In 2023 PocketSmith published a pretty remarkable post:

“Canada: Sorry, The Connection Just Isn't There Anymore.”

After years of dealing with unreliable Canadian bank feeds, PocketSmith decided to stop recommending its product to Canadians. Canadian connections would remain available, but it would no longer actively support Canadian feed errors or open tickets with its data providers.

That was more than three years ago.

This week, a Canadian Monarch Money user posted about their Scotiabank connection no longer working. Other users in the thread reported problems with RBC, TD and other Canadian institutions.

What I found particularly interesting was Monarch's response.

A Monarch representative explained that Canadian banks generally don't work well with the data providers Monarch uses and that connection problems are common in Canada.

And then they linked to that same 2023 PocketSmith article.

They also pointed to Monarch's money-back guarantee because they can't guarantee that a particular Canadian connection will work.

To me, that's the part of the conversation that matters.

This isn't a new problem. PocketSmith was talking about it in 2023. Canadian Monarch users are still talking about it in 2026. And the response they're getting is essentially that Canadian connectivity is difficult, the problem is widespread, and sometimes the connection simply isn't going to work.

There's another current Monarch thread about BMO where both Plaid and Finicity connections are reported as down, with some users being directed toward MX instead and no ETA for a fix.

None of this means Monarch or PocketSmith created the problem. They didn't. Canadian financial connectivity is genuinely difficult.

But there is a big difference between accepting that limitation and deciding that solving it is part of your job.

Finnomia is taking the second approach.

We're built in Canada specifically for Canadians, so we can't treat Canadian connectivity as an edge case or a secondary-market problem.

And one of the biggest competitive advantages we've invested in is Flinks.

Finnomia uses both Plaid and Flinks.

Plaid gives us broad North American coverage. Flinks gives us another connectivity network with a particularly strong focus on Canadian financial institutions.

That distinction matters.

If one provider is having problems with a Canadian institution, we're not necessarily stuck waiting for that provider to fix it. We can support Canadian institutions through Flinks where it provides the better connection, and we already have users successfully syncing Canadian institutions through Flinks that are currently the subject of connectivity complaints on other platforms.

For us, adding Flinks wasn't simply about putting another provider logo on a page. It was a deliberate investment in improving Canadian coverage and reducing our dependence on a connectivity ecosystem primarily designed around the much larger US market.

And we're continuing to invest on top of it.

A significant amount of our engineering work over the last several weeks has been focused on the connection layer itself: reconnect handling, MFA, background refreshes, stale connections, reconciliation and recovery.

This week we continued hardening that architecture around the situations where Canadian connections tend to become unreliable.

Reconnects now make better use of an existing connection before falling back to starting over, including recognizing when the institution simply needs another security step. We've also improved how Finnomia handles institutions that take a long time to respond, so a slow upstream provider is less likely to turn into a failed connection or an unnecessary reconnect for the user.

The broader goal is to make Finnomia more resilient to the parts of Canadian connectivity we can't control. We can't prevent a bank from changing its authentication flow or an aggregator from having an outage, but we can make sure Finnomia handles those situations intelligently and recovers cleanly when they happen.

Will Plaid + Flinks make every Canadian connection perfect?

No.

Banks change authentication systems. MFA changes. Aggregators have outages. Connections sometimes need to be re-established.

But our response to that isn't going to be, “Canadian connectivity is bad. Here's an article explaining why.”

It's going to be: What can we do about it?

Sometimes that's working directly with Plaid or Flinks on a problem. Sometimes it's routing an institution through the provider that works better in Canada. Sometimes it's changing Finnomia's own connection architecture so that an upstream problem doesn't become a worse experience for the person using the app.

PocketSmith decided in 2023 that Canadian connectivity had become bad enough to stop actively supporting Canadian feed problems.

Three years later, Monarch's own support team is linking Canadian users back to that same article.

We're going the other direction.

Canadian connectivity is difficult.

We're investing in it anyway.

Because for a Canadian personal finance platform, reliable Canadian connectivity isn't an optional feature.

It's the job.

Built in Canada. Built for Canada.

finnomia.ca

Canadian banking wasn’t built with budgeting apps in mind. That probably won’t surprise anyone who has tried more than one personal finance app.

A bank works perfectly in one app and struggles in another. Transactions are current for weeks, then suddenly stop refreshing. One institution happily updates in the background while another wants you to authenticate again. A credit union behaves differently from a major bank. A brokerage behaves differently again.

This isn’t unique to any one budgeting app.

It’s the reality of building connected financial software in Canada.

And increasingly, I think the quality of a Canadian finance app comes down to how well it handles that reality.

I’m Aaron, the founder of Finnomia, and that’s been a major focus for us over the past few weeks.

Supporting a bank is the easy part

There’s a big difference between “This institution appears in our connection list” and “This institution stays useful after you connect it.”

The second one matters a lot more.

A good connection should keep doing its job in the background. New transactions should arrive. Temporary interruptions should recover cleanly. And when your bank genuinely needs you to sign in again, the app should tell you. It shouldn’t repeatedly ask for your attention just because nothing new happened overnight.

This week we shipped another substantial round of work around exactly that.

Finnomia is now better at keeping connected accounts refreshed automatically, deciding when fresh information should be requested from the bank, and recognizing the difference between a quiet account and a connection that actually needs attention. We also continued improving how Finnomia handles reconnects and transaction reconciliation behind the scenes.

The result we’re after isn’t complicated:

Connect your accounts and spend less time thinking about the connection itself.

This is why Finnomia uses both Plaid and Flinks

There isn’t one connectivity provider that is best at every Canadian financial institution, so we don’t think a Canadian finance app should be designed as though there is.

Finnomia supports both Plaid and Flinks, which gives us more flexibility in how Canadian institutions are supported and gives us a stronger foundation to keep improving connectivity over time.

That doesn’t eliminate the realities of Canadian banking. Some institutions will still require MFA. Some will refresh differently. Some will occasionally require you to sign in again.

But the application should absorb as much of that complexity as possible instead of handing it back to the user.

That’s the part we can control, and it’s the part we’ve been investing heavily in.

A few other things shipped this week

We also continued improving Family accounts, particularly the process of inviting someone into an existing household and making sure they receive the right access.

Disconnected institutions are now easier to manage from Settings, including the ability to remove their associated accounts and transaction history.

We also made two changes to subscriptions: new Finnomia trials are now 14 days, while existing trials keep their original end date. And the Founder plan is now closed to new subscribers. Everyone already subscribed to it keeps their plan and pricing.

For anyone discovering Finnomia through these posts, we’re building a Canadian alternative to the Mint/Monarch style of personal finance app rather than another version of YNAB.

Connect your accounts, automatically bring in transactions, categorize spending, build budgets and see the bigger picture across your finances. That includes goals, bills, net worth, investments, debt payoff planning, cash-flow forecasting and Canadian retirement planning.

And just as importantly, we’re continuing to invest in the infrastructure underneath all of it.

Because adding another feature is easy to show in a screenshot.

Making the existing product quietly work better every day is usually more valuable.

For the Canadians here who have tried a few connected finance apps:

Which bank or financial institution seems to give every app a hard time?

🇨🇦 https://finnomia.ca

A lot of the work going into Finnomia right now is about making the platform deeper and more complete as people use it across increasingly complex financial situations.

Here’s some of what changed recently.

CAD + USD support expanded

Our USD rollout continued, with CAD-equivalent calculations now supported across most of the core web experience.

That includes areas like:

• Net worth
• Accounts
• Spending and income
• Trends
• Budgets
• Bills and goals
• Cash-flow forecasting
• Debt planning
• Retirement planning

USD accounts and transactions continue to display in their native currency. Conversion happens when CAD and USD need to be combined into a meaningful total.

More connectivity improvements

We continued investing in the connectivity experience behind Plaid and Flinks, with improvements across synchronization, reconnects, authentication, refresh behaviour and transaction handling.

We also added per-institution refresh controls and continued improving how Finnomia handles connections that require additional authentication.

US institutions added to search

The institution picker can now search US financial institutions alongside Canadian ones.

Search performance has also been improved as the available catalogue continues to grow.

Family experience

We’re continuing to improve the Family invite and onboarding flow to make it easier for spouses and other household members to join.

A few smaller improvements

Several other changes came directly from customer feedback:

• Better handling of credit cards with positive balances
• Forecasts now respect transactions excluded from budgets
• Improved defaults for Other Spending
• Click-to-sort transaction tables
• Clearer institution and authentication details during reconnects

There’s a lot more underway, but the focus remains the same: keep making Finnomia a more complete personal finance platform built specifically around the needs of Canadians.

As always, keep the feedback coming. A lot of what we build starts with conversations with the people actually using Finnomia.

A pretty significant addition went live in Finnomia this week:

YNAB importing.

You can now import YNAB data from Settings → Data, preview the import before committing it, and optionally turn your existing Budgeted amounts into Finnomia budget targets.

This is the first version, so I’m particularly interested in hearing from anyone with a complicated/long-running YNAB budget who gives it a try.

We also continued working heavily on bank connectivity.

Finnomia now surfaces institutions from both the Plaid and Flinks catalogues, and we can control which provider is preferred for individual institutions.

That’s important because Canadian aggregation is rarely as simple as saying an institution is either “supported” or “unsupported.”

We also shipped better Flinks reauthentication, catch-up syncing, disconnect/reconnect handling and support for additional institutions.

One bug came directly from a user this week: manual accounts were incorrectly counting toward Core’s two synced-account limit.

That’s fixed. Manual accounts no longer consume synced-account slots.

The website also got another substantial refinement with updated homepage, pricing, Features and FAQ content plus more actual product screenshots.

There was plenty of behind-the-scenes work too, but those are the changes that should matter most if you’re actually using Finnomia.

https://finnomia.ca

Flinks is now live in Finnomia alongside Plaid.

Bank connectivity has been one of the areas I’ve wanted to improve most. Canadian institutions and account types can behave very differently depending on the provider, authentication method and type of account involved.

Having Flinks and Plaid gives us more options when a particular connection is unreliable.

If you tried Finnomia and couldn’t connect an account, I’d appreciate it if you gave it another try. If you still have trouble, let me know which institution and account type you’re trying to connect. Those reports are genuinely useful when figuring out where the problem is.

There has also been quite a bit of work on the parts of the app you use every day:

• Bill-payment links and payment history have been improved, making it easier to connect a bill with the transaction that paid it.
• Loan and mortgage payments have better handling for principal and interest.
• Receipts now have a gallery and filtering, so attachments are easier to browse and find.
• Transfer matching has been improved.
• There have been fixes for split transactions and transaction editing.
• I’ve also addressed issues with Google sign-in, dashboard loading and demo access.

The other big visible change is Finnomia.ca.

The homepage has been completely overhauled with a more polished design, clearer explanations and a lot more screenshots of the actual app.

One thing I felt the old site didn't do particularly well was show people what Finnomia actually looks like before asking them to sign up.

The new version shows much more of the customizable dashboard, budgeting tools, debt-planning features and other parts of the product. There is also clearer information about privacy, security and Canadian bank connectivity.

On mobile, the iOS and Android apps are still in private beta. Testing and polish are continuing as I work toward broader availability by the end of September.

The free calculators and Canadian personal-finance guides are also available to anyone:

Calculators

Finnomia blog

Thanks to everyone who has been sending feedback, both here and directly.

A surprising amount of product development starts with someone saying, “This almost works for me, except…”

Those details are incredibly helpful.

You can see the redesigned site or sign in at finnomia.ca.

Aaron

Hey r/YNABAlternatives, Sunday check-in from Finnomia.

I'm the founder. We started closed beta in late June and opened public beta on August 1, so we're about two months into real people using Finnomia. We officially leave beta on September 1.

This isn't a "coming soon" post. The app is live, CAD-native, and we're shipping every week.

The short version: Finnomia is the Canadian personal finance and budgeting app.

Not a U.S. product with a currency toggle. We're Vancouver-based, our data infrastructure is in Canada, we're built around PIPEDA, prices are in CAD, registered accounts that actually exist here are first-class citizens, and our retirement planner knows what CPP and OAS are.

If you've bounced off Mint replacements that assume 401(k)s, barely understand TFSAs, or treat Canada as an afterthought, that's the hole we exist to fill.

What it is, and isn't

We're not trying to be YNAB.

If zero-based budgeting and "giving every dollar a job" is how you want to manage money, YNAB remains very good at that.

Finnomia started because I was looking for a replacement for Mint that was built specifically for Canadians and couldn't find what I wanted.

The idea was much closer to Mint: connect your accounts, automatically bring in your transactions, understand where your money is going, set budgets where they matter, track your net worth, and get a complete picture of your finances without manually maintaining everything.

Since Mint shut down, Monarch has become the obvious successor to that model. Monarch's co-founder and CEO, Val Agostino, was Mint's first product manager and helped build and grow the original product.

So our positioning today is pretty straightforward:

We're building Finnomia to be the Canadian alternative to Monarch Money.

The automated, connected personal finance experience people liked about Mint and now expect from Monarch, but designed specifically around Canadian banking, investing, retirement and household finances.

Where we are in the cycle

• Closed beta started in late June
• Open beta ran August 1 to 31
• General availability starts September 1
• The web app is live and is our current daily-driver product
• Native iOS and Android apps are built and in private testing
• We're past "does the dashboard exist?" and into "what would make this the default money app for Canadians?"

There will still be rough edges. Bank sync will occasionally be rude. We're still improving things quickly.

The difference is that we're no longer treating Finnomia as an experiment. It's a live product, real people are using it, and feedback is directly shaping what we build next.

What's live

Everyday money

• Read-only bank and investment account connectivity across Canadian financial institutions
• Budgets and spending tracking
• Transactions and bills
• Split transactions
• Rules-based categorization
• Merchant logos
• Customizable dashboard
• Spending trends
• Net worth tracking
• Account nicknames
• Attach receipts, photos and PDFs directly to transactions
• Household views and shared budgets with the Family plan

Canadian, on purpose

• TFSA
• RRSP
• FHSA
• RESP
• LIRA
• RRIF
• CAD, USD and Combined investment views
• Investment activity including buys, sells and dividends
• Investment insights, performance and benchmarks
• Debt Freedom Planner with avalanche and snowball strategies
• Canadian Retirement Planner

That retirement planner includes things like:

• CPP estimates
• OAS estimates
• CPP and OAS claim-age comparisons
• OAS clawback considerations
• RRSP to RRIF conversion
• RRIF minimum withdrawals
• Retirement drawdown sequencing across TFSA, RRIF and taxable assets

This is one of the clearest examples of what we mean when we say Canada-first.

A U.S.-focused personal finance app isn't going to spend much time building around CPP, OAS, RRIF minimums or TFSA withdrawal strategies.

For us, those aren't edge cases. They're the product.

Free Canadian financial tools

We're also building out a library of free tools that don't require a Finnomia account:

https://finnomia.ca/tools

Currently including:

• TFSA contribution room
• RRSP contribution room
• FHSA contribution room
• Debt payoff calculator
• Emergency fund calculator
• Net worth calculator
• Compound interest calculator

All built around Canadian dollars and Canadian financial rules.

Canadian bank connectivity is a major focus

One of the hardest parts of building this product has nothing to do with budgeting screens or dashboards.

It's reliably connecting to Canadian financial institutions.

Finnomia currently supports Plaid, and we're bringing Flinks live alongside it this week.

Flinks is much more focused on the Canadian market, and adding it gives us broader, more reliable and more consistent connectivity across Canadian banks, credit unions, brokerages and regional institutions.

Rather than depending entirely on a single aggregation provider, we'll be able to offer better coverage across the Canadian financial ecosystem.

Canadian connectivity is one of the areas where we think a genuinely Canada-focused product should be able to differentiate itself. We're investing heavily in making it one of Finnomia's strengths.

What's in the works

This is probably the part I'm most excited about.

August involved a lot of product and infrastructure work in parallel. The next few weeks start turning more of that into things users will see directly.

Flinks rollout

Flinks is being integrated now, with the goal of significantly improving Canadian coverage and giving us more options when one connectivity provider doesn't work well with a particular institution.

Receipts library

You can already attach receipts and documents directly to transactions. Next is a proper receipts gallery so you can browse and find those records independently.

Think warranties, appliances, major purchases, business expenses, or anything else you might want to find a few years later.

Better connection status

We're improving the way Finnomia communicates sync status, reconnect requirements and institution issues.

"Is my bank actually updating?" shouldn't be a mystery.

Native mobile apps

iOS and Android are already built and in private testing.

We're working toward public availability once that testing is complete.

That will also make features like photographing and attaching a receipt directly to a transaction considerably more useful.

Cash-flow forecasting v2

We're expanding forecasting with:

• Running balances
• Potential shortfall markers
• Scenario planning
• Income changes
• Job-loss scenarios
• Mortgage renewals
• Other "what happens if..." modelling

Finnomia Copilot

We're working toward a Canadian-aware financial assistant that can understand your spending, budgets and goals.

The philosophy here is important: it should propose, not silently change your finances.

If it thinks a categorization rule should be created or a goal should change, it should explain why and let you approve it.

Business workspace

We're also exploring a workspace for Canadian sole proprietors and small corporations.

The initial focus is straightforward financial visibility and cash-basis insights, with things like GST/HST functionality potentially coming later.

We're also thinking about what a professional or accountant portal should look like when a client explicitly grants access, without requiring someone to impersonate the user.

And yes, Sign in with Apple is on the list too. Google sign-in is already there.

The bigger picture

Finnomia originally started because I missed Mint.

What we're building now is becoming considerably broader than simply recreating it.

The goal is to combine the everyday visibility and automation people loved about Mint and now expect from Monarch with deeper tools around:

• Budgeting
• Household finances
• Net worth
• Debt
• Savings
• Investing
• Retirement
• Financial planning

And build all of it for Canadians first.

There's also a broader social purpose behind the company.

Finnomia has committed to donating 5% of our profits to Canadian charities supporting financial and economic literacy.

If we can build a successful company helping Canadians better understand and manage their own finances, we want some of that success going toward improving financial literacy more broadly as well.

Try it

🇨🇦 https://finnomia.ca

30-day free trial.

Pricing is in Canadian dollars.

No CAD-to-USD surprise on your credit-card statement.

We're building this in the open, and we're still at the stage where feedback can materially change the roadmap.

So if you try Finnomia, tell us:

What broke?

What bank doesn't connect properly?

What do you miss from Mint?

What does Monarch do that you couldn't switch without?

What have you always wished YNAB did differently?

Canadian banking quirks especially. We want those reports.

Happy to answer questions about pricing, privacy, PIPEDA, bank connectivity, the roadmap, or simply "does Finnomia do X?" in the comments.

Hey r/YNABAlternatives,

I'm the founder of Finnomia, and I wanted to introduce the app to this community since a lot of people here are looking for alternatives to Mint, or are using YNAB alongside another app to get a better "big picture" view of their finances.

Full disclosure: I'm not here to tell you Finnomia is a YNAB replacement—it's not trying to be. If you love zero-based budgeting and giving every dollar a job, YNAB is fantastic at that.

Finnomia is closer to the Mint philosophy: automatic account syncing, budgeting, spending insights, and net worth tracking in one place, without the ads or selling your financial data.

What Finnomia does today

• 🔄 Automatic bank syncing through Plaid
• 📊 Budgets, spending insights, and net worth in a single dashboard
• 🏦 View all of your accounts in one place
• 🏷️ Custom categories and flexible budgeting
• 🔒 Privacy first. We don't sell or monetize your financial data. No ads, no data sales, period.

What sets it apart

• Built from scratch after Mint. Finnomia isn't a legacy product that's been retrofitted over the years. It's a modern platform built specifically to fill the gap Mint left behind.
• Automation without losing control. Transactions are categorized automatically, but you can always customize categories and budgets to match how you manage your money.
• Simple by design. My goal isn't to cram every possible feature into the app. I'd rather build something that's clean, intuitive, and genuinely useful every day.
• Focused on helping you make better financial decisions. Tracking your finances is only the starting point. The long-term vision is to help people understand where they're headed financially and make smarter decisions before they spend.

Where we're headed

We're still early, and the roadmap is ambitious. Some of the things I'm working on include:

• Personalized financial insights
• Cash flow forecasting
• Debt payoff planning
• Goal tracking
• Investment tracking and analysis
• Family finance features

Open Beta — August 1 🚀

The Open Beta launches on August 1st.

A few notes:

• 🇨🇦 Currently focused on the Canadian market.
• 🇺🇸 US support is planned for later this year.
• 🎉 You'll get a 14-day free trial to explore everything.
• 🛠️ This is a real beta. There will be rough edges, and feedback from users has already shaped dozens of improvements over the past month.

If you've been looking for something that captures what made Mint great while also looking toward the future of personal finance, I'd genuinely love for you to give it a try and let me know what you think.

Questions, criticism, feature requests—I'm happy to answer anything in the comments.

https://finnomia.ca