Mint.com started as a darling of free online personal finance management tools but the love affair has soured for some users since the site was acquired by Intuit back in 2009. At first it was complaints about the ads for Quicken and other Intuit products and some of the fun language and tone getting lost. But in late 2010 Mint switched their backend system from Yodlee to Quicken’s in-house one, leading a number of customers’ accounts screwed up and prompting some to abandon Mint entirely.

The Out of Core blog wrote this April that after the switchover was rolled over to his account, “Half of my bank accounts didn’t work. According to Mint, I suddenly have 2X the amount of money I actually have and I simply cannot delete duplicate accounts. Their auto-submit-refresh-add-account page is so annoying, it drove me nuts.” (Hint: Instead of trying to delete the account, go into one of them and mark it as closed).

One ex-Mint lover writes Consumerist:

Check the angst around AccessGroup loans, the largest graduate school loan provider in the nation. (and other similar forum posts)
AccessGroup accounts simply stopped working through Mint for several months, with weekly “it’s fixed!” form emails emanating from “tech support.” While Mint now claims this is finally working, it most certainly is not as Mint will now only report a single lump sum for the institution, rather than the value of each individual loan account. In emails Mint has officially given up on making individual loan balances work.

Other issues with accounts failing, etc are simply blamed on “Maintenance” and it appears that all User trouble tickets are automatically marked “fixed” after the first form response, regardless of the actual outcome. This means one must repeatedly email tech support over the same issue.

More complaints fill Mint.com’s support forum. Some frustrated users report they’ve defected back to Yodlee’s MoneyCenter.

“The dirty, behind the scenes thing is just how complex it is,” Mint.com’s founder told CNN Money back in Oct. 2010. But,”Intuit’s platform is getting better at a much faster pace now.”

Personally Mint never really did it for me. My wife use a spreadsheet we share in Google Docs.

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