What Happens to Your Data When a Finance App Shuts Down?

In early 2024, millions of users received an email they were not expecting. Mint, a popular free budgeting service they had used for years, was shutting down. They had ~60 days to export their data before it was gone forever.

This was not a small app. It had over 3.5 million users and had been operating for over a decade. But circumstances changed, priorities shifted, and suddenly years of financial history faced deletion.

If you use cloud-based finance tools, this could happen to you. And it raises an uncomfortable question: who really controls your financial data?

The Lifecycle of Cloud Services

Every cloud service has a lifecycle. Companies get acquired. Business models change. Funding runs out. New ownership takes products in different directions.

In some cases, it can be a mild annoyance, such as losing some photos and posts if a social media app goes under.

When it happens to a finance app, you lose years of transaction history, budget data, spending patterns, and financial planning. As well as your time and effort to get everything working just right. That information took years to accumulate and cannot be easily recreated in another app, sometimes, it cannot be exported at all, at least in the form needed for an easy import into a different app. (A win for spreadsheets, at the very least!)

The Export Problem

Even when companies offer data export, it is often not as useful as it sounds.

Exports typically come as CSV files with raw transaction data. But all the work you did, categorizing transactions, setting up budgets, creating reports, tracking progress toward goals, is usually lost. You get the raw ingredients, not the finished meal.

And then you need somewhere to put it. If you are migrating from one cloud service to another cloud service, you are just resetting the clock on the same risk.

Acquisition Is Not Always Better

Sometimes a finance app does not shut down entirely. Instead, it gets acquired. But acquisition brings its own risks.

New owners may change the product direction. Features you relied on disappear. Pricing models shift. Privacy policies change. The service you signed up for becomes something different.

You have no vote in these decisions, other than taking your data and moving on.

Why This Keeps Happening

Free finance apps face a fundamental business challenge. They need to make money somehow. In reality, development does have a cost. Maintaining servers and the cost to aggregate financial data does have a recurring cost. Even for those that have the best interests at heart. And on the other spectrum, in some cases, apps may face shareholder pressure, where the best interests are not that of the user. And if users are not paying, the company must find other revenue sources.

That usually means one of three things: selling anonymized data, using your information for targeted advertising, or eventually converting to a paid model.

When none of these work well enough, the company either sells to someone who thinks they can do better, or shuts down entirely.

Paid subscription services have more stable revenue, but they face different pressures. If subscriber growth slows, like mentioned above, investors get nervous. Companies pivot, merge, or collapse.

The Alternative: Local Data Storage

There is another approach: software that stores your data locally, on your own computer. This is not seen all too often for a variety of reasons. Spreadsheets often take the prize, as they have much control and are free (or have a minimal one time cost), but may be limited in what they can do.

With local storage, your data exists in files you control. If the software company disappears tomorrow, your data remains exactly where it was. You can still access your files. You can still use the software you already installed.

This is how most software worked before the cloud era. It is not outdated thinking, at least hopefully not. It is a deliberate choice to keep control where it belongs: with you, both secure on your own device and in your control.

Protecting Yourself

If you currently use cloud-based finance tools, there are steps you can take to reduce risk:

First, export your data regularly. Do not wait for a shutdown notice. Download your transaction history at least quarterly, even if you hope you will never need it. (Even with local software, it is a good practice to make backups of your database).

Second, keep exports in a format you can actually use. CSV files are universal and can be imported into spreadsheets or other software.

Third, consider whether cloud storage is necessary for your use case. Personal finance tracking does not require real-time cloud sync for most people. The convenience is real, but so are the risks which we will discuss later (e.g. privacy, data aggregation with big companies, etc.)

Fourth, if you value your financial history, think about tools that keep data on your own device. You sacrifice some convenience, but you gain real ownership.

The Bottom Line

Cloud finance apps are convenient. They sync across devices. They update automatically. But they come with a trade-off: you are sharing access to your own financial data.

That arrangement can end at any time, for any reason, with or without your consent.

Your financial history represents years of your life, and for many, a lot of time and effort to build and maintain. Every paycheck, every bill, every saving toward a goal. It deserves to be stored somewhere you control, in a format you can access regardless of what any company decides to do.

That is what data ownership actually means.