Planomy vs Boldin (formerly NewRetirement)

The honest summary

Boldin has been in this market for years, has a large and engaged user base, and is built around the idea that a retirement plan is a living document you maintain in an account — with the option of bringing a human into it. That is a coherent, well-executed product philosophy and for a large number of people it is the right one.

Planomy starts from a different premise: that the projection is arithmetic over numbers you supply, so it should run on your device, need no account, and cost nothing. Everything else follows from that — including the things it is worse at.

Neither of those premises is wrong. Pick the one that matches how you want to hold your financial life.

The comparison

Where your plan lives is the real decision

Everything else in that table is downstream of one row. A cloud account means your plan is available everywhere, is backed up without you thinking about it, and can be shared or looked at by someone helping you. It also means there is a server-side copy of your financial situation, that access depends on an ongoing relationship with a company, and that the tool stops working when the network does.

On-device storage inverts every one of those. No server copy, no dependency, works on a plane — and if you clear your browser data without an export, the plan is gone. There is no version of this trade-off where you get both sides for free, and any product telling you otherwise is glossing.

"Free" here does not mean a reduced engine

The usual reason to be suspicious of a free planner against a paid one is that "free" normally means a stripped tier designed to make you upgrade. That is worth checking, so here is the specific thing to check: nothing in Planomy's paid tier is a planning feature. Plus buys unlimited synced plans instead of one, an AI assistant top-up to 50 credits a month instead of 5 a week, bank sync and priority support. That is the entire paywall.

Every number Boldin would compete with Planomy on is on the free, signed-out side of that line. Concretely, the projection running in an account-free browser tab is doing this:

• Federal tax read from a dated, versioned dataset shipped with the app — the 2026 file carries all seven ordinary brackets for single and married-filing-jointly, plus the standard deduction and long-term capital-gains thresholds. It is data, not constants in the code, so it can be corrected without a rebuild.
• State income tax for all 50 states and DC, at three levels of fidelity that the app labels rather than hides: 28 states plus DC carry full bracket tables, nine states levy no income tax at all, and the remaining 13 are modelled at their single flat rate.
• Separate running ledgers for cash, taxable, traditional, Roth and HSA balances — not one blended pot — because the tax on a withdrawal depends entirely on which of those it comes from.
• RMDs on the IRS Uniform Lifetime Table with SECURE 2.0 start ages, for you and for a partner independently.
• Medicare Part B and Part D with IRMAA surcharges keyed off the two-year MAGI lookback — which is what makes a Roth conversion at 63 cost you money at 65.
• Monte Carlo with a seeded run of up to 5,000 trials, and a historical backtest over every rolling window of real annual US market returns and CPI-U inflation from 1928 to 2024.
• Roth conversions specified either as a flat amount or as fill-to-the-top-of-a-bracket, with the IRMAA consequence carried through.

If you find a planning capability behind Planomy's paywall, we have mis-built something. The comparison you should be making against Boldin is about shape and support, not about which engine you are allowed to run.

Pick Planomy if…

• You do not want to create an account, hand over an email, or put your finances on anyone's server to get a projection.
• You want the whole planning engine free rather than a limited free tier that pushes you toward an upgrade.
• You want it to keep working offline, and to keep working if we disappear — the plan file is yours.
• You want plan-versus-actual tracking of real spending against the plan, with bank sync as an option rather than a requirement.

Where Boldin is the better answer

We would rather lose you on this page than have you spend an evening typing a plan into the wrong tool. These are the reasons to close this tab and go to Boldin — they are real, and none of them are things we are quietly planning to fix.

• You want the option of a person. This is the cleanest dividing line between the two products. Boldin sells human help alongside the software; Planomy sells no advice and has no advisers attached to it, by design and not as a gap. If what you actually want is someone to look at your situation and answer for their answer, that is a legitimate thing to want and we do not offer it. Planomy's AI assistant reads your plan and explains it — it is not a fiduciary and does not pretend to be.
• You want the plan to survive the device without thinking about it. A cloud account is backed up because that is what it is. Planomy's default is the opposite: clear your browser data with no export and no account, and the plan is gone. There is a free account that syncs one plan, and there is a download-a-copy button, but both are things you have to do. If you know you will not do them, the cloud model protects you from yourself and this one does not.
• You want a large community and years of accumulated material. Boldin has been in this market for a long time and has forums, classes and a body of user-written material around it. Planomy is new. When you get stuck on a modelling question at 11pm, that difference is worth something real.
• Your state tax bill is the crux of the decision and you live in one of the 13 flat-rate states. 28 states plus DC carry full bracket tables in Planomy; nine have no income tax to model; the remaining 13 use a single flat rate. The app tells you which kind it is using for your state rather than hiding it, but if the state line is what your retirement decision turns on and you are in that third group, treat it as an estimate and verify it elsewhere.

Notably not on that list: depth of the tax engine, Monte Carlo, Roth conversion modelling or Social Security timing. Both products take those seriously, and choosing between them on those grounds means comparing two things that are both adequate.

The cheapest way to decide

Run the same inputs through both free paths and compare the year your money runs out. Where the two answers diverge, the culprit is almost always one of three assumptions: the real return, the inflation figure, or how the tool handles the tax on withdrawals. Our drawdown order guide and safe withdrawal rate guide explain what to look for. Planomy's free path needs no sign-up, so the comparison costs you nothing but the typing.