Show HN: Honest Math – Simulate Your Financial Future

https://www.honestmath.com

by Concrete • 5 years ago

2 7 5 years ago

Concrete4• 5 years ago

We're a small team building professional-grade financial planning tools for everybody. Our aim is to democratize the powerful resources traditionally made available only to financial advisors.

The financial independence movement is popular and growing, and folks have more resources available to them than ever before. Unfortunately, some of the most popular "Retirement Calculators" online are flawed and misleading. We'd like to give people better tools.

We recently launched our MVP: a powerful Monte Carlo portfolio simulator with "fat tails" and "Black Swan" features. It's entirely free to use.

We understand that making an account is a pain and seems unnecessary. But here's the skinny: we're scaling this with Amazon Web Services. Since we're new and growing, we sincerely don't know how much it's going to cost to keep everything running 24/7 in the cloud. The affordability is looking promising, and we'd love to give folks free and powerful software. But until we get a better grasp on the potential overhead, we need a way to filter for usage abuse and other shenanigans. Having folks make accounts is the best way for us to monitor this for now. We plan to soon add Google and social media log-in options, too.

For what it's worth, we never share or sell your email address, but we understand the skepticism, and we want folks to use the tool in any event. So, if it's a dealbreaker, we encourage you to use a temporary/disposable email address. The only downside to this approach is that we won't be able to alert you when we've made updates. And we've got some cool things coming.

We'd love to hear your feedback and answer any questions.

dgivney• 5 years ago

Hi Concrete

Congratulations on the launch - I just had some thoughts that I wanted to pass on.

I signed up with a disposal email. Once I was logged in, the process seemed very intuitive and straight forward. However my experience was that this is something that really should have been a free calculator accessible on your website and not something that should require the hassle of signup & email verification. In fact, it took longer to register an account than my total session time using the product.

Once I had generated a plan, I clicked on the logo at the top and I was taken back to the public website and had to login again. On login, all my changes had been reset to the default which made me wonder why have an account in the first place?

Your mission sounds noble and I wish you well on its execution. I also liked your name and branding. It's a product I would trust in that regard.

Concrete4• 5 years ago

Really appreciate this feedback. I actually agree with you on the account requirement (I hate making accounts too, and then I went and created an app that requires one; the irony isn't lost on me!). But I'm a bit paranoid about server costs. Once we're certain that scaling this in AWS is going to be as cost effective as we think (and it's looking pretty good), I'll feel more comfortable removing the friction of having folks make accounts. My real expertise is finance, so I'm outsourcing much of the tech stuff, and I'm leaning heavily on my team for their input in these areas.

As for having to log back in immediately after exiting the app (and not saving assumptions)--that's a real pain. I'll have my guys get that fixed ASAP.

thegreenmile• 5 years ago

I quite like the site and your tool seems quite easy to use. I'm curious though, since it's a free tool, how do y'all plan on having a sustainable business?

Concrete4• 5 years ago

Thank you! We've got some premium features in the works. In the meantime, I'd like to keep the site clean (I hade the way advertisements muddy up the UI)and just let folks use the baseline simulator for free.

standard09• 5 years ago

Congratulations on the launch, this is indeed great. Do you plan to monetize this?

Concrete4• 5 years ago

Thank you! We've got quite a few ideas for additional simulation features, reports, and data exporting services. In due time, we might make these extras part of a premium/paid tier. In the meantime, unless we run into some unforeseeable costs, I'd like to keep the baseline version of the simulator free for folks.

Show HN: Honest Math – Simulate Your Financial Future

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