Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million

wow. what really impresses me is mint isn't an engineering company - they're a marketing company that put some ajax on top of yodlee. yodlee's been around for over 10 years and they never built a brand or a community like mint.<p>mint is now #1 on my 'notes to self' when i get so focused on engineering my way to a solution i forget sometimes its' better to partner with a competitor and move on.<p>they outsourced the hard stuff (scraping/banking relationships) and then focused on building a product. nice work, brilliant execution.

personally I'm disappointed with this, I just don't see Intuit as the right company to run Mint

This could be an excellent opportunity to start a competing outfit. I bet Inuit will have choked on Mint by the time a new competitor is launched.

Lest we forget: <a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/22/google-in-final-negotiations-to-acquire-digg-for-around-200-million/" rel="nofollow">http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/22/google-in-final-negotia...</a><p>Just because Mike Arrington says something is true doesn't mean it is. I'll believe it when there's an official announcement.

This has "buy'em to squash'em" written all over it.

<i>This is a terrific exit for Mint</i><p>Seriously? Maybe I don't get it but if Yahoo had bought Google or Facebook had bought Twitter would those have been terrific exits? Why are they selling out so quickly?<p>I don't trust Intuit and will probably stop using Mint (I was just getting started in the past few months).

So, it seems that the market for a mint clone will be open pretty soon.<p>I'd imagine there will be a lot of disaffected users here eventually.

They also acquired PayCycle (among the leading online payroll companies, and one I used for a couple of years) a little while back. I switched all of our books and payroll over to Intuit products recently, mainly so the part-time bookkeeper will be happy, but haven't been able to figure out how PayCycle fits into the lineup, or whether they will be merging Intuit online payroll (which costs a measly $9.95/month) with PayCycle (which is about fifty bucks per month).

Hopefully this means that Mint will be finally be available outside the US.

The question isn't so much why Intuit would buy Mint, but why would Mint allow themselves to be acquired so soon?<p>If Mint was doing so well, they'd continue on their path to completely outplace Quicken. Something about this just doesn't add up.

I'm not sure I'd call $170m a great exit considering they were last valued at $140m. Generally VCs are looking for much more than a 20% ROI. I'd love to know if there were some special terms that make the VCs get more than their share here. Otherwise you'd think that either Mint was in trouble and needed this, or there was something else going on.

what's up with the acquisition price ..Intuit's recent acquisitions - paycycle, homestead, and now mint.com all acquired for 170 millions!

couldn't have benefited better people, congrats to Aaron and the whole team

This is terrible news for consumers of the software. Quicken is a horrible product if you like good user interfaces and software that just does the job. You have to constantly handhold Quicken and on top of that, many times your bank will charge you to let Quicken have access to your data. The big two (Quicken and Money) personal finance software suites had no way of competing with Mint. I would rather have had Mint start charging a fee for the service instead of selling out their users. Intuit will probably do both.<p>Obviously, if your reason for starting a business is to get a huge lottery ticket payout, keeping it free and hoping some megacorp buys you is a great idea. I'm disappointed that this was the plan from Mint. I had hopes they would find a business plan that made them money AND that was good for users.<p>Of course, if Intuit doesn't fundamentally change Mint, maybe all my handwringing will be for naught. I hope I'm wrong.

I think it's interesting to see people's reactions here -- a good dose of "oh no Intuit" paranoia. But honestly, did anyone not see this acquisition coming? I was expecting them to have to pay more, honestly, but I think it was fairly apparent that Intuit was the obvious buyer and would do what it takes.<p>The other odd angle to this paranoia: How big do people really think the market of "people who don't trust Intuit with their financial information" is? For millions of people, it's already in Quicken... the step to doing that online, especially for a non-technical user, is not that big.

I'm a little surprised by the fact that they sold now for what seems like a low price compared to what Mint would surely have grown into, given all the momentum they'd built up. It seems like they'd solved the hard problem of getting millions of people to let them into their bank accounts and were fast on their way to becoming a household word. I don't see why they couldn't have become a billion dollar company; the competitive landscape was favorable to them. This seems like a home run that turned into a double. I'd be interested to know the back story behind it.

I also think there is a good opportunity to take on the UK equivalent; Kublax. It's a seedcamp company that I tried to use a few times but it was too 'rigid' so I ended up going back to a google spreadsheet.

Wait - this is techcrunch. Didn't they just the other day also boldly claim that Facebook allows faxing of photos? Did they allow both Intuit and Mint a chance to respond? I'll be waiting a few days before cancelling my Mint account before I found out whether or not this is just another bad rumor.

It just got confirmed at Techcrunch50. They will running Quicken Desktop as well.<p><a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/13/intuit-to-acquire-former-techcrunch50-winner-mint-for-170-million/" rel="nofollow">http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/13/intuit-to-acquire-forme...</a>

As a Mint user I must say this: Noooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Goodbye, Mint.

Perhaps now we'll finally get support for Canadian Banks?

Yikes! How do I close my account? Intuit == evil.

Wow! Nice exit, guys.

congratulations!

I have just one word: Damn.