The Hardbacon app is gone. The Hardbacon website is not, which is why this article exists in the shape it does: people search for Hardbacon, land on a working hardbacon.ca, and can't tell whether the app they used is coming back. It isn't. Here's what actually happened and what to do next.
This is a calm walkthrough rather than a ranked list, a comparison table, or 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 founded in 2016. 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 trigger was on the content side rather than the app side. Google's September 2023 anti-spam updates cut the search traffic the comparison business depended on, and the affiliate revenue that funded the free app went with it. Co-founder Julien Brault has been public about the scale of it: traffic fell by roughly 97%. The company (legally Bacon Financial Technologies Inc.) posted its own farewell in August 2024 and the bankruptcy followed that September.
Then the part that confuses people. Plutera Capital, a Montréal firm connected to the performance-marketing agency ODM World, bought Hardbacon's assets out of bankruptcy and kept the brand and the domain; the deal was announced in January 2025. So hardbacon.ca is live today and still publishes financial-product comparisons. Brault, who isn't involved in the relaunch, said he was glad the assets were bought and that the new team wanted to keep the brand alive.
What that means in practice: the comparison site continues under new owners, and the account-syncing app does not. There is no "Hardbacon 2.0" of the app coming from the original team. If you're here because your app stopped working, the website being up is not a sign that it's coming back.
What you can still get out of your account
Realistically, at this distance from the shutdown: nothing. The app's CSV export stopped being available when the app wound down in 2024, so if you didn't pull your history then, it isn't sitting somewhere waiting for you. The section below is here for the record, and because a few people still have an old export in a downloads folder they've forgotten about.
The web dashboard had a CSV export under the account settings, and the file it produced carried the usual transaction fields: date, amount, category, and the account each line came from. That's enough to import into a new app. Most of the alternatives accept CSV imports and will re-categorize most of the transactions automatically from the merchant string. If you find that file, it's worth using.
If you don't have one, don't spend time hunting. Reconnecting your accounts to a new app through Plaid or SnapTrade pulls back roughly 90 days of history automatically at most providers, and some apps request up to two years. Either way it arrives faster than reconstructing it by hand. For anything older than what comes back, the bank and broker statements are the real source.
Things that never exported cleanly, even when the app was running:
- Custom budgets. Hardbacon's budget data structure was app-specific. The numbers were visible in the dashboard, but there was 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 existed 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 was never a separate file you could export. If you've kept brokerage statements, your real net-worth history is in those.
A useful step regardless: 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, and it always was.
The gap Hardbacon filled
Before picking a replacement, it's worth pinning down what Hardbacon was good at. Replacement decisions get cleaner when you know which feature you're 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.
Its weaker cards, in my own use and in what users said publicly at the time, were the same things every personal-finance app struggles with: bank connections that broke for stretches, shallow investment tracking, categorization that got confused across CAD and USD. Worth being precise, though, because it's easy to assume a product dies of its flaws. These are reasons some people drifted away. They are not why it closed. The app was free; what killed it was the collapse of the affiliate revenue on the other side of the business.
A "Hardbacon replacement" is a replacement for one or two of those strengths, not a clone. Figure out which one you used most.
What I'd do, in plain language
It 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. Monarch is paid; Mozaic is free to use and charges only for automatic connections. If you want the feature-by-feature version of this paragraph, Mozaic vs Hardbacon lays it out as a table.
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), it's still there, now run by Plutera. Worth knowing what you're reading: the current owners describe themselves as an affiliate-marketing business, so the comparison pages earn a commission on the products they recommend. That was true of the original Hardbacon too. It doesn't make the content wrong, it just means you should read it alongside something else. RateHub, NerdWallet Canada, and MoneySense cover overlapping territory with their own incentives and edit cadences. Read more than one, and date-check the articles before acting on them.
For a longer ranked breakdown of the 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:
- Check for an old export. Search your downloads folder for a Hardbacon CSV from 2024. If you have one, keep it; if you don't, skip this step rather than trying to recover it.
- 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 them deliberately. It's a useful exercise for noticing what you spend on.
- Re-evaluate at 90 days. Most personal-finance apps look great in the first week and either stick or 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 the Hardbacon app'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 usual answer: 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. Use it as 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 works for Canadians across multiple institutions.
Mozaic is free to use for manual tracking, with automatic connections at $99 CAD per year, flat; the personal finance app for Canada page is the product overview, /pricing has the breakdown, and the bank-and-broker coverage list is at supported institutions. 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, so 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 narrowed since 2024 and the alternative is going back to spreadsheets.
Closing
The Hardbacon app'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 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.