Lumio vs Mint

If you landed here, you were probably a Mint user looking for what comes next. The short answer to "Lumio vs Mint" is that there's no live Mint to compare against anymore, so the real question is which replacement fits how you want to handle your money.

What happened to Mint

Intuit shut Mint down in March 2024 and pointed users toward Credit Karma, which it also owns. Credit Karma never replicated Mint's budgeting and category tracking well, which is why so many former Mint users are still hunting for a real replacement two years later.

What Mint actually was

Mint was free, and that was its biggest draw. It connected to your bank accounts, pulled your transactions automatically, and showed your spending in one place. But "free" had a model behind it: Mint was owned by Intuit and funded through advertising and financial-product recommendations. Your aggregated financial data was part of what made that business work. It was convenient, and you were also the product.

How Lumio is different

Lumio is built on the opposite premise. There are no ads, no offers, and no data monetization, because it isn't free: it's a one-time $79 purchase, which means you're the customer rather than the inventory. Instead of connecting to your bank, you export a CSV or Excel file and import it, and everything stays on your Mac. Nothing is transmitted to a server, so there's no aggregated profile of your finances living anywhere but your own machine.

	Lumio	Mint
Status	Active and supported	Discontinued (shut down March 2024)
Price	One-time purchase ($79)	Free, funded by ads and product offers
Where your data lived	On your Mac	Intuit's servers
Bank login	Never — you import CSV/Excel	Required (account aggregation)
Ads and offers	None	Yes — a core part of the model
Still available	Yes	No

The honest tradeoff: free versus private

It's worth being straight about this. Mint was free and automatic; Lumio costs money and asks you to import files yourself. If automatic bank syncing at no cost is the most important thing to you, that's a real preference, and Lumio isn't trying to win that argument. What Lumio offers instead is privacy and permanence: no ads, no bank login, no data harvesting, and no risk of the app being shut down and taking your setup with it, because your data is a file on your own computer.

What you give up coming from Mint

Set expectations honestly. Compared to Mint, Lumio doesn't connect to your bank automatically (you import statements), there's no mobile app yet, and it doesn't track your credit score or chase bills. If those were the Mint features you relied on most, factor that in.

What you gain

In return you get budgets with overspend alerts, debt-payoff projections, savings goals, and net-worth tracking, all computed locally. Your financial history never leaves your device, nobody is monetizing it, and there's no subscription. And because everything lives in a file you control, no company can sunset it out from under you the way Mint was.

Short version: Mint is gone. If you want a private, ad-free replacement that keeps your data on your own Mac and only charges you once, Lumio is built for exactly that, with the tradeoff that you import files instead of linking your bank.