Tend is the Mint Alternative You’ve Been Looking For
By James Kerr
Tax day approaches and I need to send my accountant some business expense totals. Since I am the founder of a personal finance application, I naturally want to use my own software to organize and export the transactions.
I sign in to my app, Tend Cash, and to be honest, the experience is terrible. The filters are awkward, the list is hard to scan, and it isn’t obvious how to export more than one page of transactions. Not good.
The Good Old Days of Mint
Then I remember Mint.com. It was the best. I’m sure you were devastated as I was when Intuit shut it down in 2024.
I’ve tracked my expenses for 17 years and never seen a better designed app for working with transactions. Filing taxes back then was, dare I say it, fun! I could know exactly how much I donated to charities the year before to maximize my deductions with Mint. It was easy.
At that moment, I drop everything for a week and completely re-design the Transactions page in Tend. I comb the internet archives uncovering old Mint tutorials and screenshots for inspiration to build the new interface.
Here’s how it turned out. Look at the side by side of Mint and the new Tend.
Why YNAB and Monarch Aren't Real Mint Alternatives
When Mint shut down we all fled to YNAB or Monarch. They felt like what the “real-deal budgeters” were using. Zero-based budgeting is what they brought to the table, where every single dollar in your account gets assigned to a category at the beginning of the month.
So I jumped in. I worked my budget this way for years, but it took a ton of effort to maintain. Life got busy too. I got married, had kids, moved to a new town, and paid a lot of money for child care. I didn’t have two hours every Sunday to make sure my budget software was happy.
The deeper problem is that these apps were never true Mint alternatives because their budgeting philosophy permeated the entire application. If you didn’t embrace zero-based budgeting, the app was awkward to use.
What Mint Got Right (And Wrong)
Mint was primarily an powerful expense tracker with beautiful visualizations to show trends of where your money went. The budget module was separate and optional. You never had to contort your thinking about budget methodology to reap the enormous cost-saving rewards of simply reviewing your spending.
This separation was good, especially because the budgeting features in Mint were not helpful to me at all. There was no knowledge of my expected income, fixed expenses, or savings rate. If my spending in a category got close to my made-up budget limit, I would get a useless email informing me, “Hey James!! You overspent on your Coffee Shops budget by $2.33!”
Keeping each module separate made it easy to understand and allowed users to pick and choose which features to work with.
Bringing the Best to Tend
My mission is to bring together the best parts of the many ways I’ve tracked my own finances over the last two decades. Mint nailed the transactions view and the standalone modules. I’m bringing those to Tend, but what about budgeting?
I found that people naturally come up with a calendar-based system to understand how much they can spend during an average week. I decided to build off what many of you are already doing.
Instead of categories, Tend has schedules. A schedule can model any type of recurring income, expense, or savings, even when the payment amount changes over time.
The calendar page totals these up for the year shows you how much uncommitted cash you have control over for discretionary spending. Average that out by week or month and track your actual spending against it. Everything else is covered and you can focus on a single number for your discretionary choices.
The schedules help you plan for the future, the transactions tell the story of what actually happened. That’s the combination Mint never quite finished building.
I am about to send over my business expenses to the accountant and, this time, the experience of exporting them was lovely, and even a bit nostalgic.
The spirit of Mint lives on in Tend!
Try it for Yourself
Sign up for Tend or watch a video showing what you can with this new Transactions page.