ProjectionLab

What it is

ProjectionLab is a browser-based financial planner. You build a plan out of milestones — retirement, a move to another state, a house purchase, a spouse's death — then hang income streams, accounts, expenses and financed assets off them and set cash-flow priorities that decide where each year's surplus goes. The engine simulates one year at a time to life expectancy, handling withholding, dividends, required minimum distributions and last year's tax bill without being told what to save.

The same plan is shown two ways. The Plan tab runs it once at a fixed growth rate. Chance of Success runs it many times with returns and inflation varying per trial, drawn either from historical S&P 500 returns and dividend yields and historical US inflation or from normal distributions you specify. The success rate is the share of trials that reach the end of the plan without running out of money; the outcome buckets around it — failed early, failed late, almost failed, large surplus — have thresholds and names you set yourself. Historical sampling can be sequential, random-start-year or block bootstrap, and trials run up to 2,000.

Pricing

Basic is free, Premium is $129 a year and Pro is $549 a year. Premium is annual only: the month-to-month plan that used to cost $17.42 is marked retired in the site's own pricing data, and the help centre says plainly that only Pro is sold monthly. The $1,199 Lifetime plan is retired too, so a reader who remembers one cannot buy it. The trial is seven days, and employers can buy seats at $9 per member per month.

What free gets you is worth reading closely, because the vendor's own wording is "run basic retirement projections for free". Monte Carlo and historical backtesting are both in Basic. Tax estimation is not — nor is the Sankey cash-flow view, Optimize, withdrawal strategies, tax analytics, estate planning, downloadable reports or Multiple Plans. Basic is therefore one saved plan with no tax engine under it.

Data & coverage

No market data of any kind: nothing is priced, and every balance is a number you type. The historical series behind Chance of Success are S&P 500 returns and dividends and US inflation, extended each year — the changelog records 2025 being added.

The US modelling is the deep part. Federal and state income tax with a move milestone that switches states mid-plan, the standard deduction, RMDs, Roth conversions, backdoor and mega backdoor Roth, 72(t) SEPP distributions, capital gains harvesting, ACA premiums with subsidy reconciliation, IRMAA cliffs, Medicare added automatically at 65, and Social Security computed from a primary insurance amount with early-claiming reduction, delayed credits, the earnings test and spousal benefits. Defined-benefit pensions pay out as a percentage of final or career-average pay, mortgages and property tax ride along with a financed asset, and one-off or every-five-years purchases are first-class events. Elsewhere there are account types and tax presets for Canada, the UK, Australia, Germany and the Netherlands.

Integrations

There is no account linking, by design and by the vendor's own statement. Plugins cover the gap: browser extensions sync balances from YNAB, Lunch Money and Monarch Money through a key-gated browser API exposed on the page, and anyone can write their own — but they are third-party code, not the vendor's. There is no HTTP API. Reports export to PDF, CSV and JSON, and the whole account exports and restores as JSON.

Limitations

• Balances never import themselves. You type them, or you install someone else's browser extension and trust it.
• Projections are annual. There is no month-by-month or day-by-day view, and the vendor is still researching one.
• Data is not local. Plans live in ProjectionLab's Firestore, and self-hosting was discontinued in March 2025 with bug fixes ending that December.
• Outside the US the tax engine thins out fast. The presets are real, but tax estimation is Premium-only, and there is no Canadian or British equivalent of the Social Security, ACA and IRMAA machinery the US plans get.
• Tax Analytics is a planning estimate, not a filing document — it produces no forms and no cost basis records.
• Let a subscription lapse and you keep the account but drop to Basic, which means the cash-flow view, the tax engine and every plan past the first stop being available.

Alternatives

Boldin covers similar US ground with account linking and a coaching upsell. cFIREsim answers the narrower question — would this withdrawal rate have survived history — for nothing.