About ZBee
Who builds it
ZBee is built by one person — an engineer with nearly 40 years in software, as an engineer, architect, and chief architect, who has managed his own investments and retirement planning for just as long. ZBee started as the tool I wanted for my own retirement: something that took my real accounts and answered the one question every calculator danced around — how much can I actually spend each year without running out? — and showed its work instead of asking me to trust a black box.
It's published by ZBee LLC. Building it solo, on purpose, is a deliberate choice: no outside investors steering the roadmap toward monetizing your data, no growth targets that turn a planning tool into an advertising business. The trade-off is that it's one person — which is exactly why the next section exists.
What happens if the developer stops
It's a fair question to ask before you rely on any small app for something as important as your retirement plan — and the honest answer is built into how ZBee works:
- Your data is already on your Mac, not in our cloud. ZBee stores your holdings, plan, and projections in a local file on your own machine. There is no server that holds your financial data to be shut off. If ZBee LLC vanished tomorrow, your data would still be right where it is.
- The app keeps running offline. ZBee doesn't phone home to work. Your projections, charts, and Trade-offs all compute locally. A backend outage — or the backend going away entirely — doesn't brick the app; it keeps working on the data and tax tables it already has.
- No lock-in. You can export your projection to PDF and CSV, and delete everything ZBee holds — on your Mac and on our servers — from the built-in Privacy & Data screen, at any time.
- What you'd lose is the ongoing stream: yearly tax-table updates, new features, and support. That's the real dependency, and it's the honest limit of a one-person shop — not your access to your own plan.
Contrast that with a cloud planner, where your data lives on someone else's servers and the tool stops the day the subscription or the company does. ZBee is local-first precisely so that the thing you're trusting to a small developer is the software, not custody of your financial life.
How ZBee makes money
One way: ZBee Pro, $99/year, which unlocks the app on your own accounts. No ads, no data sales, no affiliate kickbacks, no upsell to an advisory service. You're the customer, not the product. You can explore the entire app free on sample data first, and try Pro free on your own data before paying — see pricing.
Getting in touch
Email support@zbee.app — it reaches the person who builds ZBee. For how the app handles your data, see the Privacy Policy; for how the numbers are computed and what ZBee deliberately does not model, see the Methodology.