Intuit Updates Mint With Bill Negotiation, Premium Tier

pcmag.com:

Intuit’s Mint app now offers a new way to save money–and another to spend more.

The Mountain View-based company today announced a bill-negotiation tool and a new premium option for its personal-finance app. 

The first new feature, available in Mint’s web and iOS apps but not yet its Android app, builds on a subscription-tracking tool Mint added in January 2021, its last major update. Bill Negotiation will flag Mint users about monthly service payments that might be reduced with some bargaining, then hand them off to a third-party service, Billshark, to negotiate on their behalf. 

Mint users, like Billshark users, will be charged the standard commission should this intervention succeed: 40% of two years’ worth of the monthly savings achieved. 

Mint’s second change, the new $4.99/month Mint Premium, represents a major change from its ad-based business model, in which Mint suggests financial products that it thinks might fit with your habits as discerned from accounts you monitor in the app. Premium, now rolling out in the iOS app first, will remove those ads and bundle such features as souped-up data visualizations, category-specific spending forecasts, and the ability to cancel subscriptions from within the app. 

It does not, however, add one capability that’s long been on Mint users’ wish lists: integration with Intuit’s TurboTax app.

Premium does not replace the $0.99/month ad-free option that Mint quietly launched in beta last year, which is available on all three platforms.

Mint debuted in 2007 as a web-only competitor to Intuit’s desktop-bound Quicken; Intuit then launched its own web personal-finance service, the $2.99/month Quicken Online, before buying Mint in 2009. It retired Quicken Online in 2010 before selling