Finance & compliance
Plain Retirement
A flat-price retirement planner for middle-income and non-US households that shows where its numbers come from and never asks for your bank login.
In plain English
- What category is this?
- Companies buy to handle money and rules — payments, accounting, tax, audits. Here the focus is consumer subscription.
- The idea, briefly
Build a flat, low-price retirement planner (roughly $39-59/year) that needs no bank login, pre-fills return and inflation assumptions from published historical data and shows the source, works on a phone, and produces a plain-English one-page summary a spouse can read, aimed at middle-income and non-US households rather than FIRE spreadsheet power users.
More ▾- What buyers expect
People comparing tools like Boldin (formerly NewRetirement), ProjectionLab, MaxiFi expect the basics to work without surprise fees or missing pieces. The loud complaints are: Boldin makes the user invent an optimistic and pessimistic return rate for every investment account instead of deriving one from historical data. A saver configuring a plan must guess a rate per account before the projection will run. Quote from msmith on Hacker News: 'I use New Retirement and one of my biggest complaints about that app is that it expects you to provide the optimistic/pessimistic rate of return for each of your investment accounts. I would love to have a tool that provides some guidance on setting those numbers, based on historical returns and the asset classes in the account.'; and boldin is built for US taxpayers only and does not handle other countries' tax rules or retirement accounts.
More ▾
- Sources
- 14
- Checked
- 8
- Competitors
- 4
- Gaps
- 8
- Page checked
- 8 · 57%
- Snippet only
- 6 · 43%
- Documented
- 9 · 60%
- Interpreted
- 6 · 40%
- complaint7
- pricing3
- market2
- playbook1
- revenue1
Competitors
4- ProjectionLabFree
- MaxiFiFree
- EmpowerFree
Parsed from public pricing blurbs (entry paid tier when available). Max in set: $1/mo.
| Competitor | From | Free tier | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boldin (formerly NewRetirement) | Free | Yes | boldin.com✓ |
| ProjectionLab | Free | Yes | projectionlab.com✓ |
| MaxiFi | Free | Yes | maxifiplanner.com✓ |
| Empower | Free | Yes | robberger.com✓ |
What customers complain about
8| Gap | Src |
|---|---|
Boldin makes the user invent an optimistic and pessimistic return rate for every investment account instead of deriving one from historical data. | |
Boldin is built for US taxpayers only and does not handle other countries' tax rules or retirement accounts. | |
Boldin is billed annually with no monthly option and has no mobile app. | |
Boldin's free tier removes Monte Carlo analysis and uses a flat 3% state tax rate, so the free version cannot answer the central durability question. Quote. | |
Buyers ask for cheaper or free alternatives and describe the free tools as limited. The r/Bogleheads search result reads. | |
Users report the tools disagree and are hard to learn or leave: with the same inputs ProjectionLab is 'a lot more rosy on its chance of success projections than Boldin,' Projectio… | |
Non-US users find Boldin 'super USA centric'; a UK user says they dropped it and instead bought a lifetime ProjectionLab subscription. Snippet-only, page body unavailable. | |
Subscribers question whether to renew at $144/year at all. Thread title. |
Documented Interpreted
How competitors find customers
3| Tactic | Src |
|---|---|
| Boldin/NewRetirement runs free standalone retirement, Roth-conversion and annuity calculators plus a free Basic plan as top-of-funnel into $144/year PlannerPlus. | boldin.com✓ |
| ProjectionLab uses build-in-public posts, a Discord and Reddit community, and finance-blogger reviews. | projectionlab.com✓ |
| Blogger affiliates: Financial Samurai and Rob Berger recommend these tools through disclosed affiliate links, which is one documented way the products reach buyers. | financialsamurai.com✓ |
Your angle & pricing wedge
| Piece | Claim | Src |
|---|---|---|
| Angle | A flat, low-price retirement planner (roughly $39-59/year) that needs no bank login, | |
| Wedge | Mechanism: skip the two costs the incumbents carry and bill a flat low price. Boldin pays for account aggregation (its own pricing page lists linking via 'the… | robberger.com✓ |
How others got traction
3| Move | Why | Src |
|---|---|---|
| NewRetirement rebranded to Boldin and grew a free calculator suite plus a free Basic plan into a pa… | Founder-attributed origin in an opened review: founder Steve Chen built the product after his mother asked to borrow money. | robberger.com✓ |
| ProjectionLab, a solo indie product, built in public with a Discord and Reddit community. | Founder-attributed on the opened pricing page ('We #buildinpublic in partnership with our community'). | projectionlab.com✓ |
| Both leading products are promoted by personal-finance bloggers who disclose affiliate commissions. | Documented in the reviewers' own disclosures: Financial Samurai states it is an affiliate partner of ProjectionLab and Rob Berger states he… | financialsamurai.com✓ |
Market heat
Boldin reports more than 250,000 people and over $300 billion in assets on its customer-stories page (company-reported).
A reviewer says ProjectionLab is 'used by hundreds of thousands of households who have modeled more than $250 billion in assets' (company-claimed figure carried in an opened review).
More ▾MaxiFi's pricing page claims 'thousands of others like you improve their living standard' (company-reported).
Boldin's full-featured PlannerPlus tier is $144/year billed annually with no monthly option, while its Basic plan is free.
ProjectionLab's full DIY tier, Premium, is $129/year and its Basic plan is free.
MaxiFi's full tier, Unlocked, is $149/year after a 14-day trial.
Empower gives its retirement dashboard and planner away free and monetizes through paid wealth management.
Revenue signals
5| Signal | Src |
|---|---|
Boldin: more than 250,000 people and over $300 billion in assets (self-reported on its customer-stories page, not independently audited). | boldin.com✓ |
ProjectionLab: 'hundreds of thousands of households who have modeled more than $250 billion in assets' (self-claim carried in a reviewer's post, not audited). | financialsamurai.com✓ |
MaxiFi: 'thousands of others' (self-reported marketing claim on its pricing page, not audited). | maxifiplanner.com✓ |
Category list prices: $129-149/year for a full-featured DIY plan, with free tiers at Boldin and ProjectionLab (documented on the pricing pages). | boldin.com✓ |
Empower gives its planner away free and monetizes through paid wealth management (documented in the opened review). | robberger.com✓ |
Should you build this?
Middle-income and non-US households who plan their own retirement pay $129-149 a year for Boldin, ProjectionLab or MaxiFi, and the market is real: Boldin says 250,000+ people have used it and a reviewer says hundreds of thousands of households have modeled over $250 billion on ProjectionLab (both are company claims). The documented gaps are narrow but concrete: Boldin only handles US taxes, bills annually with no monthly plan, has no phone app, drops Monte Carlo from its free tier, and makes you invent your own return assumptions, while buyers repeatedly ask for something cheaper and simpler and non-US users call it US-centric. The problem is that this is a crowded, trust-heavy market and ProjectionLab already sells the no-bank-login, multi-country, monthly/annual/lifetime model, so this is a price-and-positioning bet, not a new capability. It may not work. Validate before writing code: recruit 30 households who are 5-15 years from retirement, at least 10 outside the US, split between people paying for one of these tools and people using a free calculator; have each show their current tool or last bill, state their country, and say whether they will hand over bank logins; then offer a paid annual pre-order at $39-59. Kill it if fewer than 8 of 30 pre-pay, if more than half say a free tool already answers their question, or if fewer than 5 non-US users confirm their country's tax and pension rules are unsupported today.
More ▾
All sources
14| Source | Kind | Status | Accessed |
|---|---|---|---|
Boldin pricing boldin.com | pricing | page checked | 2026-10-04 |
ProjectionLab pricing projectionlab.com | pricing | page checked | 2026-10-04 |
MaxiFi pricing maxifiplanner.com | pricing | page checked | 2026-10-04 |
| complaint | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
Hacker News item 36857387 (msmith on forced return-rate inputs) news.ycombinator.com | complaint | page checked | 2026-10-04 |
ProjectionLab United Kingdom planning page projectionlab.com | market | page checked | 2026-10-04 |
| playbook | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
Boldin customer stories and testimonials boldin.com | revenue | page checked | 2026-10-04 |
| complaint | snippet only | 2026-10-04 | |
Reddit r/Fire: Boldin vs Projection lab reddit.com | complaint | snippet only | 2026-10-04 |
| complaint | snippet only | 2026-10-04 | |
| complaint | snippet only | 2026-10-04 | |
| complaint | snippet only | 2026-10-04 | |
| market | snippet only | 2026-10-04 |