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Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance
- jkhdigital 5y agoI took a look around and just want to confirm my impression: this is not an accounting system, right? I’ve been trying to automate my accounting workflow for a long time and this is the kind of tool that I’d love to not have to build myself.
- scubakid 5y agoWhat kind of workflow are you trying to automate? ProjectionLab's current focus is long-term projection/forecasting and planning your whole life based on where you are today and what you want to do. I'd hazard a guess that you might be looking for something a bit different, more along the lines of analyzing/organizing current transaction-level data?
- zwass 5y agoGlad to see that you've continued investing in this project! I paid for the Premium version back in the Projectifi times and would have loved a heads up by email that you made some significant updates.
- scubakid 5y agoI sent out a few rebranding messages and a bunch of updates on new features over the past few months, but it sounds like maybe you subscribed before I even had an email list haha. Thanks for being an early adopter! It's folks like you that helped encourage me to keep working on it :)
- bredren 5y agoMe too! OG 5/3/21. How do we get on the mailing list?
- scubakid 5y agoAyyy thanks! There's an option in the setup wizard now and also on the blog section.
- greenpizza13 5y agoI knew this looked familiar! I paid for Projectfi this year. Can I use the same account?
- scubakid 5y agoYep! Provided you mean ProjectiFi, same account should work. Man, that first "i" really did get lost a lot, didn't it?
- gkop 5y agoGoogle may have squatted some mindshare here by launching a product called Project Fi (later renamed to just “Google Fi”): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fi
- scubakid 5y agoSeems like Project Fi predates this; I was just a bit of an idiot at first and didn't realize how common the confusion would be until too late haha. Pronunciation was solid, but readability... not so great.
- morelandjs 5y agoCongrats! If you decide you want to monetize this, truebill sold to rocket mortgage for something like a billion dollars. I could see your features supplementing their current product nicely.
- scubakid 5y agoI wonder what metrics drive acquisitions like that the most... I would imagine they might look more for products with a huge userbase, stickiness/gamification, or a demonstrably high virality factor, no?
- scubakid 5y agoI couldn't find a good financial planning tool that felt modern, nuanced, and actually fun to use... and I ended up spending all my free time this past year building one: ProjectionLab https://projectionlab.com https://projectionlab.com It doesn't involve linking your financial accounts, you don't have to make an account to try it, the free version has a lot of features, and there's a sandbox mode if you just want to see how the interface works. Last year I posted a prototype here (back when it was called ProjectiFi): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27844194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27844194, and the early feedback from the HN community was extremely helpful! I've put in about 1,000 more hours of dev time on nights/weekends since then, and it's pretty much a whole new app. Here are just a few of the things you can do with it, many inspired by the HN commentary: - Build detailed and flexible plans for your future that go beyond the standard online retirement calculators - Backtest on historical data and run Monte Carlo simulations - Model international scenarios with various account types and tax estimation presets - Experiment rapidly: the simulation engine runs in your browser and doesn't need to send your data server-side - Control how/where your data is stored: cloud sync, localStorage only, or manual import/export, (client-side by default, no persistence in the free tier) - Plan for goals like achieving financial independence, taking time off for travel, home ownership, starting a rental empire, etc. - Create granular models for how accounts/income/expenses/inflation/etc change over time using interactive plots - Build dynamic configurations using milestones that support multiple criteria and conditional logic - Create custom plots to visualize the metrics you care about - Plan separately or as a couple - Create and manage client accounts with the Pro version - Track progress over time and see it overlaid on top of your projections - Cross-compare between different plans, or stage + analyze multiple changes within a plan (and revert if desired) - Choose your own icons to personalize things - And a lot more; for a full breakdown of everything that's new, see the version history If you feel like checking it out, I would love to hear what you think! Most of the functionality is free (minus data persistence), but for anyone interested in upgrading to Premium, you can use coupon code "HN-10" for 10% off any plan :)
- actuallyalys 5y agoThis tool is really flexible and you mention "a rental empire," so perhaps it's covered already, but it might be worth trying to add features for freelancers, contract workers, or people starting side businesses. I think those people would be more willing to spend money on a planning tool, since there's more decisions to make. (I think targeting financial planners is also a smart move.)
- giantg2 5y agoVery cool. I vaguely remember the ProjectFi version. It seems like you made a lot of enhancements. Looks good.
- scubakid 5y agoThanks! I've put a ton of work in since then, and it's been a fun side project that kept me focused and energized and thinking positive thoughts during the pandemic. Also, the fact you remember it as "ProjectFi" is one of the many reasons for the rebrand -- that first "i" in ProjectiFi got lost by so many people.
- giantg2 5y agoHaha I did missed that "i". Seems like a it's worthy of more than just "side project" title. My side projects look like crap compared to this. Very professionally done.
- scubakid 5y agoWell, I must admit there is a graveyard of 60 or so other projects over the years before making anything worth posting here. The dream would be to find a way to work on ProjectionLab full-time, but so far I'm preferring the side-project/bootstrap route focused on growing it slowly and sustainably, in contrast to the VC "unicorn or bust" mentality.
- giantg2 5y agoI think many investment firms would be interested in buying it out. Just look at the ancient tools the big places use. Places like r/stocks pretty much joke about Vanguard having outdated interfaces/tools.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 5y agoHa! Fortunately, in my case I was in a position not to make that mistake. Project Fi (now Google Fi) used to be my phone provider. That does seem like it would be a common mistake, though. It's a good product so it's nice to see that it's still getting some love.
- eprout 5y agoLovely interface. What does your tech stack look like?
- scubakid 5y agoThanks! I built it with Vue.js, Vuetify, Chart.js, and Firebase. Firebase only comes into play for those who get premium and enable data synchronization though.
- eprout 5y agoJust checked out Vuetify, looks pretty slick. Thanks for the tip. So does the client handle all the logic rather than a backend?
- scubakid 5y agoBefore I added code-splitting a while back to improve my original lighthouse score, you actually used to be able to load the app and then disconnect from your network and still do everything except save to the cloud. In fact, you still can if you visit all the parts of the site first so that every chunk is loaded. With so much being client-side like that, web workers turned out to be really handy for things like Monte Carlo mode or running multiple simulations at once (e.g. on the dashboard).
- jasfi 5y agoDefinitely, the web design and UI immediately grabbed my attention.
- scubakid 5y agoThanks! It was tricky to build in so much flexibility and customization while still keeping the overall UI feeling relatively clean.. I try to strike a good balance there, but if you feel there are areas where I haven't succeeded, definitely let me know.
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- shorne525 5y agoI like the interface and the fact I don't have to connect any of my personal accounts. I've used other products that require permissions or user/pw and usually the connections fail or have some issue that makes them useless. It's nice I can do this manually, which I have a spreadsheet I use once a month anyway manually. I'm going to keep playing with this, maybe I can get rid of my spreadsheet!
- scubakid 5y agoIf there's anything you feel your spreadsheet still does better, just let me know! Always working on new features and improvements. In the past I've had some bad experiences with services that require linked accounts as well; seems like there's still a surprising amount of friction there.
- leoqa 5y agoI’m also a subscriber and wanted to export the some stuff to a Google Sheet to give to my financial adviser- I had to do some funky js console stuff. Adding an export, with yearly/monthly resolution and customizable columns would be trivial probably.
- scubakid 5y agoRecently I added a tabular view with JSON/Excel export option (v2.7.0); let me know if that helps!
- ackbar03 5y agoJust out of curiosity, do you have a lot paid customers for this? It's clearly a useful tool but I'm just wondering whether there is a significant cohort that is interested in paying actually paying for value added services.
- scubakid 5y agoNot enough for me to work on this full-time, but enough that it continues to be an energizing side project. I'm sure there could be more if I would pull my head out of the sand and spend more than ~0% of the time doing marketing haha. Certainly all the options and customization appeal more to the DIY types and/or people interested in building detailed plans for financial independence / FIRE.
- YPCrumble 5y agoI worked at a startup that pivoted away from this product so have the same question. We found that people wouldn’t pay for our product that showed financial projections based on current data. I would be really interested to hear how this product is different - maybe there’s a different monetization strategy or a different marketing strategy?
- scubakid 5y agoSo far I've just been building what I really wanted to exist for my own planning purposes combined with the best ideas from early adopters, and then I've posted in a few places and gotten a little traction here and there. I can see how it might be difficult to build and sustain a real startup around this kind of product; it does feel a bit niche, and I haven't tried ads but I've always imagined that the target audience would probably be especially hostile towards them.
- actuallyalys 5y ago> I can see how it might be difficult to build and sustain a real startup around this kind of product Yes, I think the most important difference is that, as far as I can tell, you're looking for a bit of side income rather than trying to jump start a whole company.
- rco8786 5y agoThis is fabulous, will definitely be giving you some money next time I sit down to do finances.
- kyharri 5y agoThis is fantastic. Kudos on the hard work you've got one more paid subscriber here.
- scubakid 5y agoGlad you like it so far! Possibly the hardest I've worked on a side project by an order of magnitude... actually maybe that's not true, in years past I did spend an irresponsible amount of time coding video games that no one would ever buy :D
- syntaxing 5y agoI loved this when this first came out but kind of ran into this spiral of using it like a game. I couldn’t quite do anything actionable from it. Any advice on how I can use this to improve my future financial situation?
- scubakid 5y agoI'm curious to hear more about this "spiral" haha. The way I use it is to create a few different plans and compare between them to assess long-term tradeoffs of different decisions, and come back sometimes to update things and consider new paths or opportunities. The tool can't give you alpha of course, but my hope is that building a better understanding of the spectrum of possible outcomes helps people plan more confidently for how to live life on their terms.
- waterproof 5y agoLooking forward to trying this. Last time I searched around for a tool like this, all I found was OnTrajectory (which seems right up your alley). Do you have a comparison with that or other similar tools?
- scubakid 5y agoI haven't given that tool much of a try specifically, but overall I wanted to build something where you could do granular and flexible modeling across multiple scenarios in a modern and responsive UI, where you don't link your accounts, you control and experiment with a wide variety of options and assumptions, can plot/visualize what you want and see breakdowns of what happened in each simulated year, etc. If you check it out, I'd be particularly interested to hear what you think of the Milestone system, where you can define key events/stages in your life, add multiple criteria with conditional logic for when they should occur, and bind the start/end of other events in your plan to them (with support for offsets as well). So far, I haven't seen anyone else try to build that kind of system.
- TheHideout 5y agoNice work. I remember being very critical of the first version of this a year ago and it looks like you legitimately took the feedback to heart. Thanks.
- scubakid 5y agoSure did! Many of the original comments were tough but fair, and I appreciated that. And if you play around with it some more and end up feeling like it's still rough around the edges, don't hold back.
- samtimalsina 5y agoWow, I had completely forgotten about this. My login still works! I signed up for the original ProjectiFi when it came out but did not use it much. I am a heavy YNAB user and this type of software is right up my alley. I am going give this a whirl again.
- scubakid 5y agoLet me know how it goes! One trend I noticed with people coming to this from budgeting apps like YNAB is that sometimes the Cash-Flow Priority system in ProjectionLab takes a minute to grasp. And for emergency fund / cash reserve goals, I'm in the process of adding a few more options to try to provide better support for different strategies there. If you find yourself looking for those, you can try them out on the early access site here (v3.0.1): https://projectifi-201a2--dev-xsmyy9im.web.app https://projectifi-201a2--dev-xsmyy9im.web.app
- simanyay 5y agoPlayed around with the sandbox for a few minutes and it feels great! Can't wait to try it out properly on the weekend.
- scubakid 5y agoThanks! Did you find the sandbox intuitive? Or did you feel like it needs more persona types? Recently some people expressed they would prefer a parameterized system that tries to dial things in a little closer to their situation... but since then I've tweaked the presentation/phrasing a bit to try to make it clearer the sandbox is just for showing how things work.
- feedmethecorn 5y agoThe interface is really awesome. Nice work overall! I feel like this is something a financial institution/investment firm would seek to acquire.
- scubakid 5y agoThanks! And I definitely didn't build it with acquisition in mind (or have any experience navigating those waters), but I suppose stranger things have happened haha. My intuition is that big firms/institutions would probably be looking for something with more crazy growth metrics and stickiness though, don't you think?
- feedmethecorn 5y agoFinancial institutions have been known to throw big money at products like this one. Many are looking to incorporate new, unique features into their online banking platforms.
- bestinterest 5y agoI just put in some numbers and wow. Unless I'm missing something incredible my findings are kinda depressing. The top 5% salary in the UK is £81,000 -> after tax is £54,817. £4568 a month. Say you spend £2k a month. That's £2568 for investments per month. Using the calc, it seems you would be able to retire at age 50. I quickly checked the US salary percentiles and the top 5th percentile of £81,000 in the UK is equal to the top 15th in the US. Thats 3x ceiling you could climb through not to mention taxes in the US are much much better? Am I crazy? https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-f... https://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php https://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-individual-income-percentiles/ https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-individual-income-perce...
- scubakid 5y agoIt does seem like there are some pretty wild discrepancies in total comp between countries. If the distributed/remote trend continues progressing, I wonder if we'll see things start to equalize at all in our lifetimes, or if there are other geopolitical / macroeconomic / other factors that are more significant.
- d4mi3n 5y agoIt should up to a point. A lot of high paying tech jobs are in regulated industries that sometimes have hard restrictions on who they're allowed to employ. For example, I know someone who works at Oracle Cloud and works on projects for the US DoD. For these projects Oracle is required to employ US citizens, perform background checks, and in some cases ensure those workers have clearance to work with classified information. I suspect there are other high paying jobs/markets with similar restrictions. It'll be interesting to see how the dust settles over the next few years as geographical location within a country and without impacts the labor market.
- scubakid 5y agoIt'll be interesting to see how quite a lot goes over the next few years, given recent events...
- neill 5y agoThis is great, I took some time to get a fairly in depth plan together. There are two things that stuck out: 1. You've got RSU's (at first it wasn't clear to me where this would be addressed, but I think it made sense once I came across it) but I don't see a dedicated strategy for dealing with ISO/NSO's. That'd be helpful for the tech community especially. 2. I spent the 10-15 minutes working on a plan knowing that I'd need to upgrade to pro for every feature, but it seems like I need to upgrade to save my plan. I ended up not paying because I don't have enough time right now to fully evaluate this, but I might look back later. It would have been great if I could have entered my email and saved my plan without paying, and then had to later pay to access it. This gives you the benefit of getting my email address, and then sending me an email to access my plan so that I've got a second touchpoint to your product when I check my email in the future. Looking forward to using this more in depth in the future!
- scubakid 5y agoIf you've still got your plan up, happy to give you an extended trial if you want! But overall I think you're right on both points. I've been wanting to add better support for modeling options for a while; for anyone who'd like to bump priority there, feel free to upvote this item in changemap: https://changemap.co/projectifi/projectifi/task/5735-better-support-for-modeling-stock/ https://changemap.co/projectifi/projectifi/task/5735-better-... For #2, I'll do some thinking to gauge level of effort in rigging up a mechanic like that with the current stack. Losing data sucks, and I should take more steps to reduce the chances of that happening to anyone in the onboarding funnel.
- rezic 5y agoI could see allowing only localstorage saving with no option for exporting or importing of data being limiting enough for me personally to have enough reason to upgrade to pro, maybe limit the number of plans you can have (if you haven't already, I haven't tested it) as well as the number of times you can actually save to localstorage. I liked this enough where I made a model during my lunch break, then remade it when I got home, and then remade it a third time after I had accidentally pressed the "back" button on my mouse talking to someone on Discord, taking me back to the landing page and losing all my data. After that last one I decided to at least get the free trial so I could save, but I had already planned pay for Premium so I wasn't too bothered.
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- chrishemsworth 5y agoIt looks pretty great, I hope to try it more extensively in the future. I was somewhat surprised how intensely I was overcome with existential dread as I put in my information, and just left. It's hard to approach thinking at all about finances, being some years into a pretty volatile career and having basically no assets, investments, savings of any kind, debt, and very rapidly rising costs.
- scubakid 5y agoHuh, I figured Thor would have had you set up pretty good by now... kidding aside though, if you have any thoughts on how I could do better with the UI to ease the existential dread a little, always open to feedback!
- nova27 5y agoThis looks so pretty, building a web app myself and one thing i am struggling with is the UX/UI, I can build the app but my initial design/ux looks like crap, op did you design the UX of this yourself or do you hire a designer to come up with the design ?
- scubakid 5y agoAll me actually.. though I do have a couple UX buddies I bounce ideas off from time to time. My programming journey started in middle school coding videogames to play with friends, and perhaps that's always shaped the way I approach projects: as much as possible, I like to visualize the end state (layout, interactions, the little things you want to be able to do as a user and how that should feel) before getting too far down the road coding the underlying systems.
- zild3d 5y agoIf you don't have a lot of css chops yet, using a component library can be a big help to start. Easier to learn how to customize it a bit vs building all the ui and layout components from scratch - https://mui.com/material-ui/getting-started/learn/ https://mui.com/material-ui/getting-started/learn/ - https://chakra-ui.com/docs/components/overview https://chakra-ui.com/docs/components/overview - https://ant.design/components/overview/ https://ant.design/components/overview/
- hammeiam 5y agoI'm so incredibly impressed with this tool. In addition to the slick interface, it has some killer features and niceties: - You can add a "dependent expense" (have a kid) at a certain age - You can run Monte Carlo simulations of your portfolio performance - Expenses can be configured to increase linearly, with inflation, up to an amount, or using a custom function that the user can input graphically - Adding a house purchase automatically cancels out your existing rent expense if you indicate that it will be your residence - Easily visualize all of your projected earnings from portfolio growth and losses due to inflation and taxes As an avid YNAB-er, this is heaven.
- scubakid 5y agoThanks a bunch! Mentioned this below, but as a YNAB user, if you find yourself looking for more options on things like cash-flow priorities, you can check out the early access version here where I just added a few for v3.0.1: https://projectifi-201a2--dev-xsmyy9im.web.app https://projectifi-201a2--dev-xsmyy9im.web.app
- geeny777 5y agoThis is absolutely awesome. I really appreciate how snappy it feels. I wouldn't mind if it was supported by something like (tasteful) personal capital or credit card affiliate links. Otherwise, it's too expensive for cheap fire-minded folks like myself. Adding a subscription to this would push back our FIRE dates :) Persistent storage (even if it's just a text file I have to copy-paste every time) for $12/ a year would add enough value to be worth it for me, and for me to replace my spreadsheet with this.
- scubakid 5y agoGlad you appreciate the snappiness :) that's the product of a lot of deliberation on optimizations and occasional shower thought / moment of inspiration. Maybe what I should do is add another tier that's just persistent storage with none of the other premium features; essentially "Basic" but with saving.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y agoI would appreciate, no doubt. I think I have a mental friction on paying monthly based on how much I interact with the software, so it might be me.
- scubakid 5y agoThere's always the yearly/lifetime options if monthly gives you pause. Would you suggest adding a lower tier lifetime option with just saving?
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y agoI missed the lifetime option, that's good! I'm not sure how I feel about the persisting being a premium feature yet, I have to play with the software a bit more. It might be that a tier in-between with just persisting would solve the problem, but it could just be that I haven't realized the software' s full potential. You get a lot of points for making it work well with the phone, I was really surprised.
- mjsir911 5y agoWow, this seems cool! Would love some integration with [plain text accounting](https://plaintextaccounting.org/ https://plaintextaccounting.org/) so that I don't have to re-document all my finances though, even just a simple `ledger equity` import.
- scubakid 5y agoThat could be an interesting suggestion to add on changemap. Can't say I'm familiar with the site yet, but what would your vision for a good workflow look like if the right integration was in place?
- mjsir911 5y agoLooking over the app in-depth, I see a lot that could be done depending on how much you want to do ;-) - The initial import can be done pretty easily, `ledger bal` reports my current balances, so for example I can do `ledger bal Assets` and it will report back totals on my `Assets:<Bank>`, `Assets:Retirement:401k`, `Assets:Retirement:Roth 401k`, etc. - You could potentially get a very in-depth "progress points" import with `ledger reg`, which just shows the history of my ledger. `ledger reg Assets:<Bank> --monthly --collapse --total-data` gives me a monthly tally of my savings since forever. - It would be possible but harder to infer future events & spending I think. I can somewhat figure out how much I spend monthly looking at my data, but you'de need heavy processing to get anything useful out of that. I think maybe a more reasonable request rather than supporting ledger is to just support a general purpose plaintext import. The above `--total-data` command for example just gives me: 2018-06-01 10000 2018-07-01 11000 ...
- sthatipamala 5y agoGreat work! This might be unpopular among the HN crowd, but I think you can monetize this further by bundling this with an advising service. This idea of FIRE has been spreading beyond techies/Internet nerds and into other highly paid professionals like doctors. [0]. The main difference is that non-programmer professionals generally don't get a thrill out of min/max-ing financial projections. Such people might be willing to pay a few hundred dollars a year for someone to generate this kind of analysis with them and simply execute on it each year. Similar to how people pay for CPAs. My employer actually pays Goldman Sachs to provide a similar service for its employees (no commission, fiduciary advisors) but their tools suck compared to this. [0] For example https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/ https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/, https://www.physicianonfire.com/ https://www.physicianonfire.com/
- scubakid 5y agoTo an extent, I was hoping to support use cases like this with the Pro version I rolled out recently. But perhaps I'm currently more out of the loop than you envision, in the sense that I'm not actively pairing people with advisors and it's just a product that advisors can use if they want. What do you imagine a more "bundled" offering might look like?
- teagoat 5y agoPersonal Capital actively prompt to try to set up a meeting pretty much every time you log in. They're hoping that you'll sign up for some active management stuff, or do they have a robo-investing option (I can't remember.) At a certain net-worth, they'll start calling you on a regular basis trying to get you to do the same. It's all pretty annoying. Perhaps do that, and after a 6 months of so of calls and prompts, then offer to stop calling / prompting for $10 a month.
- scubakid 5y agohaha I think I've pretty firmly planted my flag in the territory of not annoying people with calls.
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- AYBABTME 5y agoI've been dreaming of building this for myself (when I one day have time to do so) and seeing this is very exciting. I'll give it a shot and pay for it if it works well! Feature request: make this an Electron app so I can actually use local storage, and feel safe that my data (and work) is safe and won't be wasted.
- scubakid 5y agoIf there's anything you were hoping for that you find it's lacking, let me know!
- indemnity 5y agoI wanted to build something like this myself forever, but decided to start by capturing my data over time into a Google Sheet, and in the end never ended up building it. However, having that sheet meant I could enter in all my accounts, assets, debts into ProjectionLab in about 30 minutes, and spent the rest of the time fiddling with the projection tool, which far exceeds what I would have built. The cash flow priorities I simply haven't found in another tool, and was one of the big reasons for me wanting to build my own, since I get about 50% of my total comp annually via RSUs vesting, bonuses and share sales, and route those directly into e.g. my mortgage. Is there any chance to have the Pay Extra goals be annually (I mean, I can do N/12, but annually probably is more accurate from a charting perspective). I've never forked out my credit card so quickly, well done.
- scubakid 5y agoThanks so much! Comments like this are a big part of what makes it possible for me to keep consistently carving out the time on nights/weekends :) And to your point on data entry, I should probably go back and look at all the forms and make more of the inputs multi-type so you can always specify in whatever frequency you like.
- WhiteRice 5y agoThis is seriously impressive. I remember your post from a year ago. I’m thrilled to see you kept up with it and added more features. I’ll be subbing for a year!
- scubakid 5y agoGood memory; and thanks! It's sure been a busy year.
- newshorts 5y agoAwesome idea! One bit of feedback: I found the timed accordion about your product to be distracting while I was reading. I felt pressure to read quickly and concentrate, which I’m guessing was the intended effect. However, I’m a parent of two young children and have a slightly intense job, so my days are filled with time pressure already. The added stress to read something when I’m trying to explore your content at my own pace produced a net negative experience for me. One way you might resolve this is by giving users some sort of a “pause” button or opt out. The reason I spent the time to give you this feedback was because I recognize how hard you must have worked and appreciate the effort you’ve obviously put in. Nice work!
- scubakid 5y agoGreat point on the accordion; last thing I want to do is add anxiety! If you hover your mouse over the section you're reading, the countdown should stop... but perhaps I should get rid of the auto-advance altogether?
- d3nj4l 5y agoLet me add to the enthusiastic chorus with my own "This is great!". One thing that I feel you can do better (and forgive me if it's already there, in five minutes of poking around I couldn't find it) is a knowledge base of some sort. While I was building a model I wasn't sure what reasonable values would be for some of the knobs and stuff that I might be missing. Basically, I think that you could link to existing articles or pointers on personal finance that could help me, a complete novice, model better. Also, and maybe this is a non-goal, you could help me optimize - let's say I've set my living expenses to $X/mo and income to $Y/mo, and I've set a goal for financial independence by age A, the model could suggest things I could do to achieve that goal, say by cutting X down to X' or putting more of Y into a different kind of savings account. It might not be easy to do, but again, as a complete novice I'd really love to get a plan that didn't require days of work to set up.
- scubakid 5y agoDid you see the help center / FAQ? I added that last week, so it doesn't have an immense amount of content, but there are a few things that might be helpful. For things like growth rates, I have more-info popups in a variety of places to provide some context on what's happened historically and what the defaults are. But overall I think you're right that adding more resources over time would be a great idea. I've always wanted there to be more educational content as you step through the onboarding process and build a plan... just need to find the time to draft it up and/or link to it in the best way. For optimization, I could see that getting a little bit tricky, since for now I want to steer clear of anything that could be misconstrued as formal financial advice. Definitely understand where you're coming from though, and there may be some opportunities to add different kinds of optimizers (e.g. a button that runs the permutations for drawdown order and stops on the one with the best outcome).
- fsflyer 5y agoI've looked at it a little bit, but as someone nearing retirement, it is lacking a number of features that I would like. There are some common tricks that I don't see how to model with ProjectionLab: 1. Do your tax-deferred 401k,403b,IRA saving in a high earning job, state, then move to a low or no income tax state to do the withdrawals in retirement. 2. Retire early so there is some time before taking social security payments to do Roth Conversions. I-ORP[0] turns this into a branch and cut linear optimization problem. User Indyhou at Bogleheads[1] has built a spreadsheet that uses a solver plugin. It may be possible to build a model in CBC[2] and compile it to WASM and run it in the browser. 3. After turning 63, watch the Roth Conversions to make sure you don't trigger IRRMA medicare surcharges. 4. Are you trying to stay under income limits for ACA subsidies? It's not quite the sharp cliff that it was, but can be important for some. 5. Are you trying to balance regular income and capital gains to take advantage of the 0% cap gains rates? You've got to plan ahead on your contributions to the taxable and tax deferred accounts for this to work. Jeremy at Go Curry Cracker has written about using this to pay $0 in US Federal Income taxes[3]. 6. Paying full rate for health insurance will likely get you over the 7.5% limit for tax deductions. 7. Social Security claiming strategies can be complex for married couples. A feature that would be useful during accumulation is life insurance planning for the death of a spouse. The death of a spouse can throw a wrench in some of the strategies since the single tax bracket is much smaller. Tax law changes can also upset highly optimized strategies. So any highly optimized strategy should also have a monte carlo simulation around a spouse dying and tax law changes to understand what disruptions are possible and maybe accept a non-optimal strategy that is better in these adverse cases. [0] https://i-orp.com https://i-orp.com [1] https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=365518 https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=365518 [2] https://github.com/coin-or/Cbc https://github.com/coin-or/Cbc [3] https://www.gocurrycracker.com/go-curry-cracker-2020-taxes/ https://www.gocurrycracker.com/go-curry-cracker-2020-taxes/
- scubakid 5y agoFor 1: you should already be able to add a milestone which has tax consequences; there's an option on milestones that lets you redefine the overall tax setup when the milestone occurs. 2-7: all great points; I'd love to add more strategies over time to help optimize scenarios like these, though I'll have to think carefully about what can be generalized and what is strictly US-specific. Thanks for writing these up -- I'll be looking into them in more detail :)
- trutannus 5y agoThis looks useful, but isn't really usable. For example, your investments tiles all call up the same dialog. For example, clicking "Cryptocurrency" calls up the same modal as clicking "Taxable Investments". Because of this, you end up producing nonsense numbers since every modal just modifies the same field. If this is not a bug, then the modal is confusing. The labels inside the modal don't correspond to anything on the dashboard. The investment modal should have a field for each investment, rather than some random fields that don't clearly map. If I click "Cryptocurrency" and a modal with no mention of it shows up, I'll assume the software is broken. I'd also suggest having less memeish simulation descriptions for younger demographics. It adds friction for the average user when they think "well, I'm none of these things, what do I pick". Might also be taken as condescending. Comparatively, the older demographics all had very simple descriptions which would have mass appeal. Comes off like the developers don't take this demographic seriously, or don't understand how to market to it. Cool looking dashboard, but crazy amount of UX friction makes it hard to use. I'd love to see it when it's tuned up.
- scubakid 5y agoThe modal is definitely confusing, you are right! I used to have those stat cards direct you to the Current Finances screen, but then people wanted the ability to edit in place on the dashboard, so I had it open the section from current finances that contains the item you clicked. I see how this makes the overall grouping/hierarchy confusing... in the short-term perhaps I'll revert to the original, but in the long-term maybe I'll restructure the dashboard a bit. Might be nicer to have more of a top-down hierarchy focused on total assets and liabilities anyway. Edit: which things jump out to you as meme-ish? The plan names in some of the sandbox examples? Milestone types? All of the above? lol
- trutannus 5y agoMakes sense, sometimes I find weird UX friction comes when you needed a feature, and didn't plan it in initially. For the memeish stuff, it was under the example personas. While its fine to include some of these (ie: FIRE, looking for part-time), it'd be nice to have some examples for the middle of the road. A lot of what you mention isn't even on the mind of a lot of early career folks. Something like "young professional, focused on building financial stability" or "trying to create more disposable income". Something that would have the same mass appeal as "has a defined-benefit pension, planning for standard retirement age" does to the older demographic.
- MacKay 5y agoThis is awesome. I've been considering building a (very) simple version of this for my own use, but this is way better than anything I'd be able to do. I've signed up, and will try to keep up with using it! Only criticism is that after playing with the sandbox data prior to signing up it stuck around and I didn't see an obvious way of removing it besides overwriting it with my own data. The plan settings was non-obvious for getting my data input started. I began with the Current Finances, rather than overriding the plan settings which made things a little odd.
- scubakid 5y agoThanks for sticking with it despite the friction going from sandbox to premium! I did add a "clear sandbox data and restart onboarding" button a while back, but I'm not sure that hangs around if you go right from sandbox to being a subscriber. I'll take a note to improve that flow.
- Teknoman117 5y agoHaving the money showed in today's dollars by default was tripping me up for a bit. The 401k provider my employer uses shows "future dollars" by default, so you have to mentally recognize that the buying power of 10M "35 years from now dollars" is not what $10M would do for you today. Not helping my "11 months till 30" anxiety/depression. I don't know why it's messing with me so much. The internet loves to make is seem like your 20s are where it's all at but I spent it building a career rather than partying or dating... Leaving the "young adult" phase and just entering "adult". Also mega pissed that I started doing better in 2019 (international travel, lots of time spent with friends) and then the pandemic came and turned the world on its head and trapped me at home for the last bit of my 20s.
- sailfast 5y agoThe internet is wrong. Nothing happens when you cross the barrier. Do what makes you fulfilled and live without regrets. Nothing worse than wasting the limited time we have worrying about things we cannot change. (talking to myself now haha)
- Teknoman117 5y agoI would absolutely love to tell my brain to stop thinking about "should haves" because there is literally nothing you can do about it. But here I am :) I "should have" never allowed myself to become obese in college. I "should have" lost the weight in my early 20s. I "should have" focused on fitness during the pandemic. But that's the past. Yesterday would have been a better choice but tomorrow is a worse choice than today ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Got in a funk a few months ago and decided to make some changes. 5 months later I'm down 30 pounds. Fell off the bandwagon after Christmas but I'm pulling myself back onto it. Transferring offices to be near my friends, many of whom are fitness and health nuts who have all told me they're going to drag me kicking and screaming into the wonderful world of actually taking care of myself. Who knows, maybe I'll actually feel better in my 30s than my 20s as a result. Not that I feel bad now. Even though I'm a 6'4 blob I can still go out and take a 6 mile hike without any pain or trouble.
- 5y ago
- zamfi 5y agoOh, how I wish this were open source, so I could add my own custom inputs, views, code, etc. I’d love to model ranges of uncertainty on, e.g., inflation, recessions, major events, etc. — I’d love to be able to play out scenarios around stock market dynamics, housing market dynamics, and more — and this interface is beautiful. Part of me wants to make some mocks for you, in the hopes that you’ll add some of this… :)
- scubakid 5y agoA good chunk of the features I mentioned in my OG comment here were inspired by user feedback; so if there are new features/views you'd like to see, let me know! Have you seen the Advanced editor yet that you can use to model how various things change over time? That can be helpful for playing out some specific scenarios. And the compare tool might also be worth checking out. I think I see what you mean about ranges of uncertainty though; I can imagine some cool UI possibilities.
- throwaway39485 5y agoThis sounds great! I'm signing up to try it out now. The only issue is that I'm in New Zealand and have some financial ties to the US, so I'm anticipating that there might be some issues around multiple countries and currencies. But will see how it goes.
- scubakid 5y agoMulti-currency planning is something I'd like to add better support for in the future for sure. Feel free to give this one a thumbs up if you like: https://changemap.co/projectifi/projectifi/task/5546-multi-currency-planning/ https://changemap.co/projectifi/projectifi/task/5546-multi-c...
- nabaraz 5y agoI love this but would prefer something self-hosted. Any plan to offer a self hosted version?
- scubakid 5y agoI'm not actively working on this at the moment, but I'd definitely entertain the idea and be happy to help think through if there's a reasonable way to do it. What's your biggest motivation for wanting a self-hosted version?
- nabaraz 5y agoi) Connect to bank accounts automatically and pull the balances and transactions. ii) Owning my data. Currently, I have my own tool that gets balances from credit cards and some bank accounts. I save all the data in a random xyt format which I export/import to my web tool/app. I am looking to replace this tool with something but without giving my data.
- scubakid 5y agoFWIW, data already stays client-side by default. If you upgrade and enable saving, you can choose from localStorage only, cloud sync (i.e. not what you want haha), or manually importing/exporting JSON files. That being said, totally understand the desire to have a version you host in your environment under your absolute control. How do you envision i) working in a self-hosted version? Something you wanted to code up on your own? And does that imply you'd expect the self-hosted version to be easily editable, e.g. the actual source code?
- nabaraz 5y agoCorrect. My current setup -> My web server connects to bank accounts every 6 hours and creates a xyt file which is encrypted and synced. I take that file and load my web tool to get the visualization, simulation etc. My ideal solution is something similar. Great work with projectionlab nonetheless. I have tracked the progress since it was called project fi or something.
- gabereiser 5y agoWhile it’s cool to have prebuilt scenarios without signing up. I couldn’t predict my own without signing up. I closed the tab.
- lolinder 5y agoI'm not sure what you were seeing, but I spent a solid hour playing with my own data without (yet) creating an account. Aside from that, this kind of low-effort dismissal ("has/lacks X, closed the tab") plagues a lot of Show HNs, and it's not constructive. If you really feel so strongly against signing up, it would be more constructive to explain why you feel that way and suggest ways OP could improve their project. As it is this comment doesn't contribute to any meaningful discussion, it just comes off as rude.
- gabereiser 5y agoI was able to put my data in. The simulation predictions still showed $1m+ retirement data. Also, I feel strongly against signing up for stuff because I already get tons of spam marketing from sites that I have signed up. I also am very protective over who knows what about my money.
- scubakid 5y agoFor what it's worth, data already stays client-side by default. If you upgrade and enable saving, you can choose from localStorage only, cloud sync, or manually importing/exporting JSON files.
- scubakid 5y agoWhen you say you "couldn't predict your own", what do you mean? You should be able to do everything possible in the free tier without signing up.
- gabereiser 5y agoWhen I put my data in, the simulation didn’t update. It was still showing me $1m+ retirement predictions.
- _drkh 5y agoSolid app - I echo others statements on this and am seriously considering switching to this from a spreadsheet for the long term; I tried a similar thing for my own finances (spreadsheet -> own app), but it was _far too tedious_ trying to get all the various financial bits worked out, so this is a huge savings in time. Also, the plan together feature seems to be a solid feature overall so far, and it's really helping my partner with financial anxiety be able to even _look_ at our finances without breaking down so far. Two things I noticed, one is a minor visual bug and the other is a potential win (unless I missed it entirely, in which case disregard): - it'd be nice to have a feature to do one-off expenses with greater ease, applied to a subset or all plans right off the bat, the idea being I'd like to see the effect of a spontaneous / fun buy and its greater impact on my plans at that moment (thinking really casual FI where me being off 1-2 years isn't a major dealbreaker); - the promo image under the `Plan Together` summary for mobile has the app layout _behind_ the device notch when it handles it correctly.
- scubakid 5y agoGlad you're enjoying it so far! For one-off expenses, I'm assuming you've noticed that the plan interface has all the expandable columns (accounts, income, expenses, assets, etc.), and that you can create new expenses on the fly by adding them from the expenses column, setting frequency to once, and picking which year to throw it into? Or are you saying that's fine but you'd like a way to propagate specific items from one plan to another/all? If the latter, I'm planning to add something for that: https://changemap.co/projectifi/projectifi/task/5878-add-ability-to-copy-an/ https://changemap.co/projectifi/projectifi/task/5878-add-abi... And thanks for the heads-up! That's what the mock-up generator I used produced and I don't have an iPhone so I wasn't 100% sure how it _should_ look haha. I'll take a note to go back and adjust.
- _drkh 5y agoThat was it, the latter feature! Thanks for letting me know that's in the works, that was the only thing I wished was available.
- chrsig 5y agoI'm really interested in this. My big question is: how easy can it be made to fill in details? I've been thinking quite a bit lately on what I could possibly hack together in a few julia scripts, where I can at least munge my own transaction data. I'd never wind up with this level of polish on presentation -- visually it's very pretty. Manually inputting a bunch of details is such a chore though.
- scubakid 5y agoAn option to link accounts could help with one aspect, i.e. updating balances as they change over time... but I get the sense that it's a can of worms, and it seems like the larger incumbents that do that often have syncing issues anyway. But beyond balance updates, it seems hard to avoid having a ton of input fields in an app where you build a detailed model of your future. It feels like there's a tradeoff between being able to build a super detailed model and having a comparatively frictionless experience where you don't need to enter much.
- morgengold 5y agoNice work. Would you mind sharing your programming stack for this tool?
- scubakid 5y agoI'm using Vue.js, Vuetify, Chart.js, and Firebase, as well as some things like vuex, vue-router, threads, and dayjs, among other supporting modules. I also use web workers in a few places, e.g. Monte Carlo mode.
- jwmoz 5y agoLooks really good!
- unixhero 5y agoIt's too expensive for me. The facts you produce look very good tho.
- scubakid 5y agoI don't want anyone to feel priced out of being able to create a quality plan for their future, so I have a discount request form under the pricing section :)
- nico401 5y agoI have spent couple hours trying your product, it's pretty damn good! Couple remarks: 1. It would have been great if I could make other variables used in Monte Carlo simulations than the market. It would allow one to model uncertainty. For example, an event could happen following a random distribution (kid arrival, move between 3 and 5 years), or a future salary could follow some normal distribution, etc. 2. The main dashboard for a plan is GREAT. UI/UX-wise, considering the number of dimensions to factor, I find it surprisingly simple to iterate over a plan. 3. Having the option to show expenses on the main plan chart would be great. Expenses are a big part of optimizing personal finances. 4. The plan comparison may deserve a different UI than the simple plan analysis. Seeing differences on the right is not completely intuitive. 5. I'm currently living in France, and we have some accounts with no amount limit but with an annual transfert limit. For example, you cannot add more than 20K€/year to the account. I believe it's currently not possible to set a cash allocation such that it maximizes transfert amount/year instead of overall amount. 6. Related to 5., but we cannot withdraw from that account without paying taxes until retrieving, then it's tax-free up to some amount per month. Maybe similar to a 401k. But it's impossible to set that up on a custom account. 7. I have set that model up, still in trial, but now I'm really scared that my browser might bug or hit refresh by habit and loose everything. The find the saving feature to be really harsh. It'd be nice to find some alternative so that it can be saved, and maybe retrieve it after subscribing? Or limit the number of parameters/events that can be added to the model? Or show in much simplified mode. In my case, I'd like to show my partner and discuss it before subscribing: I want to make sure it contains enough features needed to model our finances. Really good job overall, I'll certainly follow your work!
- scubakid 5y agoThanks for the detailed feedback! 1. Definitely looking to add more degrees of freedom to Monte Carlo scenarios over time. A couple examples: https://changemap.co/projectifi/projectifi/task/5736-flex-on-expenses-for/ https://changemap.co/projectifi/projectifi/task/5736-flex-on... https://changemap.co/projectifi/projectifi/task/5926-allow-selection-of-different-withdrawl/ https://changemap.co/projectifi/projectifi/task/5926-allow-s... 3. Have you seen the Plot Builder? (open plot selector and hit new). Expenses are one of the metrics you can use. 4. Totally agree. Eventually I want this to show more than the deltas in the yearly summary, just haven't gotten to it yet. 5. I actually just added some more options for savings type goals to the early access site here: https://projectifi-201a2--dev-xsmyy9im.web.app https://projectifi-201a2--dev-xsmyy9im.web.app. let me know if that helps at all. 7. I'd like to make some improvements here too. Losing data sucks, and I should take more steps to reduce the likelihood of that ever happening. I'll see if I can come up with a good approach that's not easy to take advantage of.
- dalmo3 5y agoThis is astonishing. Coincidentally, I've just finished a year-long (side-)project building a similar app for a friend. Similar, I say, if you only read the one-sentence description of what they do. ProjectionLab is 100x prettier, smarter and more featured than anything I could have done. You have my full admiration, and perhaps my subscription :) I have to come back to it on the weekend, on the computer (although it looks/works fantastic on mobile.)
- scubakid 5y agoThanks! I did spend quite a while trying to make the mobile experience decent, but if you come back I'd highly recommend checking it out on desktop; nothing beats that 4k monitor with all plan sections expanded.
- mchenier 5y agoReally nice! I like it a lot. One feature I miss there from my spreadsheet is the ability to track and get updated investment values automatically. I mean, it could be great to have a way to specify the number of stock for each investment account, the cost basis and then, have live record of the investment values. At the same time, it would give a better idea of capital gain tax implication.
- scubakid 5y agoI've had a few people suggest something like this in the past, and if it's not on changemap already feel free to add an item for it. I'm still trying to work out if it would be useful enough to implement though, i.e. if people would actually use it, and if it really offers enough improvement over entering balance updates the current way. I guess it depends on how often you're adding to / changing positions. Also, are you in the camp where you would want to see an optional account linking feature in the future? Or is that something you'd steer clear of?
- mchenier 5y agoThanks for replying. I am definitely in the camp of the no account linking feature. In fact, more in the camp where I don’t want to provide credentials to connect to bank institutions.
- scubakid 5y agoSure thing, and that's good to know! I suppose the ease of entering your positions also greatly depends on how many you have. Maybe supporting some kind of format to import from would help there.
- thenerdhead 5y agoSeems really promising. I like simple projections. Most calculators out there on the web suck or are advertisements. They account for too much and I just need PERT but for various asset classes. I tried doing the walkthrough and it told me I'd go bankrupt. I think there's a bug somewhere as I have 0 debt and over a mill in liquid assets meaning net worth positive. The sandbox was a bit confusing with the seeded data and I wasn't able to make much sense so I had to start over with the walkthrough. I would pay a few hundred dollars a year for a simplified version of this where I can just play around with fixed percentages based on my expected returns for different asset classes. Right now it's a bit complex for me and I'd just go back to pen/paper & excel. If I could show something simple like this to my friends and family, I'm sure they would enjoy it too.
- scubakid 5y agoHmm is it possible you just had the frequency wrong on an expense type or something along those lines? e.g. yearly amount specified monthly/daily by accident? Or a dollar amount put into a percent field? I've added warnings in some places like that where it's possible to identify what a surprisingly high/low value would be, but those guardrails aren't quite everywhere. To simulate different asset classes, you can always add different account types, rename them, and set custom growth rates / change-over-time plots.. but I agree that something more built-in could make sense, e.g.: https://changemap.co/projectifi/projectifi/task/5670-asset-specification-allocation/ https://changemap.co/projectifi/projectifi/task/5670-asset-s... ... though I suppose this moves in the direction of adding even more features rather than simplifying haha.
- bronco21016 5y agoThis is absolutely fantastic! I've long wanted a tool similar to this but have been stuck with spreadsheets for quite sometime simply because I do not have the knowledge nor time to build something so beautiful. I plan on playing with this quite a bit more over the next few days. I've noticed in this thread a few other requests for import and I'd like to also chime in with that request. I have a unique situation when it comes to income where I can reasonably predict my income overtime because of a collective bargaining agreement. Being able to import a table of income/year that I've already generated would save me a ton of time! Thanks again for the amazing work!
- scubakid 5y agoHappy you like it so far! Have you seen the Advanced editor I added recently to control precisely how things like investment returns, accounts, income, and expenses change over time? When you open up the full dialog for that, I bet that control point table would be a perfect place to add support for CSV import of income (or whatever other variable) by year.
- bronco21016 5y agoI did! When I get some time to get everything setup this weekend that where I'll fill in my data. Unfortunately, I have 31 years to go :S so it will take time to manually enter. But a quick import of CSV on the left hand side where the points are added would be perfect!
- scubakid 5y agoSounds good; feel free to add that feature idea to changemap if you want! Or I can take a note to do it when I get a chance.
- mattymf 5y agoThe projections predict I will buy a Tesla and go bankrupt immediately after
- scubakid 5y agoMaybe hold off on that Roadster then ;) Or if you're saying you think there's a bug, happy to help troubleshoot; I know there are lots of inputs haha
- 0_zymandias 5y agoVery impressive application, a smooth intuitive UI. The progressive disclosure style works well for inputting all the settings without getting overwhelmed. That said, my go-to for FIRE calculations/simulations is https://www.firecalc.com/index.php https://www.firecalc.com/index.php - and I don't see that changing anytime soon. The FIREcalc UI is very clunky compared to ProjectionLab but once you get used to it, IMO the options are a little more straightforward to understand and set. And FIREcalc is free and makes it easy to "save" your settings for future tuning/revisiting by generating a link with URL query parameters containing your setting values - I'm good with that approach. ProjectionLab does provide more granularity for specifying investment accounts that are taxable vs tax-deferred vs tax-free, which allows it to factor in the effect of taxes in the projections. But I wonder if that's a level of complexity that's better left out of the calculations. Effective tax rate (and yeah verily, taxes) - so damn complicated at least in the US. It will vary considerably over time even during your post-FIRE journey, depending on: your income (of course); your deductions/credits; changes in tax rates and codes; on the state(s) you live in (and how the state taxes social security, HSA earnings); etc, etc and so on and so forth. Also many folks setup their asset allocation across all the various types of accounts to be as tax efficient as possible (https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Tax-efficient_fund_placement https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Tax-efficient_fund_placement), and AFAICT there's no way to reflect that in ProjectionLab currently. All that's a long way of saying that I appreciate that FIREcalc doesn't try to factor in taxes. It's easier to get my head around just allocating a certain amount for taxes in the yearly spending number, maybe based on my tax history or some coarse tax estimation calculator, maybe using an expected case and worst case tax amount in the yearly spending number and then running the FIREcalc simulations and comparing - without trying to account for the effect of taxes in a more granular way, given the inherent squishiness of taxes. YMMV of course. Anyways, nice work on ProjectionLab, I can see where it would be a valuable tool for those who are trying to get a handle on their current finances and FIRE goals and may be a little less comfortable using tools like FIREcalc or home-grown spreadsheets (I geek out on this stuff so naturally I use both!).
- scubakid 5y agoThanks for sharing your perspective! It's always interesting to see among the flood of feature requests and suggestions that occasionally some people would prefer fewer features and more simplicity haha. Do you think there could be a place in ProjectionLab for a "simple" mode of some sort? With a reduced set of options and some notes on how the simpler assumptions differ from the standard mode? And if so, anything other than the tax config you'd want to see stripped out?
- Rastonbury 5y agoI saw this the last time, why did you change the name?
- scubakid 5y agoI did like the name ProjectiFi (when pronounced correctly), but I found it had too many readability issues. A lot of people missed the first "i" and thought it was Project Fi, and others would say "Project i-Fi", like some oddly named apple product.
- zaphod4prez 5y agoThis is awesome! It seems like you've paid close attention to security and privacy, but I would love a clearer, stronger guarantee. "We truly cannot access your data, will never access your data, and will never, ever sell your data." That would go far here.
- scubakid 5y agoThanks! And just in case you haven't seen them, let me know if these FAQ topics help a little: https://projectionlab.com?help=enter-data https://projectionlab.com?help=enter-data https://projectionlab.com?help=data-security https://projectionlab.com?help=data-security https://projectionlab.com?help=am-i-the-product https://projectionlab.com?help=am-i-the-product But more directly to your point, if you enable cloud sync, that uses Google Firebase. Firebase encrypts at rest and in transit and has the usual certifications, but the project owner does have an admin UI for Firestore. If that's a concern, there are always the other data persistence options as alternatives: localStorage only, and/or importing/exporting copies of your data to local JSON files. Perhaps it would also be wise for me to look into integrating with something like GCP cloud kms, that way maybe the user could supply their own encryption key client-side?
- ethanfinni 5y agoCool, can you share how long it took you to build this?
- scubakid 5y agoA bit over 1,200 hours so far... but I only tracked actual coding time, and not time spent answering questions, brainstorming new ideas, meeting with people, casually testing stuff, wrangling images, etc.