Mozaic vs Hardbacon: a Canadian app to replace it

Hardbacon mattered because it was Canadian. Most personal-finance apps are built for the US and bolt Canada on afterward; Hardbacon, out of Montreal, was the other way around. It paired a budgeting and investment-tracking app with a big financial-product comparison marketplace, and for a while it was the default answer when a Canadian asked "what do I use to track my money?" Then the app wound down, and the people who relied on it needed somewhere to go.

This page is written by Mozaic, so the stake is disclosed. Mozaic is also Canadian-built, and it covers the tracking half of what Hardbacon did, in more depth on the investment side. It does not cover the other half, the comparison marketplace, and we will not pretend it does. Here is the full breakdown.

The one-paragraph version

You will miss the marketplace if the part of Hardbacon you used most was the comparison engine for credit cards, mortgages, and robo-advisors. Mozaic has none of that; a dedicated comparison site is the closer replacement for that job.

Choose Mozaic if what you valued was the app: connecting your Canadian banks and brokerages, tracking investments per holding, seeing one net-worth number in CAD, and getting native CELI, REER, and FHSA account handling. That is exactly what Mozaic is, and the brokerage detail is deeper than most trackers offer.

Feature comparison

What Hardbacon did that Mozaic does not

The comparison marketplace. A big part of Hardbacon was the engine that compared credit cards, bank accounts, mortgages, and robo-advisors and earned a referral when you signed up. Mozaic has nothing like that and never will, because a tool that both tracks your money and gets paid to steer your product choices has a conflict of interest baked in. If that marketplace is what you want back, a dedicated comparison site fills that role, not Mozaic.

A free tier. Hardbacon's app was free to use because the marketplace paid the bills. Mozaic is a paid subscription. If free is a hard requirement, that is a real difference and worth naming upfront.

Where Mozaic is the stronger tracker

Deeper brokerage detail. Mozaic uses SnapTrade to pull individual holdings, cost basis, and time-weighted return from Wealthsimple, Questrade, Interactive Brokers, and the Canadian bank-owned brokerages, with per-position P&L and benchmark comparison against the S&P/TSX 60 and the S&P 500. For investment tracking specifically, this is more than most Canadian apps offered.

Registered accounts with contribution room. Mozaic treats CELI, REER, FHSA, REEE, and CRI as native account types with the room rules built in: TFSA limit increases each January, the FHSA $8,000-per-year cap, RRSP deadline reminders. It is the registered-account depth a Canadian tool should have.

One CAD net-worth number. Mozaic folds USD assets into a single net-worth view in CAD at daily FX, and treats cash flow and net worth as one product rather than separate screens.

Read-only and conflict-free. Mozaic connects through Plaid and SnapTrade in read-only mode, holds no money, sells no leads, and shows no ads. The subscription is the whole business, so the only job the app has is showing you your accounts accurately.

Pricing

Hardbacon's app was free because the comparison marketplace monetized your product decisions. Mozaic is $99 CAD per year, flat, with every feature included and no marketplace. That price is the entire business model, which is exactly why there are no referral incentives shaping what you see. If you would rather have a free app funded by product referrals, Mozaic is not that; if you would rather pay a flat fee for a conflict-free tracker, that is the trade. The full pricing page is at /pricing.

Moving over from Hardbacon

There is no file to transfer. Inside Mozaic you reconnect each Canadian bank through Plaid and each brokerage through SnapTrade, and the last 24 months of transactions plus current holdings usually load automatically. If you exported any history from Hardbacon before the app closed, you can import transactions by CSV. Category and rule setups do not carry between different apps, so expect to spend a few minutes setting yours up fresh.

A note on fairness in comparison content

Hardbacon was a real Canadian product doing two jobs: a tracking app and a comparison marketplace. Mozaic does the first job, in more depth on investments, and does not do the second at all. If the marketplace is what you miss, we would rather point you to a dedicated comparison site than oversell. If it was the app you relied on, Mozaic is the Canadian-built replacement, and the 14-day trial takes no card.

For more on this transition, read the Hardbacon shutdown and what to use instead. The comparisons hub indexes every head-to-head, including Wealthica and Monarch Money. If you want the investment-tracking overview, see the investment tracker for Canada page.