Monarch Money Alternative — Free Plan Available

Monarch was founded in 2018 by Val Agostino, who was on the original Mint product team, and it is deliberately built as the answer to what went wrong there. There are no ads and no lead-generation offers, because the subscription is the entire business model. When Mint shut down in early 2024, Monarch absorbed a large share of those refugees — the company reported a roughly twentyfold jump in signups in the weeks after Intuit's announcement.

What you get for the money is genuinely strong: multi-account aggregation through more than one data provider (so a broken connection can be re-linked through a different one), investment holdings and performance, net worth history, recurring-bill detection, custom category groups, and shared household access where a partner gets their own login instead of sharing yours. For a couple managing a mortgage, brokerage accounts and several cards together, that is a coherent product and $14.99/month is a defensible price.

The reasons people leave are narrower than with the other tools. There is no free tier at all — after a 7-day trial the app locks, so it is $99.99/year minimum whether or not you used it that month. It is English-only and US-centric, so a bilingual household or accounts outside the US are poorly served. And the whole design assumes you will link accounts; used manually it loses most of its value. Dinero Claro sits at the other end of that trade-off: less automation, no bank linking required, fully bilingual, and a free tier that covers budgeting, expenses, goals and the AI money coach for people who do not need brokerage-grade aggregation.