A retirement planning app built for the Mac
Last reviewed: October 2026
Most retirement planners are websites: you sign up, link your accounts to their cloud, and work in a browser tab. On the Mac itself, retirement planning is usually one feature inside a personal-finance suite, or a simple calculator. ZBee is neither. It is a native Mac app with one job once you are near or in retirement: measuring your safe yearly spend from what you actually own, after every tax, with your holdings kept on your own Mac.
Why a native Mac app
Your data stays with you. ZBee's whole model runs on your Mac, and your holdings are never stored on ZBee's servers. That is a design constraint, not a settings toggle: there is no server of customer financial data to breach. See what ZBee stores and never keeps.
It behaves like a Mac app. It is notarized by Apple, picks up your system accent color, and exports your plan as a PDF or CSV whenever you want a copy.
What it measures
- Your safe yearly spend, built from your actual positions rather than an assumed rate of return standing in for them.
- Every tax, year by year: federal and state income tax, Medicare surcharges (IRMAA), the net investment income tax (NIIT), required minimum distributions and Social Security, all shown so you can audit them.
- Spending guardrails from the published Guyton-Klinger rules, with this year's trigger points in dollars: the level below which the rules trim, and where a raise is earned.
- Real market history: your figure is replayed through every market sequence since 1928, 1929, 1966 and 1973 included, and reported as "survived N of M", with any failing years named.
The arithmetic is open to check: the methodology cites its sources and says what ZBee does not model, and Inside the number explains how the figure is found and what each chart is showing you.
Getting your accounts in
Connect a brokerage read-only, with the data going straight to your Mac, or skip that entirely: drop in a screenshot or a statement PDF, open your broker's download file, or add holdings by hand. Connecting a brokerage is optional.
What ZBee is not
It is not a budgeting app. If you want one place to track every account, bill and category on your Mac, a personal-finance suite such as Quicken or Banktivity is built for that. It is not a whole-household web planner either; Boldin and ProjectionLab cover more of your life, in their cloud. And it deliberately has no Roth-conversion optimizer: ZBee measures what your current situation supports and does not recommend you restructure it. How ZBee compares sets the differences out side by side.
Requirements and price
ZBee needs a Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or later) running macOS 11 or later. To check, choose Apple menu, then About This Mac: a Chip line means ZBee runs; Intel Macs are not supported. A free companion estimator app is available for iPhone and iPad.
ZBee gives you 30 days with the whole app on your own money, with no account and no card. After that, ZBee Pro is $132 a year. See pricing and the FAQ.
ZBee is a measurement and planning tool, not financial advice. Projections are hypothetical estimates and will not match actual results.
Download ZBee for Mac · How much can you safely spend? · Worked cases · The full comparison · Read the methodology