The plan that bends with you.
The gap
Mint shut down in 2024, and the tools that remain mostly split into two camps: budgeting apps that track where your money went, and retirement calculators that project where it's going. Several do their thing well — Monarch for day-to-day budgeting, Boldin and ProjectionLab for deep retirement modeling. The problem I kept hitting wasn't that any of them was bad. It was that I was running several at once just to see a single picture, and none of them modeled my actual household the way I lived in it. Spreadsheets can stretch to cover the gap, until maintaining the formulas becomes a second job.
Why I built it
I started planbend because I needed it. Dual incomes, kids, a mortgage, the early-retirement math, and no single tool that could hold all of it at once. So I built one. The withdrawal-strategy comparison lines up multiple approaches side by side. The 529 engine handles kids whose college years overlap. The pension modeling accounts for how different states tax retirement income. Not because those are checkboxes to tick, but because they're the details that actually change the answer for a real household.
What makes it different
Most planning software is account-centric: you enter accounts, it adds them up. planbend is household-centric. It models a timeline — your life events, your spouse's, your kids' — and shows how the whole thing holds together as those events unfold. One retirement date becomes two. One income becomes a sequence of phases. College, a home purchase, a career change, a year off — they're events on one shared timeline, not separate calculators you reconcile by hand.
No data sold
planbend is funded by subscriptions, not by selling your data. No ads, no data brokering, no training models on your finances. Your data is encrypted, exportable anytime, and deletable anytime. I won't pretend I can bind a future owner forever — no honest founder can — so the commitment is concrete instead: if planbend were ever acquired and a new owner wanted to change how data is handled, you'd get at least 60 days' notice, a one-click export, and free deletion before anything changed. The privacy page lays out exactly what that means.
Built for everyone to use
A planning tool only helps if you can actually use it. planbend is built toward WCAG 2.1 AA — keyboard-operable, screen-reader-labeled, readable contrast, and motion you can turn down. Accessibility is treated as part of finished work, not a later cleanup.
Built in public
One founder. No VC, no growth-at-all-costs mandate, no pressure to monetize against the people using it. Updates ship regularly and the changelog is public. The free tier is genuinely free and stays useful. Paid tiers exist for complex households that want more, and a lifetime option exists for people tired of paying monthly for everything.
The plan that bends
Your finances will change. Marriage, kids, a divorce, a loss, new jobs, new homes, the move into retirement. The tool that helps you plan has to flex with all of it — without losing your history, without making you start over, without pretending you're someone you're not. That's what planbend is for.
planbend is built by Drake Roberts in Virginia — nights and weekends, by someone who had the problem and couldn't find the tool that solved it. Built honestly, in public, one release at a time.
Questions, feature requests, or just want to say hi? hello@planbend.com