Updates

Making Personal Finance Effortless, Profitable, and Free

Written by Mint
Published Mar 23, 2007
1 min read
The views expressed on this blog are those of the bloggers, and not necessarily those of Intuit. Third-party blogger may have received compensation for their time and services. Click here to read full disclosure on third-party bloggers. This blog does not provide legal, financial, accounting or tax advice. The content on this blog is "as is" and carries no warranties. Intuit does not warrant or guarantee the accuracy, reliability, and completeness of the content on this blog. After 20 days, comments are closed on posts. Intuit may, but has no obligation to, monitor comments. Comments that include profanity or abusive language will not be posted. Click here to read full Terms of Service.

This is part 2 of Mint’s story written by Aaron Patzer, founder and CEO of Mint.com. Read part the first part here.

By trade, I’m an inventor of sorts – or at least I like to think so ;-). So in March 2006 I quit my day job as a software architect and came up with a (now patent-pending) way to categorize financial transactions with amazing precision (often 95%+ accuracy), just given a text description.

Automatic categorization — that’s our secret sauce. It let’s you see where your money goes. See how much you spend on DVDs, shoes, clothes, or Thai food – without having to put work into the system. That’s great, it’s an essential feature, but how was a startup going to compete selling boxed software against Intuit and Microsoft? I realized we didn’t want to compete with Intuit or Microsoft… we wanted to make a product for everyone else out there.

For starters, it seemed odd to think about “software-in-a-box” locked to single desktop. I mean really, who does that anymore? Easy decision, Mint would be web-based, available anytime and anywhere you make financial decisions.

Okay, what about price? Quicken charges $30-70 depending on the version; and they’re very clever about up-selling – the average purchase price is $54.

But wait a minute; personal finance software ought to help you have more money…somehow it seems wrong to charge for it.

Free is always the best price for consumers – especially if you’re supposed to be helping them do more with their money. So, we decided Mint would be completely free.

Then we realized Mint could go beyond free – it could actually make users money by…more to come.

Mint is passionate about helping you to achieve financial goals through education and with powerful tools, personalized insights, and much more. More from Mint