Hardbacon is gone. If you're reading this, you probably just learned that the app you've been using to keep an eye on your money has shut down, and you're trying to figure out what to do next without panicking about it.
This is a calm walkthrough. Not a ranked list, not a comparison table, not a "switch to us!" pitch. It's the article I wish a former Hardbacon user could send to a friend in the same situation.
What happened
Hardbacon was a Montréal fintech that started around 2017. It ran two related products: a personal-finance app that connected to your bank and brokerage accounts, and a long-running content site comparing Canadian banks, brokers, and credit cards. The app side wound down during 2024 and is no longer being updated.
The comparison content lives on in archived form in scattered places — Wayback Machine captures, screenshots in subreddits, syndicated snippets that other Canadian personal-finance bloggers had reposted — but nobody is maintaining it. Rates have moved. Fee schedules have changed. The reviews of brokerage platforms describe versions of those platforms that don't exist anymore.
There is no "Hardbacon 2.0" coming from the same team. There is no acquirer rebuilding the product under a new name. It's the kind of quiet shutdown that doesn't make headlines because there's nothing dramatic to write about — just the slow wind-down of a consumer product that didn't find a sustainable business model.
What you can still get out of your account
The first thing to do, if your Hardbacon account still loads at all, is export your transaction history.
The web dashboard had a CSV export under the account settings. The CSV includes the date, posted amount, category label, the account it came from, and any notes you'd added. That's enough data to import into a new app — most of the alternatives accept CSV imports and will re-categorize most of the transactions automatically based on the merchant string.
Things that don't export cleanly:
- Custom budgets. Hardbacon's budget data structure is app-specific. The numbers are visible in your dashboard but there's no clean way to move "I budget $400/month for groceries" into another app's budget engine — you'll have to set those up by hand wherever you go next.
- Recurring rules. If you'd taught Hardbacon "this Hydro-Québec charge is utilities, not other," that label exists only inside Hardbacon. New apps need to learn your categories from scratch.
- Net-worth snapshots. The chart of your net worth over time was reconstructed from your connected accounts; it isn't a separate file you can export. Screenshot what you care about. If you've kept brokerage statements, your real net-worth history is in those.
A quiet, useful step before closing the tab: download the broker and bank statements directly from each institution for any period you might want later. Hardbacon was reading those institutions through aggregators — the underlying source data is still at the institutions themselves.
The gap Hardbacon actually filled
Before picking a replacement, it's worth being honest about what Hardbacon was good at. Replacement decisions get cleaner when you know which feature you're actually trying to replace.
Hardbacon's strongest cards were:
- Canadian-by-default. Pricing was in CAD. The interface assumed you bank with a Canadian institution. The comparison content was about Canadian products. You never had to mentally translate from a US-centric pitch.
- One screen, many accounts. The aggregator-driven dashboard pulled together chequing, credit cards, and brokerages into one place, which was useful if your money lived across institutions.
- Comparison content alongside the app. The blog and the app reinforced each other. You could read about why your bank's credit card was middle-of-the-pack and then check your spending on that same card without switching tabs.
Hardbacon's weaker cards — and the reason the product struggled commercially — were the same things every personal-finance app struggles with. Bank connections broke, sometimes for weeks. Investment tracking was shallow. The categorization was inconsistent across CAD and USD transactions. Premium-tier value never felt like a clear step up from the free tier.
A "Hardbacon replacement" is really a replacement for one or two of those strengths, not a clone. Figure out which one you used most.
What I'd actually do, in plain language
The honest answer is: depends on what you used Hardbacon for.
If you mostly used it to see all your accounts in one place and you have multiple banks and at least one brokerage, the natural replacement is something like Monarch or Mozaic Finance. Monarch is the broadest, well-funded all-rounder; coverage of Canadian banks through Plaid is good, and the budgeting and cash-flow tools are mature. Mozaic — disclosure, I built this — is narrower and more focused on the consolidated multi-account net-worth view, especially when several brokerages are involved. Both are paid; neither is free.
If you used Hardbacon as a budgeting tool first and an aggregator second, look at YNAB. The methodology is opinionated (zero-based budgeting; every dollar gets a job) and the people who love it really love it. It is not an aggregator-first product — you can connect a bank, but the practice is to assign incoming dollars to categories on purpose. If that's not the shape of the problem you have, skip it.
If almost all your money is at Wealthsimple already, their free consolidated view covers the basics and costs nothing. It doesn't connect to other banks or brokerages, so it stops being useful the moment your money lives in more than one place. But for a Wealthsimple-only household it's the right answer.
If you mostly used Hardbacon's content site — reading comparisons of banks and brokerages, not the app — you have to accept that an equivalent comparison source under a single Canadian editorial hand doesn't currently exist. RateHub, NerdWallet Canada, MoneySense, and Greedyrates all cover overlapping territory, with different incentives and different edit cadences. Read more than one, and date-check the articles before acting on them.
For a longer ranked breakdown of the actual replacement apps — including the ones I'm not going to enumerate here because they don't change the answer — see our existing comparison of Mint and Hardbacon-style alternatives for Canadians. It covers seven apps in detail with pricing, coverage, and the bank-by-bank notes.
Practical migration checklist
If you're acting on this today, the sequence I'd follow:
- Export. Log into Hardbacon while you still can, download your CSV transaction history, and screenshot anything visual you'd want for reference later.
- Pull statements directly. Log into each underlying bank and brokerage and download the last 12–24 months of statements. This is the authoritative source — Hardbacon was just reading it through a pipe.
- Pick one replacement, not three. The temptation after a shutdown is to try every alternative at once. Don't. Pick the one that matches your strongest use case, run it for two months, and only add a second tool if you've identified something real that's missing.
- Re-do categories on purpose. Your category rules in Hardbacon were built up over years of small corrections. Don't expect the new app to inherit them. Rebuild deliberately — it's a useful exercise for noticing what you're actually spending on.
- Re-evaluate at 90 days. Most personal-finance apps look great in the first week and either stick or quietly stop being opened. Set a calendar reminder for three months out and decide then whether the tool is earning its keep.
On security and trust
A short note, because Hardbacon's shutdown is also a reminder that the company holding your aggregated financial data isn't guaranteed to be around forever.
When you pick the next app, look at three things:
- Read-only connections. The token your app holds for your bank or broker should not be able to initiate a transfer, place a trade, or change a position. Plaid and the brokerage aggregators (SnapTrade is the one Mozaic uses, for example) issue read-only tokens by default — but verify on the new app's security page that it doesn't ask for write scopes.
- Data location and jurisdiction. Where does the database live? Canadian users have specific PIPEDA and Quebec Law 25 considerations; data stored in a Canadian region tends to make the compliance story simpler.
- What happens if they shut down. A good security page tells you. The honest answer is usually: connections are revoked at the institution side, the database is deleted on a schedule, and you get a notice. The bad answer is no answer — silence on the security page about data lifecycle.
For Mozaic's specific posture — read-only tokens, Montréal-region storage, application-layer encryption of sensitive fields — the full write-up is at /security. The point isn't to pitch Mozaic; it's to give you a template for what to look for on any app you're considering.
Pricing reality, briefly
Hardbacon was free for the bulk of its life with an upsell to a Plus tier. The post-Mint, post-Hardbacon market has mostly settled on $5–$15 CAD per month for a personal-finance tool. There is no like-for-like free option anymore that actually works for Canadians across multiple institutions.
Mozaic is $99 CAD per year, flat, with a 14-day trial — see /pricing for the breakdown. Monarch and YNAB both publish in USD, in roughly the same range as each other, and the CAD figure on your card will move with FX — check each vendor's pricing page rather than trusting a number quoted elsewhere. Wealthsimple is free, with the caveat above about its coverage being Wealthsimple-only.
The right answer to "which one" depends on what you used Hardbacon for. The right answer to "should I pay for one at all" is almost certainly yes, given that the free tier on every survivor has been quietly narrowed since 2024 and the alternative is going back to spreadsheets.
Closing
Hardbacon's shutdown is the second time in two years that Canadian users have had to migrate off a personal-finance app — Mint went first, in March 2024, and Hardbacon followed later that year. The market is smaller than it was, but the survivors are better products than what was around in 2022.
Pick one, give it a real three months, and treat the migration as a chance to notice the categories of spending you'd actually like to change. The app is a tool. The change happens in what you do with the picture it shows you.
If you've found this article useful and want to talk through which replacement fits your situation, the contact email at the bottom of the page is mine, and I read every message.