App Comparison

The Best Mint Replacement in 2026: Why Folko Fills the Gap

Mint, once the most popular free personal finance app in the US, was discontinued by Intuit in January 2024 and absorbed into Credit Karma. Millions of users were left looking for an alternative that matched what Mint offered — and ideally did more. Folko is that alternative, and it does things Mint never could.

What made Mint popular — and what went wrong

Mint was genuinely useful for its time. It connected to US bank accounts, automatically categorised transactions, showed spending breakdowns, and let users set budget goals — all for free. For Americans who wanted passive visibility into their spending without manual entry, it lowered the barrier to financial awareness significantly.

The problem was always the business model. Mint was free because it monetised user financial data to sell targeted financial products — credit cards, loans, insurance. Users were the product. This meant ads, data sharing, and ultimately, when the economics stopped working for Intuit, discontinuation.

Credit Karma, where Mint users were sent, is even more explicitly a financial product marketplace. If you miss Mint for the budgeting, Credit Karma isn't the replacement you're looking for.

What Folko offers instead

Folko takes a fundamentally different approach. It's free because we want it to be free — not because we're monetising your data. There are no ads, no data selling, no financial product upsells. Users who want to support development can upgrade to a paid tier, but the core product — unlimited transactions, income tracking, budget goals, Spending Overview charts — stays free forever.

Where Mint connected to bank accounts and passively pulled in transactions, Folko is manual entry. That's a deliberate privacy-first choice. Your transaction data lives on your device and in your encrypted Supabase account — not being parsed and sold to financial advertisers. And research consistently shows that active, manual logging builds better financial awareness than passive bank import.

But Folko's biggest expansion beyond what Mint ever offered is group expense splitting. Mint was a solo tool. It had no concept of shared expenses, household bill splitting, or group travel costs. Folko handles all of it: add members to a cashbook, split transactions equally or by custom amounts, run Smart Settle to minimise the number of transfers needed, and pay out via 20 integrated payment rails.

Global from day one

Mint was fundamentally a US product. Bank sync worked in the US and, partially, Canada. The app was in English. The budget categories assumed US financial life. For the 95% of the world that isn't American, Mint was never really an option.

Folko was designed to work everywhere from the start. 150+ currencies with daily exchange rate updates. 15 languages — English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic (with full RTL layout), Hindi, Indonesian, Turkish, German, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Korean, Vietnamese, and Italian. Payment rails that cover the payment methods people actually use globally, not just Venmo and PayPal.

If you're in Brazil, India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, or anywhere the old Mint never reached, Folko works for you in a way Mint never did.

Feature comparison

The privacy difference matters

Mint's "free" always had a cost — your financial data. Intuit used transaction data to infer what financial products to pitch you, showing credit card recommendations, loan offers, and insurance quotes based on your spending patterns. For some users that felt useful; for many others, having their bank data parsed for advertising purposes felt uncomfortable.

Folko doesn't do any of this. There are no financial product referrals, no ads, no third-party data sharing for marketing. Your income, expenses, and cashbook activity are encrypted and stay yours. If we ever change this policy, we'll give you 90 days notice and the ability to export everything.

The business model is simple: if you find Folko valuable, you can optionally upgrade to a Supporter ($1/mo) or Patron ($5/mo) tier for more cashbooks, members, and reporting features. If you don't, the free tier is complete and genuinely unlimited.

Who Folko is built for

The continuity commitment Mint never made

One of the hardest lessons from Mint's shutdown: millions of users had to scramble for alternatives with minimal notice. Their data, their history, their budget categories — exported in a hurry or lost.

Folko has committed in writing to a minimum of 24 months maintenance from public launch, regardless of commercial performance. After that, service continues while profitable. If we ever need to wind down, you'll receive 90 days written notice via email and in-app. Your data is always exportable — CSV, Excel, PDF — at any time. We think you deserve to know your finance app won't disappear on you.