Free to Plan, Forever — and How We'll Make Money

Most tools hide their business model. Here's ours, in plain language: what's free, what's paid, what we'll never do — and how we intend to keep the lights on without turning you into the product.

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The core planner is free, and needs no account

You can build your whole plan, see your year-by-year projections, and run the analysis — all of it — for free, without making an account. That's the core of retireclarity, and it's the part we're making a durable promise about: the core planner is free to use. Open it, enter your numbers, get your answer. No signup, no paywall standing between you and your own plan.

That's a capability pledge, and it's deliberately scoped to the core. It's the thing most people come here to do, and it will stay free.

We will never sell or monetize your data

Here's the promise that actually separates us from most "free" tools: we make money from people, not from data.

The plan is simple and old-fashioned — some people will pay us, openly, for advanced capabilities. That's it. We don't sell your information, we don't rent it to advertisers, and there's no data-broker revenue hiding behind the free tier. When a product is free and the company is clearly spending real money to run it, it's worth asking where the money comes from. For a lot of "free" retirement tools, the answer is you — your aggregated accounts, an advisor at the end of the funnel, a lead being sold. Our answer is: customers paying us for features. You are never the thing being sold.

Nothing you use free today gets taken away

A fair worry with any "some things are paid" model is the bait-and-switch — give it away, build the habit, then move the free stuff behind a wall. We don't do that.

The rule is: what you use for free today stays free for you. Grandfathering isn't a line in a policy we hope you skip — it's the rule we run the product by.

Some advanced features are paid — plainly

And now the honest other half, stated without a flinch: some advanced features will cost money — today and in the future. That's not a threat to the core planner; it's what funds it. Charging a fair price to people who want more is exactly what lets us run this without selling your data to anyone.

We're not going to publish a feature list here, because pretending we've got it all mapped out would be its own kind of dishonesty. The principle is what's fixed: the core planning is free, your data is never the product, and advanced capabilities are how we make money.

The one paid direction we'll name — because it's already public through the in-product waitlist — is device sync. Keeping your plan in step across your devices needs servers and storage, so it's a natural thing to charge for. When it ships, it will be opt-in and off by default, the planner will never require it, and synced data will be encrypted in transit and at rest. That's the whole shape of it, and we won't claim more.

Why say all this out loud

Because the free tools we've compared mostly don't. You had to go read their policies to find the model. We'd rather just tell you: plan for free, keep your data, and if you ever pay us, it's for a feature you chose — not for the privilege of being sold.

Want to see what free-and-private looks like in practice? Start with a sample plan.