Intuit, Makers of Quicken, Buys Mint.com
Yesterday, Mint.com announced that they were acquired by Intuit for $170 million. Not too shabby. Intuit is best known for personal finance products such as Quickbooks, Quicken, and TurboTax. They also released Quicken Online last year, which was basically a direct competitor to Mint.com. Both aggregate your spending and income by automatically accessing the data your financial websites, and analyze your habits for you. However, according to their press release, Intuit intends to keep both of the them separate:
Intuit intends to keep both the Mint.com and Quicken Online offerings, with each serving separate and equally important purposes. Mint.com will become the primary online personal finance management service that is offered directly to consumers by Intuit. Quicken Online will connect Quicken customers across desktop, online and mobile to deliver easy, anytime-anywhere access. This will help accelerate Intuit’s ability to create products and services that make managing money easier for all Intuit customers.
One of the benefits of this deal seems to be that concerns about data safety might be alleviated. Millions of people trust Intuit with their tax returns, which are probably some of the most sensitive data out there, so they might be more comfortable with sharing their financial website passwords with Intuit.
On the other hand, the competition between Quicken Online and Mint.com probably inspired some extra features and also made sure that both services remained free. According to WalletPop, there are “no plans” to charge for either of these services for now. Both sites have improved a lot recently, I just hope that continues.
September 15th, 2009 at 6:59 am
Yodlee still wins my vote; I tried mint, didn’t like it.
September 15th, 2009 at 7:22 am
Same here. Tried Mint, preferred Yodlee. Never closed my Mint account though. Did after I heard about this.
September 15th, 2009 at 7:58 am
This is absolutely terrible. I use QuickBooks nearly everyday and that product and support, frankly, sucks. Intuit has the “let early purchasers beta test this for us” down to an art form, and it’ll only be a matter of time before that mindset spreads to Mint.
I’m not really sure if I’d recommend Mint to clients now that it’s owned by Intuit. I’ve recommended Mint in the past, but I really have to wait and see how this goes.
Having said all that, Intuit should be able to somehow integrate Mint into Turbotax, which will be pretty slick (no more shoebox accounting for a lot of folks). But I think the days of Mint improving rapidly are over.
September 15th, 2009 at 8:14 am
Intuit is horrible… they just killed some core functionality for quickbooks which was working just fine just so they could force me to upgrade.
The new quickbooks is just like one giant advertisement for other products they offer (payroll, etc.) I never thought I’d need a pop up blocker in a program I actually paid for.
September 15th, 2009 at 9:01 am
I’ve tried Mint & hated it. My gripe is that (at the time) you can’t manually input transactions. I didn’t make it much further into the software.
Now, I use QuickenOnline. I hate it too; specifically, I hate the handling of recurring transaction. At this point, I feel quickenonline is the lesser of the evils.
I’m not sure how this news makes me feel…
September 15th, 2009 at 9:52 am
I am a regular and very avid user/supporter of Mint. I must admit: I’m a little scared right now. I hope the Mint I’ve come to know and love doesn’t change for the worse now.
September 16th, 2009 at 6:19 am
Intuit is taking over the financial world! They bumped out MSMoney and now bought Mint, which I have never tried. Jonathan turned me on to Yodlee years ago and never seemed worthwhile to do the whole setup again in Mint. Even farther back when Intuit tried to force me to upgrade Quicken with their ’sunset policy’ I dumped them and bought a license for MoneyDance after trying it, which I still use today with no regrets and free upgrades and everthing works. I am a big fan of MoneyDance and Sean Reilly.
September 16th, 2009 at 11:31 am
0 to $170 million in 2 years. Impressive.
I think Mint will stay free into the future.
September 17th, 2009 at 9:06 am
I am a regular and very avid user/supporter of Mint. I must admit: I’m a little scared right now. I hope the Mint I’ve come to know and love doesn’t change for the worse now.
I don’t think this is going to happen!!
September 21st, 2009 at 8:09 pm
Hmm, hopefully Mint stays cool.
I haven’t liked some of their recent changes, but overall it’s useful and easy to use.
I like the new ability to roll over budgets each month!