The best Mint alternative for iPhone in 2025

There isn't one universal winner. For people who liked Mint's free, low-friction feel, Cash Compass is the closest match — free tier with voice entry, manual logging, charts, and iCloud sync, no bank login required. For people who want the bank-sync auto-categorization that Mint had, Copilot Money ($13/mo) or Monarch ($14.99/mo) are the closest replacements. For envelope-style budgeters, Goodbudget. For zero-based budgeting, YNAB at $99/yr. The honest answer depends on whether you actually used Mint's bank-sync or just its dashboard. Most Mint users we've talked to barely touched the sync — they wanted a place to see categories and trends. That group is happiest with a manual-first app.

For some people, yes. Copilot Money and Monarch do a genuinely good job of pulling transactions, suggesting categories, and surfacing recurring charges automatically. If you spend across 5+ cards and accounts and don't want to log anything manually, paying $156-180 a year is reasonable. But manual entry has hidden upside: it makes you feel each purchase, which is half of why budgets work. Studies on cash-vs-card spending have shown the same effect — friction at the moment of spending changes behavior. Voice input in Cash Compass takes about three seconds, so it splits the difference: low friction but still conscious. Try a month of manual logging before assuming you need sync.

It's actually safer. Bank-sync apps connect through Plaid or a similar aggregator using your bank credentials. You're trusting one more company with login access to your accounts, plus their downstream partners. Plaid has had multiple disclosed incidents, and any breach gives attackers more leverage than a list of expenses would. A manual or voice-driven app like Cash Compass never sees your bank login because there's nothing to connect to. Your transactions live in your iCloud account, encrypted by Apple, not on our servers. The tradeoff is that you do the entry yourself — five to ten seconds per transaction. Most people find that worth the privacy improvement, especially after Mint sold to Intuit and got folded into Credit Karma's ad model.

Mint's export was disabled when it shut down, but if you exported your CSV before March 2024, most apps including Cash Compass premium accept CSV imports for historical reference. If you didn't export, don't try to reconstruct two years of history — just start fresh. Pull the last 30 days of transactions from your bank or card statements, group them into 6-10 categories (rent, groceries, gas, dining, subscriptions, fun, savings, other), and use those as your starting set. Most people overcomplicate the category list. Mint had 100+ default categories and that's why people stopped categorizing. Start small, add categories only when one feels missing, and expect to re-tune the list after the first full month.