Appleseed vs. ProjectionLab
Appleseed is a modern financial engine for high-income professionals. Native RSU vesting, multi-property modeling, and 1-click crash tests, built for speed instead of spreadsheet administration.
Premium, annual-only, after a 7-day trial. The free tier simulates but doesn’t save your plan; tax analytics, compare mode, multiple plans, and withdrawal tooling are Premium.
Stochastic by default. The chart is the simulation.
The fan and the success rate come from the same 500 paths — not a mode you remember to switch into.
The default plan view is one deterministic path drawn from growth rates you picked. Chance of Success is a separate mode you switch into.
Complex things, asked simply.
Plain-language inputs everywhere. A kid’s college is four fields — cost estimated for you, 529s applied against it automatically.
Configuration all the way down — growth-rate editors, Advanced Change Over Time rules — and even its fans concede the learning curve.
RSUs, engineered — not hand-built.
Vesting schedules, annual refreshers, sell-to-cover withholding, pre-IPO grants with a liquidity year — native inputs.
One RSU Grant income type — the docs tell you to “figure out your own vesting schedule” in an editor. No refreshers, no stock options, no pre-IPO stock; richer vesting sits on the public feature-request board.
Crash-test the stock you actually hold.
Two one-click stress tests, calibrated to history — run on your concentrated position.
Replays 2000 on your position: the top-10 NASDAQ names of 2000 returned 3.4%/yr at 24% volatility over the 26 years since.
Calibrated presets: a 1-year gap at 80% comeback comp, or the pessimistic 2 years at 60%.
Broad historical backtesting is there — but single-stock concentration isn’t a concept anywhere in the product.
A move is one wizard, not an assembly project.
In Appleseed a move is a “transition”: three steps that sell the old home, buy the new one, add selling and moving costs, and estimate the new home’s carrying costs from its value and state.
There is no “move” — there’s a 20-field form per house and a milestone system, and you wire the sale and the purchase together yourself.
Advice that ships with an Apply button.
The Assistant sits under the main chart, explains the plan, applies the fix in one click — and overlays both futures on one chart.
Your plan succeeds in 71% of paths. The biggest drag is $240k sitting in cash, earning less than inflation. Investing everything above a six-month emergency fund lifts the success rate to about 84%.
No AI at all — 2026 reviews list it as a con, and the only option is a third-party Chrome extension. You read the charts yourself.
How the planner stays free.
No ads, no data sales — the full planner is free.
If you want help executing the plan — tax-aware diversification of RSUs, say, or investment allocation — qualified users can request an introduction to a fiduciary advisor partner. Never a requirement to use the site.
Curated by an ex-Google founder. We only connect you with independent fee-only advisors with proven track records managing complex tech equity and concentrated stock.
We make a single, warm introduction — and never share any data except what you explicitly share in the form. Appleseed receives a referral fee if you become a client.
Some users want automatic account syncing — and the data provider bills us every month, for every connected account. Pro covers that and a few deeper analysis tools, $19/mo or $99/yr. The planner stays free.
Fair is fair: if running the numbers is the hobby — the editors, the modes, the methodology knobs — ProjectionLab is a genuinely deep sandbox. Appleseed is optimized for people who want the answer.