Karl Katzke

For the past month, I’ve been using Mint.com to track my bank balances. Unlike most other blogs that cover web development in general and web 2.0 specifically, I try to wait until after a service has launched and I’ve had the chance to use it over time before I give my impression.

My impression of Mint: It sure is cool-looking, but where are the features? Sure, the pie chart flies all over the place and it’s pretty colors … but how can I compare two separate months? How do I exclude transactions or categories from being shown in that graph? Or for that matter, how do I add a category? How can I chart changes in my income, since I’m a consultant and my income fluctuates? How can I see labels in the chart view? Why, if my entertainment spending for the past three months is a big fat zero (I don’t get out much…), is it still shown in my “Spending Trends” as a bar graph when something like the Pets category would be more valuable? Or on the overview page? How do I add or remove categories from that?

Mint provides a good basic view of your finances, but that’s all it is: Basic. I’m using it as a sharing point for my finances because I’m having a family member counsel me on my budget and this is an easy way that we can look at the same information without having to give her the logins to my online banking sites.

It just seems unfinished, and the forums back me up on that. Mint’s going to struggle to stick around because they launched too early and their offer-based advertising profit model isn’t going to match what I’m sure they’re having to spend in servers and bandwidth. Plus, tons of users are having problems getting their banks to connect — either because of bank issues like Bank of America’s split between different companies, or because of issues with the interface (ex: Chase). I’ve noticed the site pick up in speed dramatically over the past few weeks, but if the forum traffic decrease is any indication, it’s because users are dropping the service and not because the Mint team has managed to up their capacity to meet demand.

Again, I like Mint, but I’m afraid they won’t be long for this earth. Silly users. They want features? I’m sorry, but that’s web 3.0.