Ellevest Alternative: What to Use After Ellevest Was Absorbed by Betterment

COMPETITOR

Ellevest

No longer an independent product

What Ellevest Built

Ellevest was important. Not because it was a perfect product — it had limitations — but because it built something the financial services industry had consistently failed to: a financial platform that treated women as the primary audience rather than an afterthought.

Sallie Krawcheck and her team made a specific and coherent argument: women face different financial challenges than men, and financial products designed for a generic user default to male financial patterns. Career breaks for caregiving reduce retirement savings. Longer lifespans mean retirement portfolios need to stretch further. The gender pay gap means women accumulate wealth more slowly at every income level. Ellevest’s planning tools incorporated these realities into the analysis.

The membership model — with coaching, educational content, and community — went beyond portfolio management. Ellevest helped women think about money in the context of their careers, not just their investment accounts. The salary negotiation tools addressed the wealth gap at its root: earning more in the first place.

Whether or not you agreed with every element of its approach, Ellevest was a proof of concept that women-specific financial services could build a brand, generate loyalty, and deliver genuine value. It demonstrated that the market existed.

What the Acquisition Means

When Betterment acquired Ellevest’s automated investing accounts in April 2025, it absorbed the investment management function. Your Ellevest investment account became a Betterment account.

What did not transfer: the membership features. The financial coaching. The salary negotiation tools. The career-linked planning that accounted for women’s specific financial trajectories. The community. The educational content. The positioning and language that made Ellevest feel built for its audience.

Betterment is a competent robo-advisor. It manages automated investment portfolios at 0.25% AUM with reasonable efficiency. It is not, in any meaningful sense, a continuation of what Ellevest was. Betterment does not aggregate outside accounts, does not track net worth across your full financial picture, and has no women-specific features or framing.

The ellevest.com domain now redirects to Betterment’s website. The brand and its meaning are gone.

The Gap That Remains

Ellevest’s absorption left a specific and significant gap: there is now no independent, premium, women-focused financial management platform in the US market.

Female Invest is an education and community platform — primarily UK and Denmark-focused — that does not offer financial tracking or account aggregation. It is a learning platform, not a wealth management tool.

The general-market alternatives — Empower, Kubera, Monarch Money, Copilot — were built without women as the primary audience. They work technically for any user, but they don’t address the specific financial context of high-earning professional women: equity compensation, career break planning, longevity-adjusted retirement analysis, or the wealth-building challenges the gender pay gap creates.

What Thalvi Is Building

We are building Thalvi because the gap Ellevest’s closure created is real, and the existing tools don’t fill it.

The core product is wealth aggregation: brokerages, 401(k)s, IRAs, real estate, and crypto in one dashboard, focused on net worth trajectory and portfolio composition. This is the financial visibility piece that Ellevest’s membership tools included but that the general-market alternatives don’t deliver with the right framing for high-earning women.

The Pro tier adds RSU and ESPP tracking with tax optimization context — equity compensation management that Ellevest, focused on automated investing rather than tracking, didn’t address deeply either. For women in tech and finance, this is where a large portion of wealth is being built.

The positioning is direct: we are not a budget app. We are not a robo-advisor. We aggregate your wealth so you can see your complete financial picture and make informed decisions about it. The language, design, and feature priorities reflect that the person using this product is a capable investor, not a beginner.

The business model is a clean subscription: $9/month or $99/year, with a Pro tier at $14/month or $149/year. No AUM fees, no advisor solicitations, no data monetization. Ellevest’s membership model — which charged for coaching and services — showed that women will pay for financial tools that serve them well. Thalvi is the pure-software version of that premise.

The Broader Context

Ellevest’s absorption is a data point worth holding onto: even the leading women-focused financial brand was not immune to acquisition and consolidation. The pattern of personal finance products being absorbed, pivoted, or shut down — Mint, Ellevest, Personal Capital’s rebranding — underscores why the business model of the tool you use matters.

A subscription-funded product with no dependency on advertising revenue or AUM fees is more aligned with user interests and more durable than one funded by monetizing user data or managing user assets. Whatever you use to track your wealth after Ellevest, the underlying business model is worth evaluating alongside the features.