Pralana Online

What it is

Pralana Online is the browser edition of the Pralana Retirement Calculator, sold by Pralana Consulting LLC as an annual subscription. It runs at the vendor's own domain, pralana.online, reached by single sign-on from the subscription site, and it carries the same year-by-year US household model as the Excel edition without needing Excel.

The model covers employment, pensions, annuities, Social Security, property, children and college, healthcare and charitable giving, across eleven account types including inherited traditional and Roth IRAs, with RMDs. Federal, state and local taxes are estimated each year. Analysis runs as a deterministic projection, 1,000 Monte Carlo simulations, and a historical replay from each start year since 1928, with the option to substitute one historical sequence for the deterministic line. Optimisers cover Social Security start ages, withdrawal order over three periods, Roth conversions capped by tax bracket, capital-gains bracket, IRMAA tier or ACA poverty-line multiple, and an earliest retirement date at 90% Monte Carlo confidence. The manual lists seven variable spending strategies: consumption smoothing, constant spending, fixed percentage, fixed percentage with floor and ceiling, Guyton-Klinger, target-percentage adjustment and an actuarial method, plus CAPE rules, which apply only inside a historical analysis.

What Online adds over the workbook is mostly visibility. Metric MRI views show how a figure was derived — Social Security benefits, RMDs, IRMAA, unrealised gains, depreciation. The tax engine renders mock-ups of the forms it fills: Form 1040 with Schedules 1, 2, A, D and E, and Forms 6251, 8582, 8606, 8960, 8962 and 8995 among others, plus a generic state return. The vendor also lists more income and expense items than Gold allows, up to eight children, mortgage refinancing, nominal or real return inputs, and Social Security start ages to the month.

Pricing

Four service levels on the purchase page, each a yearly subscription plus a one-off sign-up fee: Platinum, one plan, $99 a year plus $30; Platinum Family, five plans, $159 plus $40; Platinum Pro, 25 client plans, $349 plus $50; Platinum Pro 50, $499 plus $100. Every plan holds up to three scenarios. The manual also mentions a 100-client Pro tier that the store does not sell.

The terms renew the subscription automatically and state that fees are non-refundable unless the vendor agrees case by case. Gold subscribers can upgrade at a discount, and upgrades between Online levels are prorated. There is no free tier or trial today.

Data & coverage

US households only — federal and state tax rules, Social Security, Medicare, IRMAA and the ACA. The manual says state taxes are approximated for the 50 states and DC and that not every state provision is handled. Historical returns and inflation run from 1928; everything else is your own assumption, with up to ten user-defined asset classes. No market data, no security-level holdings.

Integrations

No account linking and no API. Tabular projections export to Excel and PDF, and the input and results reports are PDFs. A plan can be backed up to an encrypted file the manual calls short-term, shared with another subscriber, or seeded from a PRC2023 or PRC2024 Gold export.

Limitations

• Hosted, so it ends with the subscription. The terms say termination ends all rights to use the service; unlike Gold, there is no copy that keeps running after a lapse.
• Your plan lives on the vendor's server. The manual describes what is stored and offers a permanent delete, but this is household financial data on a third-party site.
• One browser tab at a time. The manual warns that multiple tabs or windows may cause errors.
• Restored backups may not match. Tax parameters and calculations change between releases, and the August 2026 site release changed partial-year income and expense amounts.
• US-only, with a steep input burden and no balance syncing.
• No refunds by default.

Alternatives

Pralana Gold is the same model as an Excel workbook at the same price, and keeps working offline after a lapse. Boldin and ProjectionLab are browser planners with account linking and less tax depth. MaxiFi Planner builds the whole plan around consumption smoothing. For free historical-sequence testing without taxes, FI Calc.