Five paths to a retirement plan. We will not pretend the others are bad.

Strengths

• +Tailored to your specific household, not a model archetype.
• +Carries a fiduciary or best-interest standard depending on the licence.
• +Can coordinate across estate lawyer, accountant, and insurance broker.

Trade-offs

• −Plan goes stale the day after delivery. Updates require another engagement or AUM fee.
• −Lead time of weeks. Cannot model a question on a Sunday afternoon.
• −Often gated by an investable-asset minimum that excludes households still building.

Strengths

• +Transparent. Every cell is auditable.
• +No subscription, no vendor lock-in, fully under your control.
• +Educational. You learn the mechanics by building them.

Trade-offs

• −You maintain every CRA threshold yourself, every year.
• −No AI agents to answer the next question. No CPP timing logic, no FHSA window logic, no OAS clawback band, unless you write it.
• −Errors propagate silently. A single mis-typed bracket changes the answer by tens of thousands.

Strengths

• +Built for Canadian rules. CAD-native, CRA-aware where covered.
• +Aggregation across brokerages is solid; less data entry than a spreadsheet.
• +Some products (Snap Projections) carry serious projection depth, often priced for the advisor channel.

Trade-offs

• −Aggregators usually require bank-login credentials and screen-scraping.
• −Limited AI dispatch surface. You read a chart; nothing answers the follow-up question in English.
• −Advisor-tier pricing puts the deep tooling out of reach for the household segment.

Strengths

• +Mature UX. The interactive projection charts in Boldin and Empower set the bar the rest of the industry copies.
• +Deep scenario modelling and Monte Carlo simulation.
• +Often the cheapest entry point if you ignore the currency.

Trade-offs

• −Tax engine is IRS, not CRA. No RRSP, no TFSA, no FHSA, no RRIF, no OAS clawback band.
• −CPP and OAS appear as foreign-pension placeholders at best, often not at all.
• −Data hosted in the United States. Subject to US disclosure law, not PIPEDA.