Buy once

Retirement planning software without a subscription

A retirement plan is a thirty-year instrument. Renting the software that models it — and losing access to your own assumptions the month you stop paying — has always been the strange part of this category. RangefinderInvest is a desktop app you buy once, with your plan in a file you own.

The short version: one payment, twelve months of updates included, and a license that never expires — every version you already have keeps working forever whether or not you ever pay again. Verification happens offline on your own machine, so there is no server that could switch your copy off. Your whole plan lives in a SQLite file you can move, back up, or open with any SQLite tool. See pricing for current terms.

What "buy once" means here, precisely

One payment, not a term. No recurring charge, no card on file that renews.
Twelve months of updates are included, and every version released in that window is permanently yours.
The license never expires. What lapses after twelve months is only your claim on newer builds — never anything you already installed. Renewal is optional, never automatic, and coverage runs contiguously from the previous window's end, so renewing late costs nothing and renewing early loses nothing.
Nothing is gated at runtime. The update window is display-only: Settings names the date and what it means, and no feature anywhere checks it while the app is running.
Verification is offline — an Ed25519 signature checked on your own computer. Moving machines is removing the license from one and activating on the next.

The trial has the same shape: 30 days with every feature, no card and no account, and when it ends the app stays open read-only. Your portfolio, every scenario you built, CSV export and backups all keep working. A plan you spent an evening building is not leverage to use against you.

What the projection actually models

Paying once is the pricing model, not the reason to use it. The reason is that the engine takes the parts of retirement that actually decide the answer seriously.

It runs a Monte Carlo simulation of the whole household in today's dollars, starting from your real balances split by tax class — not a single blended pot. On top of that:

Spending phases — different amounts at different ages, each choosing which bucket funds it first — plus one-time withdrawals for the lump you already know about.
Income streams — Social Security with a chosen start age, plus pension, other income, and investment income.
A real tax model — federal brackets and a flat state rate, the Social Security provisional-income worksheet, gains on taxable withdrawals, and an optional ACA-subsidy / IRMAA income ceiling.
RMDs per owner, on each account owner's own birth year — which matters in a household where the spouses aren't the same age.
A separate model for the taxable account, with its own return, volatility and yield, because the embedded income changes the tax bill.

The output is a fan chart of percentile outcomes by age, a success probability, and a year-by-year table. Because the simulation is seeded and deterministic, two runs are comparable — which is what makes the optimizers meaningful: a Roth-conversion frontier that solves how much to convert each year against lifetime taxes and RMDs, and a home-purchase planner that solves for the priciest home the plan still supports and shows what that answer is leaning on.

The part most planners don't show you

Any Monte Carlo has to assume something about returns, and that assumption drives the answer more than most of the inputs people agonize over. RangefinderInvest runs three return models side by side — a forward normal draw, a fat-tailed Student-t draw, and a historical replay of the actual long-run US record — and the historical replay offers several sampling methods on a dial.

Those methods disagree, and the disagreement is the insight. Replaying long contiguous stretches of history flatters a plan, because every full-length window in the record carries the same once-in-a-century interest-rate tailwind through to completion. Stitching the plan out of random multi-year blocks keeps the sequence-of-returns risk that actually sinks retirees — a bad first decade — while breaking that regime lock-in. Drawing each year independently throws sequence risk away entirely and flatters the odds again, which is why it's offered as a contrast baseline rather than a default. Seeing the spread tells you how much of your plan's success was leaning on one lucky stretch of history. Save any set of assumptions as a named scenario and switch between them.

It plans the portfolio, not just the withdrawal

A projection is only as good as the portfolio underneath it, so the same app holds the whole thing: every account with its institution, type, tax treatment and target allocation; exact Add / Reduce / Close rebalancing orders per account in dollars or whole shares; tax-aware, lot-level withdrawal sequencing with wash-sale flags; evidence-based fund screening across your universe; model backtesting with a full tearsheet; and a real T-bill/CD ladder priced by accrual to maturity. The plan and the positions are the same data, so they can't drift apart.

The honest trade

Good fit

A multi-account US household with real tax complexity — IRAs, Roth, taxable, HSA, RMDs on different schedules.
You want to interrogate a projection rather than be handed a number.
You'd rather your financial picture not be on anyone's server.
You expect to use this for decades and don't want a recurring bill attached to it.

Poor fit

You want accounts to update themselves — there's no aggregation or account linking at all.
You want advice, or a person to talk to about your plan. This is software; it doesn't advise.
You're outside the US tax system — the modeling assumes it.
You want mobile or browser access, or to share a plan with an advisor inside the tool.
You want budgeting — it doesn't track spending.

	RangefinderInvest	Subscription planner
Payment	Once	Every year, ongoing
If you stop paying	You keep the app and your scenarios	Access typically ends
Where your plan lives	A file on your disk	The vendor's servers
Account required	No	Yes
Works with the internet off	Yes	No
Reproducible runs	Seeded — two runs are comparable	Varies
Shows several return models side by side	Yes	Varies
Rebalancing orders from the same data	Yes	Varies
Account aggregation	None — CSV or typed statements	Common
Mobile / browser access	Desktop only	Common
Advisor access or human help	No	Often offered
Non-US tax systems	Not modeled	Varies

Compared against the general shape of subscription-priced planning tools, not any one product's current features or terms — those change independently of this page. Four rows go against us on purpose.

Questions

Can I see it before entering my own numbers?

Four complete sample households ship with the app — early career, mid career, near retirement, and in retirement with RMDs and survivorship. Load any one and every screen is populated; each opens as an editable copy, so your own data is never touched.

What am I paying for if updates stop after a year?

The app you have. It doesn't degrade, expire, or check a subscription — nothing is gated on the update window while the app runs. Renewal is optional and never automatic.

Is the projection a prediction?

No, and no projection is. It's a simulation of many possible paths under assumptions you set. That's precisely why it shows the spread between return models instead of one headline probability — the honest output is a range and its sensitivity, not a promise.

What does the app send over the network?

Nothing about you, your portfolio, or your plan. Two request types only: the market-data lookups you configure, carrying ticker symbols and date ranges, and a once-a-day update check carrying the version, the operating system, and — once per install — a flag that the install is new. Both have off switches, and Microsoft Store installs skip the check. The privacy policy details both.

Run your own numbers for 30 days

Every feature, no card and no account — and it stays readable afterwards whatever you decide.

Download free trial See pricing

macOS, Windows and Linux. Your plan stays in a file on your own machine.

Other planning tools are described here as a category — hosted, account-based, subscription-priced — rather than by name, because their features and terms change independently of this page. RangefinderInvest is software, not an investment adviser, tax adviser, or financial planner: it does not provide investment, tax, or legal advice. Its projections are simulations based on assumptions you choose, are estimates rather than predictions of future results, and should not be relied on as the sole basis for a financial decision. Tax modeling assumes the US federal system plus a flat state rate. You place every trade yourself.