BasaltMint Canada shut down on January 1, 2024. Intuit, the company that owned it, folded Mint into Credit Karma and stripped out the budgeting features. Roughly 3.6 million users woke up to an app that no longer did what they’d been using it for.
If you were one of those people, you’ve probably spent the last two years trying replacements. YNAB is $99/year USD. Monarch Money is $99/year USD. PocketSmith has a free tier that barely works with Canadian banks. The pattern is the same everywhere: you either pay a subscription or you hand over your banking credentials to a US company that treats Canadian support as an afterthought.
Here’s what I found after trying most of them: the best free alternative isn’t another app that needs your bank login. It’s a different approach entirely.
What Canadians actually lost when Mint died
Mint was never perfect for Canadians. It didn’t understand TFSA contribution room. It didn’t handle RRSP withholding correctly. But it was free and it connected to most Canadian banks. That was enough for millions of people.
When Mint died, the alternatives fell into three categories:
Paid with US bank sync. YNAB and Monarch work great if you bank with one of Canada’s Big Five. Step outside that, to credit unions, Tangerine, EQ Bank, or Wealthsimple Cash, and the connections break. Plaid’s Canadian coverage is spotty at best. You end up manually updating accounts anyway, paying $15/month for half a product.
Free with a catch. Credit Karma is “free” in the same way Mint was free: your data is the product. Wally has a free tier but it’s limited. Google “free budgeting app Canada” and you’ll find pages of results that are actually free trials, data harvesters, or US-only apps with a Canadian flag photoshopped onto the landing page.
Manual tracking apps. Goodbudget, EveryDollar, spreadsheets. These actually work well for Canadians because they don’t depend on bank API connectivity. But most of them still charge for the premium tier.
The gap is right there: an app that’s truly free, works for Canadians without needing bank connections, and doesn’t monetize your data. That’s the Mint replacement nobody’s properly built.
Why file-based budgeting fixes the Canadian problem
The reason most Mint alternatives fail in Canada isn’t the budget logic. It’s the bank sync. Canadian banks are notoriously difficult for US-based fintechs to integrate with. TD, RBC, Scotiabank, and the credit unions all use different authentication methods, different MFA flows, and different data formats. Plaid, YNAB’s sync provider, supports roughly 40 Canadian institutions out of 12,000+ total. The coverage is bad and it’s not getting better fast.
A file-based budgeting app sidesteps this entirely. Your budget lives in a file on your device. There’s no bank API to maintain, no Plaid integration that works for some banks but not others. You enter your transactions manually or import them from a downloaded CSV. This is the same file-based approach that keeps your data portable and independent of any company’s servers.
Sync still works. iCloud sync is free on Apple devices with end-to-end encryption via Advanced Data Protection. You can also use Dropbox, Syncthing, or anything else.
This sounds like more work if you’re used to auto-import. In practice, most people who used Mint with auto-sync still had to correct mis-categorized transactions and manually add cash purchases. The auto-import saved maybe five minutes per session. Manual entry takes the same five minutes, with the difference that your data lives on your device instead of a company’s server.
For Canadians, the advantage is that the app doesn’t need to support your specific bank. It doesn’t need to maintain API integrations with credit unions. It doesn’t need to keep Plaid contracts active. It works the same whether you bank with RBC, Coast Capital Savings, or a local credit union in rural Quebec. That’s what Mint promised but never fully delivered outside the US.
What $0 actually means
When I say Basalt is free, I mean it’s free. No free trial that converts to $15/month. No “free tier” that limits you to two accounts. No data harvesting.
The “$0” isn’t a pricing gimmick. It’s structural. No servers to maintain, no cloud costs to cover, no investors expecting growth. Your device does the work. This is what artisan software looks like: built by people who care, not companies with quarterly targets.
How the alternatives stack up
| App | Price | Works Offline | Canadian Banks | Your Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basalt | $0-$4/mo | Yes | All | Your device |
| YNAB | $14.99/mo | No | Some | Their servers |
| Monarch | $14.99/mo | No | Some | Their servers |
| Rocket Money | $6-12/mo | No | Most | Their servers |
| Quicken Simplifi | $5.99/mo | No | Some | Their servers |
| Copilot Money | $13/mo | No | Some | Their servers |
| Origin Finance | $12.99/mo | No | Some | Their servers |
Basalt is a spreadsheet with a proper budgeting interface (categories, envelopes, leftover-to-budget calculations), without the formula maintenance or the temptation to upload it to Google Drive where Google’s terms of service apply to your financial data.
The trade-off you should know about
No bank auto-import is the trade-off. You enter transactions manually or import them from your bank’s CSV export. Most banks let you download transactions as a CSV, QFX, or OFX file. Basalt’s smart importer handles the conversion so you don’t need to format anything by hand.
Bank auto-import is something we’re actively working on in the most privacy-friendly way possible. It may arrive in a future version, but it’s the kind of feature that takes time to get right without compromising why Basalt exists in the first place.
If you want transactions to appear magically without ever opening a budgeting app, this approach won’t satisfy you. But if you’re used to opening Mint twice a week to review spending and fix category assignments, the workflow is essentially identical. You’re just doing it in a different app, with the difference that your data never leaves your devices and syncs on your terms.
Quick start for former Mint Canada users
- Download Basalt (macOS or iOS).
- Create a vault. This is a folder on your device where your budget file lives.
- Set up your accounts and categories. Start with the defaults. They’re based on common Canadian budgeting categories.
- Import your transactions. Download the last 90 days from your bank as CSV or PDF and use the smart importer.
- Set your budget for the month. Assign expected income to categories until the leftover reaches zero.
- Update weekly. Five minutes per session, same as Mint.
That’s it. No account registration, no bank login, no monthly fee. The app works the same whether you’re in Vancouver, Toronto, or somewhere in rural Ontario where the internet barely reaches.
If you want bank sync, this isn’t the app for you. But if you want a free alternative to Mint that works with whatever Canadian bank you use, respects your privacy, and doesn’t have a subscription hidden behind a free trial, it’s worth trying.
Most Mint replacements treat Canada as an afterthought or charge US prices for incomplete bank support. Basalt is built differently: free, file-based, and works the same with every Canadian bank. Subscribe to the newsletter for more practical takes on personal finance and privacy.