The ProjectionLab 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. ProjectionLab’s Basic tier tier is free, but you have to create an account to get started.

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 the capability ProjectionLab 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. 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.

Futurez has no trial. The free plan doesn’t expire, so there’s nothing to count down and nothing to cancel. You pay when you want to stop planning one future and start comparing several:

• Unlimited simulations
• 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 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. 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.

And all of it runs on the free plan. The engine isn’t the thing we hold back.

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 to Futurez through the Model Context Protocol (MCP) — an open standard for letting an assistant work with an outside tool — and ask it what-ifs against your real plan: “what if we both retired two years early?” It edits, re-runs, and reports the new odds. Here’s how that works.

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 — and it’s included from the free plan up. Because your assistant does the thinking on your own Claude or ChatGPT subscription, that usage isn’t metered by Futurez at all.

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 have a permanent free plan. Neither one is a countdown to a paywall.
• 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 need estate or international planning now. ProjectionLab’s Premium plan covers both; Futurez doesn’t model these today. This is the clearest reason to pick them.
• 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 ProjectionLab’s Basic tier against that.
• You want historical backtesting. ProjectionLab’s Basic tier includes it. Futurez’s model is forward-looking by design and we’ve published why, but if replaying actual market history is the test you trust, they have it.
• 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. Like ProjectionLab, it wants an account before you can look around. 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, no signup, 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.