ProjectionLab
👤 Kyle Nolan (Boston software engineer deep in the FIRE movement — built the tool he wanted, and his own tribe became the distribution.)🌐 site𝕏LinkedIn
Privacy-first life-and-money simulator: no account linking, no ads, no data sale. Built by and for the FIRE crowd.
Will it work? · our read
Trust compounds. A great lifestyle business — but the paid-privacy wedge only bites where users distrust free tools and love spreadsheets. Push mainstream and free auto-sync rivals win.
01How the money moves
Money nerd distrusts free, data-selling apps
→
Enters data by hand, models any life path free
→
Upgrades to $129/yr Premium — data never sold
02The numbers
$1M ARRStatedMRR $83.3K · Jun 2025
2025-06
the sentence on the page
We reached $1M ARR with zero funding - ProjectionLab
Non-recurring lifetime purchases add another 20-50% on top of MRR each month (founder). ProjectionLab blog
$1M ARR in about 4 years, zero funding, 100K+ households.
🔒
You have the verdict. Members get the work behind it.
- The CENTS scorecard — where it's strong, where it's soft
- The founder's key move, and the counter-move
- How it could die — the evidence, and how sure we are
- The case against our own call
- A 🚀 launchpad prompt — the case, as a plan for your business
We rate our own confidence — and argue against ourselves. Nobody else in this category does.
Sources always public on all 560 cases · cancel anytime · 14-day refund
See a full teardown, free → ImportYetiSourcesSources last checked 25 August 2026
ProjectionLab blog — "We reached $1M ARR with zero funding" (first-party)ProjectionLab — About (founding story and values)Kyle Nolan on X — $70K MRR, $1M total revenue (Jan 2025)Starter Story — How Kyle built a $50K/mo financial planning toolChooseFI Ep 506 — Kyle Nolan interview
Revenue is first-party and unusually well documented — Kyle publishes revenue charts, a $1M ARR blog post, and X updates ($83.3K MRR, June 2025); bootstrapped with zero funding is confirmed. The CENTS grades, the "dies" scenario, and the Plaid framing are our read, not founder claims. Rival prices verified at time of writing (Boldin $144/yr, MaxiFi $149/yr, Empower free). We never score you.