Monarch: Budget & Track Money ٤+

As a die-hard Mint user, I was horrified when I heard they were shutting it down. And after doing a lot of research, I was convinced no one else could replace it. But boy, was I wrong!! Monarch Money is SO much better than Mint was and it is worth every penny! As with any new app—especially a powerful financial one—there is a bit of a learning curve, however so much can be automated that it soon nearly takes care of itself. And in the few months that I have been using it, the Monarch team has been cranking out the improvements faster than any other app I have ever used. Truly impressive!

There are sometimes glitches with the data aggregators that automatically gather the transactions and data from your financial institutions, but Monarch is constantly and actively working to improve that aspect, so I am willing to put up with a bit of inconvenience as they work it out with the thousands of institutions they connect to. (By “inconvenience” I mean I sometimes have to re-login to an institution to re-connect it….not a big deal.)

Monarch has knocked it out of the park with this “Mint on steroids” solution that they have developed. I can’t wait to see what other fabulous features they implement that I never even knew I needed. Keep it up, Monarch!! You make me glad that Mint shut down and motivated me to find something exponentially better!

This is extremely close to mint. Its very simple, very clean, and I like that you can add your partner if you want. No syncing issues either. Just a week of using and it’s already helping me me more mindful of what I’m spending with daily check ins. Since a lot of competitors are cheaper or even have a one time buy it feature, I would really really like to request the one time buy. Make it expensive enough for others who don’t want to commit to a budget app to stay on a month by month subscription, but just the right price for someone like me who knows what they like in a budgeting app and are willing to pay. I love Monarch. I don’t like subscriptions. Another thing that isn’t super necessary but that I would enjoy are little challenges, or rewards for in the app when I am continuing good money habits/saving. There’s a few other apps out there that do this, including Mint (RIP), and I really had fun with it.

Again, these are just suggestions. I love your app and the effort that has been put into it. It shows. Congratulations on gaining a lot of customers! I know the whole team for Monarch must be thrilled. Sometimes it just takes one app disappearing for others to take the risk on you, download your app, and absolutely love it!

This has potential to be better than Mint, but there are definitely some hurdles. I’ll focus on the constructive criticism. I’ve been using this for a couple weeks and there was a decent amount of work involved in transferring Mint data and setting everything up. But I’m glad it was possible. What’s unacceptable is that every morning at about 4am I get a 2 factor auth text message for one of my accounts. I’m not sure why that happens since it seems to update just fine. Maybe I should try linking the account a different way but I’m worried it will erase the history imported from Mint. The goals feature is interesting. I don’t necessarily have a goal in mind but I added a savings goal to test the feature and it added a savings line in my budget. What’s weird is regardless of how much I save each month that budget item stays at zero unless I designate a transaction towards that goal. But if I designate a transaction as being a part of that savings goal it’s completely detached from what I actually saved that month (I.e. selecting a paycheck for a savings goal implies I saved the entire paycheck). So in short I like this app, and it has potential to maybe even be better than Mint, but I don’t like it a $100/year subscription worth. I would consider a lifetime subscription and would recommend that to developers as an option.