Life after Mint: an alternative you can talk to
Mint aggregated everything in one place and asked nothing of you, and then it shut down. The apps that inherited its users mostly rebuilt the dashboard. BetterBudget starts from a different idea: your accounts in one place, plus an assistant you can ask, “where is my money going?”, “am I overspending this month?”, “can I afford this?”
Every modern budgeting app, us included, rides the same few aggregators, so “my bank keeps disconnecting” follows people from app to app. We handle it three ways: connection status is always visible (you see when each institution last synced), re-linking never creates duplicates, and the manual/CSV path means a broken connection never breaks your budget.
Like Mint, but it answers back
Balances, budgets, bills, debts, goals, and net worth in one place, and instead of digging through charts, you ask. Simulations answer the bigger questions before you commit: avalanche vs snowball, refinancing, savings timelines. Budgeting that doesn’t feel like homework.
Common questions
There is a real free tier: manual accounts, CSV import, budgets, bills, and limited AI chat. Automatic bank sync starts on the Plus plan at $9.99/month.
Yes, bank linking is optional, a first-class path rather than a workaround. Manual accounts and CSV import work on every tier, so you can budget without handing over bank credentials at all.
Bank connections run on Plaid, and no app can promise a connection never breaks, anyone who does is overselling. What we promise instead: you can see when each institution last synced, re-linking never creates duplicate transactions (our ledger is append-only and imports are idempotent), and manual/CSV keeps working when a connection will not.
No. No data sales, no third-party advertising trackers, first-party analytics only (with an opt-out in Settings). The business model is the subscription, not your data.
You ask questions, "how much is left in dining?", "when is the Visa paid off if I add $50 a month?", and the assistant answers from your own numbers. All money math runs in a deterministic calculation engine; the AI explains and plans but never invents arithmetic. Ask it to show the math.
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Educational information, not financial advice.