As a follow up to my earlier post on the unfortunate demise of Wesabe, here is Marc Hedlund’s clear and lucid view.

http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint

Bottom line it was Mint’s effort to ensure customers did not have to do any work in getting set up (tagging), and ongoing importing of data (Mint chose Yodlee).  The reason PFM’s are not broadly appealing is precisely because of the associated work effort.  People need things to happen simply and it turns out they are willing to compromise accuracy to that simplicity.