Alternatives
A private alternative to Empower / Personal Capital
If you came looking for something like the free dashboard but without linking every account you own to a third party, this is the honest version of that comparison — including the two things the free dashboards do that RangefinderInvest flatly does not.
The short version: free aggregating dashboards work by connecting to your brokerage accounts and holding a copy of your financial life on their servers. That is what makes them effortless, and it is also what some people won't do at any price. RangefinderInvest takes the opposite approach: it never links to a brokerage account. You import a CSV or type your statement, everything stays in a file on your own machine, and you buy the software once instead of it being free. In exchange for the manual step, you get the actual trades and a projection with real taxes in it.
The structural difference, in one paragraph
Aggregation is a real service and it isn't free to run. To show you every account in one screen, a hosted dashboard needs a standing connection to each institution, which means credentials or tokens held by an aggregator on your behalf, and a copy of your balances and positions on the vendor's servers. That is a genuine convenience — and a genuine concentration of exactly the data you'd least like consolidated somewhere you don't control.
RangefinderInvest doesn't have that connection to lose. The app has no login, no linked accounts, no aggregator, and no server that holds anything of yours. What it has instead is an import step you perform: drop a Schwab or Fidelity transaction CSV onto an account, or enter your monthly statement by hand. That is strictly more work, every time. Whether it's worth it is the entire decision.
One thing worth knowing either way: a dashboard that costs nothing is usually funded by something, and in this category that something is typically a paid advisory relationship the free tool introduces you to. That's not a criticism — it's a business model, and a legitimate one — but it's worth checking how any given tool makes its money before you hand it your full financial picture. RangefinderInvest is funded by people buying it, which is why it costs something and why nothing in it is trying to sell you anything else.
What you get for the manual step
The trades, not just the picture
A dashboard tells you that you're off target. RangefinderInvest computes the whole chain — target % → current % → drift $ → action → order — and classifies every line Add, Reduce, Close or Hold, per account, with anything inside your drift threshold left alone. Orders come out in the form the instrument actually trades: dollars for mutual funds, whole shares for ETFs. Holdings that aren't in your model at all show up as Close rows rather than quietly sitting there, and your uninvested cash counts as investable dollars.
A withdrawal that's also a rebalance
Tell it you need money out and it re-sizes every target against the post-flow value, so the trades that raise the cash are the trades that fix the drift. It sequences accounts by tax treatment — taxable, then tax-deferred, Roth last — respects each account's "allow withdrawals" flag, works at the lot level with a HIFO / FIFO / specific-ID method, flags wash sales, estimates the tax on the sale, and will tell you to spend cash instead of selling into a drawdown.
A projection with the tax code in it
The retirement side runs a seeded Monte Carlo of the whole household in today's dollars, starting from your actual balances split by tax class: spending phases, one-time withdrawals, Social Security, a federal and flat-state tax model including the Social Security provisional-income worksheet, an optional ACA-subsidy / IRMAA income ceiling, and RMDs per owner's birth year. You get a fan chart of percentile outcomes and a year-by-year table — plus a Roth-conversion frontier and a home-purchase affordability planner built on the same engine.
It also refuses to hand you one comforting number. The projection runs three return models side by side — a forward normal draw, a fat-tailed Student-t draw, and a historical replay of the actual record — and the historical replay offers several sampling methods whose answers differ, sometimes by a lot. The gap between them is the point: it shows how much of a plan's success is leaning on one lucky stretch of history rather than hiding that behind a single success probability.
And the parts a dashboard doesn't attempt
- Fund selection on evidence — trailing and calendar-year returns, 3-year volatility and max drawdown across your whole fund universe, ranked by a tunable risk-adjusted score with the expense ratio subtracted as a drag.
- Backtesting your actual model — a full tearsheet (CAGR, volatility, max drawdown, Sharpe, Sortino, Calmar, best and worst periods) against a benchmark, using the allocation weights that were really in force on each date, with a banner naming the true common window rather than silently truncating it.
- Bonds and brokered CDs modeled properly — a real T-bill/CD ladder priced by accrual to maturity, with issuer exposure, a forward income calendar, and a builder that models a target ladder off the Treasury par-yield curve.
Which one you should use
Stay with a free dashboard if…
- You want automatic updates across every account with no manual step, ever.
- You want budgeting and cash-flow tracking alongside investments — RangefinderInvest does none of that.
- You check things on your phone.
- Your accounts are spread across many institutions and typing statements would be genuinely painful.
- You're comfortable with the data trade, and free matters more than private.
Look at RangefinderInvest if…
- You will not link brokerage credentials to a third party, on principle or after a breach.
- You want the exact orders, not a diagnosis you then translate into trades yourself.
- You have real tax complexity — multiple account types, RMDs, Roth conversions, lot selection.
- You want a projection you can interrogate, including how sensitive it is to the method behind it.
- You'd rather buy a tool than be the product.
| RangefinderInvest | Free aggregating dashboard | |
|---|---|---|
| Where your data lives | A file on your own disk | The vendor's servers |
| Brokerage credentials held by a third party | Never — no connection exists | Required for linking |
| Account required | None | Yes |
| Getting your holdings in | CSV import or typed statements | Automatic |
| Price | One-time license | Free |
| How it's funded | People buying it | Usually advisory services — check |
| Exact rebalancing orders | Yes, per account and instrument type | Usually not |
| Tax-aware withdrawal sequencing, lot level | Yes, with wash-sale flags | Varies |
| Monte Carlo with RMDs, SS taxation, IRMAA | Yes, seeded and reproducible | Varies |
| Model backtesting & fund screening | Built in | Varies |
| Budgeting & spending | No | Common |
| Mobile / web access | No — desktop only | Yes |
| Works with the internet off | Yes | No |
Described as a category — free, account-linking dashboards — rather than as any one product, because features and terms change independently of this page. Verify current details with the vendor before deciding.
Questions
How much work is the manual import, really?
For Schwab and Fidelity accounts it's exporting a transaction CSV and dropping it on the account; the app detects the broker, previews the rows, flags unknown tickers, and de-duplicates so overlapping exports are safe. For anything else it's entering the statement, which most people do monthly or quarterly. Rebalancing isn't a daily activity — this is a cadence question, not a chore-per-day question.
Can I try it against my own numbers?
30 days, every feature, no card and no account. Afterwards it stays open read-only — your portfolio, plans, exports and backups keep working, so you're never locked out of what you built. Four sample households also ship with the app if you'd rather look before typing anything.
What does the app send over the network?
Nothing about you or your portfolio, ever. Two request types and no others: the market-data lookups you configure, which carry ticker symbols and date ranges, and a once-a-day update check carrying the version, the OS, and — once per install — a flag that the install is new. Both have off switches; Microsoft Store installs skip the update check. Details in the privacy policy.
Will someone call me about my portfolio?
There's nobody to call you. There's no account, we don't have your holdings, and Kalman Software doesn't sell advisory services — the software is the product.
See your whole household without uploading it
Download it, load a sample household, and see the order ticket and the projection before you commit anything of your own.
30 days, every feature, no card and no account — then read-only, never locked.
Empower and Personal Capital are trademarks of their respective owners; Schwab is a trademark of Charles Schwab & Co., Inc.; Fidelity is a trademark of FMR LLC. Kalman Software LLC is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any of them, and those names are used here only to identify the products being compared and the CSV formats RangefinderInvest can read. Statements about free aggregating dashboards describe that category generally, not any particular product. RangefinderInvest is software, not an investment adviser: it does not provide investment, tax, or legal advice, its projections are estimates rather than predictions, and you place every trade yourself.
Related: portfolio rebalancing software · retirement planning software without a subscription