The questions a skeptic should ask

It's a deliberate choice, for two reasons:

• Security. RunWhatIfs never asks for your bank logins and doesn't connect to your institutions through a third-party aggregator. There are no stored bank credentials or access tokens that could be exposed — the app holds only the figures you choose to type in.
• Intention. Updating your own balances each month keeps you engaged with your money in a way an auto-syncing feed quietly erodes. The few minutes of typing are where the awareness comes from — that small friction is the point, not a limitation.

Only what you type in: account balances, debts, spending, income, and a few profile facts (like birthdate) used to tailor age-based math. It's stored under your login, scoped to your account at the database level, and shown to exactly one person: you. It is never sold, shared, or used for advertising — permanently, as a design decision, not a current policy.

The optional monthly narrative (the “money journal”) sends your summary figures — the same numbers you see on your own dashboard — to our AI provider to compose a plain-English write-up of your month. It's optional: turn it off in Settings and nothing is sent at all. The narrative describes your numbers; it never recommends products or actions.

Both, always. A JSON export of everything you've entered is free forever — data portability is a promise, not a feature tier. And you can permanently delete your account and every row of your data from Settings at any time.

That awareness beats autopilot. RunWhatIfs is built around the act of deliberately looking at your own spending and saving — typing the numbers, watching the trend, owning the picture — rather than having an app manage your money quietly in the background. It describes your numbers honestly and hands every decision back to you.

A little — by design. It's a few minutes once a month, and that small, repeated effort is the mechanism the whole product is built around: it's how your numbers become familiar instead of background noise, and it keeps the security footprint tight. The app is designed for five intentional minutes a month, not a feed that scrolls past. If autopilot is what you want, a hundred other apps would love your bank password — this one is for people who'd rather know their numbers cold.

RunWhatIfs is deliberately not a live feed. It's built on a monthly rhythm — frequent enough that drift shows up early in your trend, calm enough to stay intentional rather than reactive. Stepping back once a month to see the whole picture is the experience the app is designed around.

The centerpiece. A private sandbox where you stack life scenarios — move homes, change income, take a career break, have a kid, ride out a market drop, land a windfall — on top of your real numbers and watch a live projection of the age work becomes optional move in real time. It recomputes a copy of your data and never touches the real thing.

There isn't one hiding in the fine print: no ads, no selling or sharing your data, no bank credentials to monetize — all permanently off the table. The app is small and inexpensive to run, and the long-term plan is a paid tier (“Plus”) for the people who want more depth. That plan is public on the pricing page — including the part where it doesn't exist yet.

Two candidate shapes are being tested on the pricing page — a $5/month tier and a $59/year projections tier — and the waitlist people actually join decides which gets built. Whatever happens: the free tier stays generous (the monthly check-in habit is the whole product), and the JSON export of your data stays free forever.

No. RunWhatIfs describes your own data and compares it to commonly cited benchmarks. It doesn't recommend investments, products, or actions, and it isn't a substitute for a licensed financial, tax, or legal professional. Decisions are always yours.

Treat them as educated estimates, not forecasts. They rest on simplifying assumptions — a steady ~5% real return, level saving, a fixed target, today's spending continuing — and real life rarely moves in a straight line. They're most useful for direction and comparison, less so as precise predictions.