An honest Boldin alternative you can try without an account

The first difference you’ll hit is the front door.

Futurez doesn’t ask you to sign up to use it. Open the app and you’re modeling. Your accounts, income, expenses, run across all 1,000 market futures. Boldin’s Basic tier is free, but you have to create an account to get started.

The second difference is what “free” actually gets you. Boldin’s Monte Carlo projections are part of PlannerPlus, its $144/year plan. Futurez puts the complete engine on the free plan and always has.

When you’re ready to keep what you built, adding an email address turns that same session into a permanent free account. The free plan gives you:

• One simulation, running the real engine: all 1,000 market futures, the full federal and 42-state tax model, every chart.
• Up to 10 accounts, 10 income sources, and 10 expenses, plus one custom rule.
• A monthly allowance of in-app AI credits for describing charts and rules in plain English.
• Connect your own AI — link Claude or ChatGPT to your actual plan. This one needs the email; it’s the perk you unlock by turning an anonymous session into a free account.

That last item is worth sitting with. Connecting your own assistant is a capability Boldin doesn’t offer on any plan, and on Futurez it’s on the free one.

When you outgrow the free plan, Futurez has exactly one thing to sell you: Plus, at $89/year. Boldin’s full-featured PlannerPlus plan is $144/year. For the complete toolkit, Futurez costs about $55 less a year.

Boldin offers a 14-day trial of PlannerPlus. Futurez’s free plan serves as an unexpiring trial, allowing you a thorough way to kick the tires. Pay when you want:

• Unlimited simulations instead of one.
• Version history and the ability to quickly flip between versions to compare outcomes.
• No caps on accounts, incomes, expenses, or custom rules, and a much larger monthly in-app AI allowance.

Most of what separates these two lives in how each one builds a “possible future.” Futurez runs a fixed 1,000 market scenarios, but the point isn’t the count. It’s that each scenario is a full, internally-consistent economic history rather than a string of independent random returns:

• Stock returns have fat tails and are skewed toward losses, so real crashes happen and run deeper than melt-ups run high.
• Crises cluster across multiple years: sustained drawdowns like 2000–2002 and 2008–2009, not isolated one-year dips.
• Stocks, bonds, rates, and inflation move together, the way they actually do.
• The near term is deliberately cautious. For roughly the first decade, Futurez doesn’t assume history’s long-run average return. It marks expectations down to the forward-looking consensus the major asset managers publish, because today’s valuations compress what’s likely next. It’s a model that would rather under-promise.

That last point is the philosophical difference: Futurez is calibrated to lean to the safe side, and it publishes how it was tested. Boldin offers Monte Carlo simulation too, with adjustable assumptions, though only on its paid PlannerPlus plan. Futurez offers a dedicated methodology page to help you understand how the model works.

Both tools have a built-in AI assistant. Boldin has Boldin AI inside your plan; Futurez has its own in-app AI chat that can answer questions and make edits. Where Futurez goes further is letting you bring the assistant you already use:

• Connect your own AI. Link Claude or ChatGPT to Futurez through the Model Context Protocol (MCP) — an open standard for letting an assistant work with an outside tool — and ask it to run what-ifs against your real plan: “what if we both retired two years early?” It edits the plan, re-runs the projection, and reports the new odds, all inside the assistant you already talk to. It’s included from the free plan up, once you’ve added an email so there’s an account for your assistant to sign in to. And because your assistant does the thinking on your own Claude or ChatGPT subscription, that usage isn’t metered by Futurez at all. Here’s how it works.
• Write a rule by describing it. Type “do a Roth ladder from age 55 up to the 12% bracket,” or “if the market’s been strong, retire a year early,” and Futurez writes the logic; you approve it before it runs. Rules can read each year’s actual market performance and respond to it, the way a real person would.
• Build a chart by describing it. “Show effective tax rate vs. total income each year,” and Futurez drafts it for you to review and save.

The connect-your-own-AI workflow is Futurez’s distinct approach here. If “talk to my financial plan from Claude or ChatGPT” sounds like how you’d want to work, that’s the piece to weigh — and you can weigh it without paying.

There’s a lot of common ground, and it’s worth naming:

• Both are serious DIY planners, not just calculators. Monte Carlo projections, detailed inputs, and real scenario testing — for people who want to drive their own plan rather than hand it to an advisor.
• Both have a permanent free plan. Boldin’s Basic tier doesn’t expire either.
• Both take tax seriously. Boldin models Roth conversions and tax-smart withdrawal strategies; Futurez models federal and 42-state income tax, RMDs, IRMAA, Social Security, and QBI automatically inside every projection.
• Both model real households: two people, joint and individual accounts, dependents. Futurez additionally lets income and expense dates follow named life milestones, so “healthcare costs start at Medicare” or “this income stops when my partner retires” model themselves.
• Both include an in-app AI assistant for asking questions about your plan in plain English.

An honest comparison names the other tool’s strengths:

• You want your accounts to sync automatically. On its paid PlannerPlus plan, Boldin links your financial accounts (through a service called Meld), so balances update on their own. Futurez, by design, doesn’t connect to your bank; you refresh balances yourself with a fast, one-account-at-a-time Quick Balance Update. If auto-syncing is what you want, Boldin does it and Futurez doesn’t. This is the clearest reason to pick them.
• You want access to a human. Boldin offers paid coaching and advisor services (Boldin Advisors, a flat fee of about $3,200), plus classes and an established community. Futurez is pure software for planning it yourself — no advisor access.
• You want several plans side by side without paying. Futurez’s free plan holds one simulation — comparing plans is exactly what Plus is for. If keeping multiple scenarios free is a hard requirement, check Boldin’s Basic tier against that.
• You value a longer track record. Boldin, formerly NewRetirement, has been around for years with a large user base. Futurez is new.

Weighing more than one tool? See our ProjectionLab comparison too.