Compared · honestly
Granary vs your spreadsheet
If you built your own retirement spreadsheet, you are our favorite kind of person. You didn't build it because you couldn't find a calculator — you built it because you wanted to see the math. Same instinct here: that is exactly why every number in Granary opens the formula behind it.
So this page won't tell you spreadsheets are bad. Yours is free, infinitely flexible, and you understand every cell. The honest question is narrower: which pieces of machinery are worth not building and not maintaining yourself?
Credit where due
What your spreadsheet does better
Total flexibility
No tool's assumptions will ever fit your situation the way a sheet you wrote yourself does. If your finances are genuinely unusual, the spreadsheet bends where software argues.
It costs nothing and answers to no one
No subscription, no vendor, no sunset risk. It works offline, forever, and nobody can change it underneath you.
You understand it completely
Every formula is yours. That understanding is worth more than most features — it's the same reason Granary refuses to be a black box.
The honest ledger
Where a planner earns its keep
Cost
Granary
$39/yr for Pro; a real free tier exists.
Your spreadsheet
$0. That is real money in its favor, and we won’t pretend otherwise.
Monte Carlo
Granary
1,000 paths over a 50-year horizon, return and inflation randomized each year. Built in.
Your spreadsheet
Doable with scripts or add-ins — but building a simulator is one project, and validating it is a second, harder one.
Historical sequence testing
Granary
Every rolling window from 1928 to 2024, with real CPI sequences. Included.
Your spreadsheet
You’d need a century of return and inflation data wired in, plus a windowing engine over it. A serious build.
Social Security taxability
Granary
The full Pub 915 ramp: provisional income, both thresholds per filing status, the 0/50/85% lesser-of tests, every projection year.
Your spreadsheet
A multi-step lesser-of worksheet — exactly the kind of formula that breaks silently in a cell and never tells you.
IRMAA
Granary
Six tiers per filing status with the two-year MAGI lookback, recalculated annually; an IRMAA-shield withdrawal strategy on top.
Your spreadsheet
Six cliffs per filing status, lagged income, and annually-updated brackets — maintainable by hand, briefly.
The 2026 ACA cliff
Granary
Cliff-aware subsidy engine checked against Rev. Proc. 2025-25 — including what a Roth conversion does to your MAGI headroom.
Your spreadsheet
The applicable-percentage table changed for 2026 and the 400% FPL cliff is back. Did your sheet get the memo?
State tax
Granary
All 50 states: exact rates for flat-tax states, a deliberately conservative top-marginal default for progressive ones — editable, so you can set what you actually pay. Updated when the rules change.
Your spreadsheet
Fifty lookup tables to find, enter, and re-verify every year.
Regression tests
Granary
282 CI assertions run on every release. When a user catches a bug, the fix ships with a test so it can’t come back.
Your spreadsheet
When did you last write a test for cell Q47?
Auditability
Granary
Click any number and the formula behind it opens, with the inputs that fed it.
Your spreadsheet
Fully auditable — provided future-you remembers what past-you meant by that nested IF.
None of this says a spreadsheet can'tdo these things — it says each one is a build-and-maintain project, and the tax rows change under you every year. Granary's side of the table is the product; yours is your weekends.
The honest close
Which one is for you?
Choose the spreadsheet if
- →The building is part of the point — you enjoy maintaining it, and that engagement keeps you on top of your plan.
- →Your situation is unusual enough that any tool’s assumptions would chafe.
- →$0 matters, and your plan doesn’t hinge on the fiddly federal machinery.
Choose Granary if
- →You want Pub 915, IRMAA, RMD, and ACA-cliff rules maintained for you when they change — with a changelog, not a cell edit at midnight.
- →You want Monte Carlo and 1928–2024 historical windows without building and validating a simulation engine first.
- →You still want to see the math: every number opens its formula, and 282 regression tests stand behind it.
- →You want both: keep the spreadsheet, export Granary to CSV or JSON anytime, and cross-check us. Users have caught real bugs that way — each fix shipped within 48 hours, with a regression test.
Comparing the commercial tools instead? See Granary vs Boldin and Granary vs ProjectionLab.
Run your own numbers.
Run your sheet and Granary side by side for a week. If they disagree, one of us has a bug — and we'd genuinely like to know which.
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