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ProjectionLab — The personal finance simulator you've been waiting for
Create beautiful and nuanced financial plans that truly represent you, your loved ones, and the paths you choose. Run Monte Carlo simulations, backtest on historical data, and figure out how to live your best life and reduce anxiety around your finances.
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@rrhoover Thanks Ryan! I appreciate you taking a look! I'm hoping the sandbox mode reduces one kind of friction, i.e. for the folks who initially just want to hop in and see how things work using an example persona. You're right though that fully tailoring any long-term planning tool to your circumstances will involve some input and configuration eventually. For that path, I've done my best to make it easy to jot down the big-ticket items and then circle back to make refinements at your leisure. If you end up playing around with it, I'll be curious to hear what you think of the planning UI and Monte Carlo mode!
@knolan I didn't realize there was an example persona. Smart. Will play around with it.
@rrhoover while the input stage is definitely time consuming, it’s no more so than it would be if you were working with a financial professional. You’d still have to gather all of that information. The difference is that with Projection Lab you get to manipulate it yourself as much as you want, and for so much less than paying a finance pro. Totally worth the effort!
@ming_xu1 Good question! Just updated my comment above to include a link to the public roadmap. It's not a feature set that I would say is imminent, but I do think it's an interesting idea and I hope to find the bandwidth soon to flesh out what more of the details would look like. Are there specific features you'd like to see in a version tailored towards startups? Perhaps a view oriented more towards near-term events (as opposed to the current focus on long-term planning), e.g. next X years of runway?
@knolan Whenever I meet the same investor for the second or third time, they always ask a same question, what about your financial forecast? For a early stage starups like us, we dont really have much data to do the math. So a better way is to do the analysis based on financial projections and to see what would happend on sales forecast, buring rate and other finanical KPIs if we do very different way. But now the only tool I have is a bunch of Excel templates from my business school professor.
When the first time I use ProjectionLab, I suddenly realized this might be what the tool I need looks like.
@ming_xu1 Makes a ton of sense! In some ways, I think the current tool is already pretty close to being usable for scenarios like this.. but I bet one thing you'd want right away though is a month-by-month view rather than just year-by-year, right? And maybe also the ability to schedule events down to the day? (e.g. employee X starts on Y date) Sounds like a trivial add from the outside I know, but the way the whole milestone system and event timing system is set up, it's currently optimized for a simulation engine that reports results with yearly granularity. So, there will be a few things to think through there if I decide to take it in this direction.
@ming_xu1 Definitely! It's something I've been planning to look into for a while. Just need to find the most performant way to support more granular views and scheduling without compromising the speed of full-life simulations. Keeping those fast and fluid is a high priority; experimentation needs to be fun 🧪 😁
Looks amazing! I've often thought of making a tool in this space - but this is 1000% better than anything I could've thought of! Great job ?makers!
@nik_hazell 🙏 Thanks Nik! It's been a fun challenge to build something with this rich a feature set as a side project (and solo dev). Lots of time spent carefully scoping which things to take on and choosing a stack I could be as efficient as possible in. If you decide to kick the tires on it some more, let me know how it compares to the kind of tool you had been envisioning!
@knolan, this looks amazing. You are right. There are no good solutions to plan personal finances. At best, google sheets and excels :). Going to try this out over the weekend. Congratulations on the launch.
@mjain_mayank Thanks Mayank, let me know how it goes! In fact, when I started building ProjectionLab over a year ago, it began as me tinkering around with an excel spreadsheet that (at first) was easy enough to share and explain to friends and family who wanted a better retirement plan. But as they asked for more flexibility and new features, it quickly spiraled out of control into a complex web of advanced excel features that became opaque and unmaintainable. I knew there had to be a better way... and now there is! 🎉 😀
Look very interesting. I’ll be checking it out more in-depth once I get out of bed and have some coffee. Early morning finances is my kryptonite.
@skosmach 🙏 Thanks Scott! Let me know what you think once you get a chance to dig in. Coffee actually sounds amazing right now; 12am PDT launches are a little rough on the east coast!☕
Looks cool. Tried it, and play around. Love the local currency options and the overall look.
Congratulations on the launch!
@nash_h Thanks Nash! In part, it's early adopters like you that have kept me energized and motivated ⚡😁 It's not always easy to sit down after dinner at the end of a long day and charge ahead on new features for a side project. But I'm passionate about this one, and there's no shortage of ideas for where to take it from here 🚀
Congratulations guys in the launch. I have been searching for a similar product. Hope it solves what i was looking for. Will give it a spin.
@akshat_jain21🙏 Thanks Akshat! If you have any questions or feedback after getting started, just let me know.
👋 Hey everyone! I couldn't find a good long-term financial planning app that felt modern, fluid, detailed, and actually fun to use... so fast-forward several hundred cups of coffee and over a year of work, and let me introduce ProjectionLab!
✅ The free version has a lot of features, there's a sandbox mode if you just want to quickly see how it works, it does not ask to link your financial accounts, and you don't have to create an account to try it.
Here is a quick preview of just a few of the things you can do:
- Build detailed and flexible plans for your future that go beyond the standard online retirement calculators
- Plan separately or as a couple
- Model international scenarios, with various account types and tax estimation presets
- Plan for goals like achieving financial independence, taking time off for travel, home ownership, or starting a rental empire
- Backtest on historical data and run Monte Carlo simulations
- Create custom plots to visualize the metrics you care about
- Experiment rapidly with a fast + fluid simulation engine and modern UI
- Create granular models for how accounts/income/expenses/inflation/etc change over time using interactive plots
- Track your progress over time and see it overlaid on top of your projections
- Quickly compare between different plans or analyze multiple changes within a single plan
- Build dynamic configurations using milestones that support multiple criteria and conditional logic
- Choose your own icons to personalize just about everything
- And a lot more!
If you check it out, I'd love to hear what you think. The free version is pretty robust, but if you'd like to upgrade to Premium feel free to use code PH-10 for 10% off 😃
👇👇👇👇👇
ProjectionLab: https://projectionlab.com
Discord: https://discord.gg/dZQ5DDEmT7
Roadmap: https://changemap.co/projectifi/projectifi
Twitter: https://twitter.com/_knolan
PL Twitter: https://twitter.com/Projection_Lab
Email: kyle@projectionlab.com
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For now, I'm building ProjectionLab as a solo developer on nights and weekends. It's already been quite a journey bringing PL to the point it is today; and I'm still energized and full of ideas for how to continue making it better, in part thanks to the feedback and support from communities of early adopters like you! 🙏
Looking forward to hearing your feedback!
@victoria_wu 🙏 Thanks Victoria! If you end up playing around with the tool, I'll be curious to hear what you think!
@shortcipher Thanks Chris! I felt the same way 😜 If you decide to take it for a spin, let me know if there any areas where you'd like to see more development.
Projection Lab is fantastic! Probably the best money I’ve spent in the last year from an ROI perspective. Kyle must be one of the elusive 10x developers to have made such a solid bit of software on the side. Very inspirational.
@mackross 🙏 Thanks so much Andrew! I'll try to remember this comment on the days where I feel more like a 0.1x developer 😅
impressive.. though confused on the income/salary section. shouldn't that section have multiple options for income over lifetime expectancy? Or am ii missing something there.
@prembajaj Hey Prem, you can add as many different income items as you want, bind their start/end times to whatever milestones or years you like, and define precisely how you expect each one to change over time. If you're having trouble with any of that, feel free to reach out and I'd be happy to walk you through it.
@lee_booy 🙏 Thanks Lee! Glad to hear you appreciate the UX. It's been a fun challenge figuring out how to build in so much advanced functionality and make it all discoverable without completely overwhelming new users. That can be a fine line to walk at times, but hopefully PL strikes a decent balance so far 🤞⚖️
I've been using ProjectionLab for a few months now. It's amazingly detailed, and far superior to everything else I've tried. PL makes most of my planning spreadsheets obsolete, and more features are being added all the time.
At the heart of personal finance is a search for peace of mind.
Whatever your financial goals may be, ProjectionLab can help you attend to them and find that peace of mind. Whether you're focused on building a big picture assessment of current conditions or want to endlessly tinker with projected outcomes for the future, it has you covered.
ProjectionLab is a great product, which I've been using for several months now. After a little testing, it was a no-brainer to grab the lifetime plan. It has deftly replaced my hodge-podge of spreadsheets and looks a lot better too!
@jocelyuki 🎉 Thanks Jocelyn! If you have any questions after playing around with the app, don't hesitate to ask!
@gauravgoyal_gg 😀 Thanks Guarav. If you have any feedback to share after you take it for a spin, feel free to reach out any time.
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