The most beautiful FIRE planner.
Meet the household it can't see.
ProjectionLab is a gorgeous, privacy-first retirement simulator — deservedly loved by the FIRE community. But by design it doesn't connect to your accounts, model entities, or handle taxes across custodians. Formation is the living, sourced household OS — with its own live Monte Carlo built in.
No charge today · Cancel in two clicks · Founding price $199/yr, locked for as long as you stay
What ProjectionLab does well
It's the design benchmark in this category — genuinely the most beautiful financial-planning tool around, built by a solo founder and bootstrapped to $1M in annual revenue with zero funding. Its Monte Carlo, scenario comparison, and milestone modeling are best-in-class, and its privacy stance is principled: no account linking means no breach surface. We admired it enough to build our own live forecast — we'll praise it plainly.
Feature by feature
ProjectionLab
FIRE simulator
Formation
one plan · $199/yr founding
ProjectionLab tiers per projectionlab.com/pricing as of June 2026 (Basic free / Premium $129/yr / Pro $549/yr, annual). ProjectionLab is a web app and does not link financial accounts by design.
Independent signals
We'll give ProjectionLab its due.
ProjectionLab is a privacy-first web app — no app store, no Trustpilot, no review-aggregator score (and we won't invent one). Its reputation lives where the FIRE community talks.
We mean the praise: ProjectionLab is beautiful, principled, and the best pure-projection sandbox there is. But it's manual-entry by design and built for one person's FIRE plan — not a multi-custodian, multi-entity household with K-1s, equity comp, and a CPA in the loop. Formation connects the real accounts, organizes them by entity, cites every figure, and folds a live forecast in. Different jobs entirely.
$1M ARR bootstrapped, zero funding (ProjectionLab) · Free–$549/yr three annual tiers (projectionlab.com) · No account sync manual / privacy-first by design (projectionlab.com)
The ProjectionLab question
Model the future, or run the household?
ProjectionLab is the best place to model a future by hand — privacy-first, beautiful, and deliberately disconnected from your real accounts. Formation does the opposite job: it connects every custodian, organizes the household by entity, cites every number, handles the tax and equity-comp reality — and runs its own live Monte Carlo when you want to look ahead. One is a projection sandbox; the other is your living balance sheet. Plenty of people who love ProjectionLab use Formation for the day-to-day truth it can't see.
Common questions
Is Formation a good ProjectionLab alternative?
Formation is built for households whose finances have outgrown a single-login tool: money spread across many custodians, more than one legal entity (trusts, LLCs, S-Corps), equity compensation, K-1s, and multi-state tax — unified in one view, organized by the entity that owns each account, with every number traced back to its source. The feature-by-feature table above lays out where Formation differs from ProjectionLab so you can judge the fit for your own situation.
How much does Formation cost compared to ProjectionLab?
Formation is one plan with full access — $29.99/month or $349/year list, and founding members lock $17.99/month or $199/year for as long as they stay subscribed. Every subscription starts with a 7-day free trial; there is no free tier and no percentage-of-assets (AUM) fee. The pricing row in the comparison table above shows how that lines up against ProjectionLab.
Can Formation handle trusts, LLCs, equity compensation, and K-1s?
Yes. Formation models every account by the legal entity that owns it (personal, joint, trust, LLC, S-Corp), tracks RSUs, ISOs, NSOs, and ESPP with alternative-minimum-tax awareness, ingests Schedule K-1s from PDF, and runs cross-custodian, wash-sale-aware tax-loss harvesting across all your brokers at once. AURA, Formation's education-only AI, explains and analyzes these numbers but never gives personalized advice, places trades, or moves money.
The living household, not just the projection.
Connect every account — organized by entity, cited to the source — with a live forecast built in.
No charge today · Cancel in two clicks · Founding price $199/yr, locked for as long as you stay
Full pricing details