting                     | AI-assisted budget tracking        | Category-based budgets             |
| Investment tracking            | Yes — holdings, gains, cost basis  | Basic portfolio view              |
| Debt payoff planning          | Yes — avalanche/snowball simulations | Basic debt overview               |

## The verdict

The post-Mint landscape is crowded. Monarch, Copilot, YNAB, and Credit Karma are all vying for Mint's former users. Most of them are just newer versions of the same idea: a cloud dashboard that shows you charts of your spending.

Ray is different. It's an AI financial advisor that runs locally on your machine. Instead of logging into an app to look at pie charts, you open your terminal and ask questions: "Am I on track this month?", "Can I afford to switch jobs?", "What's the fastest way to pay off my student loans?" Ray calculates answers from your actual bank data.

The tradeoff is real — Ray doesn't have a mobile app or visual dashboards. It's a CLI tool. But if you're a Mint refugee who's tired of giving your financial data to companies that might shut down or sell ads against it, Ray offers something none of the other alternatives do: complete privacy, AI-powered advice, and open-source transparency.

## Try Ray free

Open source, local-first, and takes five minutes to set up.

```bash
$ npm install -g ray-finance
```

[View on GitHub](https://github.com/cdinnison/ray-finance)