Chris Messina

Monarch - The modern way to manage your money

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Top Hunter

Monarch is a modern personal finance app that actually helps you achieve your financial goals. With Monarch you can manage your entire financial life in one place, create a financial plan, and then easily follow that plan to achieve your financial goals.

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Val Agostino
Hi folks! I’m Val, one of of the co-founders of Monarch. The personal finance problem is near and dear to me, as I was the first product manager on the original team that built Mint over 13 (!) years ago. Despite that (and having tried every personal finance app since) I found that my wife and I were still manually updating spreadsheets to manage our household finances. We set out to solve that problem with Monarch. We’re often asked “How is Monarch different from other personal finance apps?”. Here are some of the things that make Monarch unique: 1) Many apps are good at showing you what happened to your money historically, but by then it’s too late to make any changes. Monarch helps you create a financial forecast (or plan) toward your goals, and then follow that plan. Unlike a spreadsheet, your plan stays up to date in realtime. 2) Personal finance apps are only as good as their underlying data. We’ve built Monarch to work across multiple data aggregators and automatically route you to the best aggregator for a given financial institution. We are continuously investing in this area. 3) We have a transparent, subscription-based business model. We set out to build the best product in the personal finance space and believe in the “you get what you pay for” mantra. We don’t show ads nor sell your data, and we’re obsessed about your privacy. 4) We’re customer obsessed. Because we’re paid by our customers instead of advertisers, we listen to what our customers want and then build it. (Crazy, huh?). We have daily calls with Monarch customers and publish our roadmap so that people can suggest and vote on features. 5) We’re multi player. Managing your finances is often a multi person activity. Monarch makes it easy to securely add multiple people to your account, such as a partner, financial advisor, or accountant. 6) We’re multi-platform. Sometimes you want to manage your money on your phone, sometimes you want to sit down at a computer and dig into the details. Monarch supports both with our mobile (iOS, Android) and web app. Finally, we’re just getting started. We have a lot of exciting things planned (Crypto support coming soon!). We hope you’ll check us out! Sign up on our website with promo code PRODUCTHUNT20 to get 20% off forever.
Val Agostino
@dardanth Thank you! We're only available in the U.S. for now, but we'll expand as our data partners add support for more international financial institutions. We obviously need to add multi-currency support as well.
Albert
@valagostino You say that privacy is a top priority, but unfortunately I inherently don't trust plaid or their privacy/security practices. I'm not a privacy-at-all-costs kind of person and I don't really mind that Google knows most of my interests, but my financial data is more important to me than other areas of data privacy. I don't think there's a good solution to this problem until the banks standardize, but I do not ever plan to give plaid or any third party aggregator service full read/write access to my bank account (especially when only one or the other is usually needed), and their terms of service give me significant pause in terms of their ability to sell access to my data to parties who are neither plaid nor the intended application.
David CL
@valagostino thank you for sharing such important info. I've been using Monarch for 2 months and it's a great app for managing money. My wife likes it too because she doesn't know much about money management and this apps helps her a lot, lol. We've recently had several problems with our loan debt, but she has found somewhere an article at https://thefrugalexpat.com/dave-... about getting out of debt. It helped a lot along with this app and several other money managing apps. Thank God we have such technologies now.
Osman (Ozzie) Osman
After my wife and I had our first kid, we found ourselves with a bunch of financial questions. What will our expenses look like now? How much do we need to save? What if one or both of us decides to take time off (or work on a start-up)? We tried all the products/tools we could find, but ultimately nothing helped. We ended up in a spreadsheet doing the math together. Money is one of the most stressful parts of most people's lives, behind all sorts of morbid statistics (one of the top drivers of stress, depression, divorce, suicide). We built Monarch to help you make sense of your finances, then figure out a plan and actually stick to it. We abstract away the nitty-gritty, but leave you in control. We build Monarch with no ads, no selling your data, no tricks—I've worked on enough "free" (aka ads-monetized) products to understand the underlying tensions. Especially when it comes to money, you don't want a product where your interests compete against those of advertisers.
Jon Sutherland
Hey everyone, I'm Jon, one of the co-founders of Monarch. We’re building Monarch into the best platform to manage your personal finances. We launched earlier this year on web, iOS, and Android, and have been rapidly improving the product based on user feedback ever since. Give Monarch a try and let us know what you think! Use the promo code PRODUCTHUNT20 to get 20% off forever (you’ll need to redeem this coupon on web to get the discount). P.S. Thank you @chrismessina for hunting us!
Adam Waxman
@chrismessina @jmsuth any chance there is an updated promo code? Just tried the above code but it didn’t work 🙇‍♂️
Mike Jones
Love your product been using it for 3 months now. I couldn't be happier! I love how all the user feature request are public and can be voted on. The transparency is one of the reasons I love you guys so much! Keep up the fantastic work! Also your design is top notch!
Justin Maxwell
I'm the ex-UX lead and Mobile PM from Mint.com and worked alongside @valagostino. I'd been looking forward to this for 10 years and it exceeds everything I had hoped for. Turns out you get what you pay for, go figure. My family has been using it for over half a year and it's the mint 2.0 we all wanted. little tweaks that just make things so much easier, actual customer support, and better "auto-pilot." But most of all, an actual solid business model that aligns with user need.
Val Agostino
@justin_maxwell Thanks for the kind words, and being an early supporter!
Bogdan Ionita
Nice to have everything personal finances-related in one place, but bank integrations are somewhat of a headache most of the times. If you get that flowing, that's great!
Osman (Ozzie) Osman
@bogdan_ionita Yes! This is a non-trivial problem. We've built a system that lets us work with multiple data aggregators to choose the most reliable connection for each bank.
Phips Peter
I really like the design of Monarch! I wish the product supported per account access control for multiplayer.
Osman (Ozzie) Osman
Thanks @pspeter3 ! I reached out via a separate channel to better understand your use case as we think about more multiplayer features.
Girdharee Saran
The application seems to be wonderful!
Sydney Liu
Looks incredible!! Congrats!! Can't wait to try it out
David Carpe
mad props to val, ozzie, and jon - great work!!!
Osman (Ozzie) Osman
@passingnotes Thanks for being one of our first supporters :)
Carlos Moll
I was a Simple refugee who landed on Monarch as my financial planning solution and I couldn't be happier. While Monarch doesn't quite do everything I want just yet, I have never been so confident in the future of a product. The team's transparency with future development and continual feature rollouts have been a welcome breath of fresh air. It's rare for software to deliver such a clear and immediate impact on one's quality of life, but Monarch delivers!
Osman (Ozzie) Osman
@cmoll Simple refugees are some of our favorite users... we were so sad to see Simple go, but glad we can help fill the void :)
Tyler Bosmeny
My wife and I LOVE Monarch! We've been using it for about 3 months, and it has completely replaced Mint for us. The UI is so fast and easy that categorizing transactions is almost fun. The speed of product iteration is great too.* Congrats on the product and the launch team!! (* tho please let us archive old accounts :))
Osman (Ozzie) Osman
@bosmeny just wait till you see our new (currently in the works) transaction edit / review flow :) and yes, archiving of accounts is definitely on our mind.
Cole Wardell
Such a great product! Our family has been using Monarch for almost a year. We really enjoy the ability to make quick changes to your budget and save for the financial goals in our lives! Keep up the great work Team Monarch!
Osman (Ozzie) Osman
@cole_wardell Glad to hear. This is exactly why we built Monarch—to help people and families work towards their financial goals.
Siddhesh Lokare
Looks promising! Good luck to the whole team!
Marcos Monteiro
Looks really nice, congrats! I have been looking for a good PFM for a long time, but didn't get satisfied with any of the existing solutions. Wish you good luck and hope you can achieve that.
Osman (Ozzie) Osman
@marcos_monteiro thanks! Please try us out, many of our happiest customers tried multiple PFMs before settling on Monarch.
Fawzy Abu Seif
This looks awesome! I’d love to try it out.
Osman (Ozzie) Osman
@fawzyabuseif Thanks Fawzy! Please feel free to try it out and we'd love your feedback.
Tawfiq Abu-Khajil
Looks great! 👏🏻 Congratulations. Question about investments, how does that work? Does it integrate with Robinhood, Coinbase, etc? The biggest issue I had with Mint is that it doesn't integrate with Robinhood so treats your deposits into that as an expense + doesn't truly reflect your net worth since it cannot see your investment portfolio.
Osman (Ozzie) Osman
Hey @tawfiqabukhajil, we integrate with Robinhood and plan to add Coinbase (and other crypto exchanges) soon. We just launched an investments feature (https://www.monarchmoney.com/wha...), so your net worth should be accurately reflected... and as long as your deposits are correctly classified as being transfers, they won't count as expenses (if it doesn't automatically happen, you can easily set up a Transaction Rule to do it).
Anthony Guidarelli
I've been using Monarch since early in the beta. The team has done a great job consistently adding features that are driven by user input. It's the best personal finance tool I've seen. Some standouts for me: - The transaction categorization remembers what you've done in the past and makes it easy to add your own categories. - Data is always up to date. And I have only found 1 account that I couldn't link (which is a new product, so not surprising) - Multi-user! First product I've seen that allows more people to manage the same data. Love that my partner can use it too and manage our personal and shared accounts - The budgeting interface is useful to build a budget from nothing, or to use your current spending patterns to help understand what good targets are. - UX on both web and mobile app is fantastic. It's consistent and simple to use on both. Keep up the excellent work! I'm excited to see what features come next.
Jon Sutherland
@anthonycreates Thank you so much for the support, Anthony!
David A. Lindahl
As a personal finance enthusiast (aka nut), I've tried literally every single financial app on the market. I've been using Monarch since the beta and its easily my favorite. - The UI is clean and uncluttered (as a UI developer, this is very important to me) - They support multiple platforms like Android, Web, and iOS - They add new, awesome features all the time - They charge you money so they aren't selling your data or cluttering the UI with ads - And much.. much.. more.
Val Agostino
@austriker27 Thanks for the kind words, and for your support!
Conner Drew
Congrats on the launch Monarch team! I've been using Monarch Money since beta and couldn't say better things about it! This is the financial tool I have been wanting for years, and then some. I've tried most financial tools and this blows everyone else out of the water! The speed of development and coordination of new feature launches is clearly executed by a well orchestrated team. :party_parrot: PS - The lack of ads is so damn refreshing 😆
Jon Sutherland
@connerdrew Thank you for the kind words, Conner! We're just getting started 🙂