The ProjectionLab alternative you can talk to

Futurez is $89/year with everything included: no tiers, no add-ons. ProjectionLab’s comparable Premium plan is $129/year. Same privacy-first, no-bank-linking approach; Futurez costs about $40 less a year for the full toolkit.

The catch, stated plainly: ProjectionLab has a real free Basic tier ($0), and Futurez does not. Instead, Futurez gives you a 14-day free trial of the entire product (not a stripped-down preview), with no credit card required to start and nothing charged unless you decide to upgrade. So ProjectionLab wins “try it for free forever at a smaller scope”; Futurez wins “try everything for two weeks, then pay less for the whole thing.” If a permanent free tier is a hard requirement, that’s a real point for ProjectionLab.

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 lean to the downside, 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. ProjectionLab offers Monte Carlo simulation and historical backtesting as well. This isn’t “they don’t do Monte Carlo.” It’s that Futurez’s whole design goal is a conservative, auditable model, and we show our work on a dedicated methodology page rather than asking you to take it on faith.

The second big difference is how you actually interact with the tool. In Futurez, a lot of the work is plain English:

• 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.
• Write a rule by describing it (“do a Roth ladder from age 55 up to the 12% bracket,” or “if the market’s been strong, retire a year early”), and the AI writes the logic; you approve it before it runs.
• Connect your own AI. Link Claude or ChatGPT through Futurez’s MCP server and ask your assistant to run what-ifs against your real plan: “what if we both retired two years early?” It edits, re-runs, and reports the new odds.

This connect-your-own-AI workflow is the piece ProjectionLab doesn’t offer. If “talk to my financial plan” sounds like how you’d want to work, it’s a Futurez-only capability today.

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

• Neither connects to your bank. Both are privacy-first: you enter your balances yourself, and nothing sensitive is pulled on your behalf. (Futurez’s Quick Balance Update makes the monthly refresh a fast, one-account-at-a-time flow.)
• Both are built for you, not an advisor. These are DIY tools for people who want to drive their own plan.
• Both take tax seriously. ProjectionLab’s Premium plan does tax optimization, Roth conversions, and capital-gains harvesting; 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.

An honest comparison names the other tool’s strengths:

• You want a free plan. ProjectionLab’s Basic tier is $0 and includes Monte Carlo and historical backtesting. Futurez has no permanent free tier — just the 14-day trial of everything, which needs an account but no credit card. If a plan you can keep using for free forever is a hard requirement, that’s a real point for ProjectionLab.
• You need estate or international planning now. ProjectionLab’s Premium plan covers both; Futurez doesn’t model these today.
• You value a longer track record. ProjectionLab has been around longer and has a larger, established community. Futurez is new.
• You’re an advisor. ProjectionLab has a dedicated Pro tier ($549/year) with client management. Futurez is built for individuals planning their own future, not for managing clients.

Almost nobody compares exactly two tools. If you’re looking at ProjectionLab, these are the others that usually come up, and the honest one-line version of each:

• Boldin (formerly NewRetirement) — free Basic tier, $144/year for PlannerPlus, and a flat-fee option to work with a certified financial planner at $3,200. Unlike ProjectionLab and Futurez, Boldin does link to your accounts on the paid plan, and it offers human coaching. Pick it if you want a person in the loop. We wrote a full Boldin comparison too.
• Pralana — sells a web version (Pralana Online) and a downloadable Excel version (Pralana Gold), plus a free, simpler Excel tool called Bronze. It has a deserved reputation for depth and is the usual answer when someone says “I want to see every assumption.” The trade-off is that depth arrives as a spreadsheet, and you drive it like one.
• cFIREsim and FIREcalc — free, fast, and beloved in the FIRE community. They answer one question well: how would this withdrawal plan have survived history? They aren’t tax engines and don’t model a whole household, so they’re a sanity check rather than a plan.
• Empower (formerly Personal Capital) — free, polished dashboards, and it aggregates your accounts. Worth knowing that the free tool is the front door to an advisory business that charges a percentage of your assets. That’s not a knock, but it’s why it’s free.

Where Futurez fits in that set: it’s the only one you can point your own AI assistant at. Everything else on this list is a tool you operate. Futurez is one you can also delegate to — link Claude or ChatGPT through the MCP server and ask “what happens if we both retire two years early,” and it edits the plan, re-runs it, and reports the new odds. If that isn’t interesting to you, the honest answer is that several tools here will serve you well, and price and free tiers should decide it.