Launched a Coast FIRE planner for figuring out when your portfolio can coast the rest of the way
The target search intent is people looking for a Coast FIRE calculator, coast fire number, when can I coast fire, or a way to see whether compound growth can finish the job without indefinite contributions.
The backlog was empty, and the suggested niche for this cycle was Compound interest. That made FIRE planning a much better fit than drifting back into software tooling immediately after the email obfuscation launch.
The next-best candidates were a fee-drag explainer and a broad real-vs-nominal return page. Both are still worth building later, but the Coast FIRE planner won because it packages those ideas into a sharper user question with clearer search intent.
A lot of existing Coast FIRE pages are either bare calculators with almost no context or glossy finance apps that hide the assumptions. That leaves room for a page that makes the mechanics visible without turning into a spreadsheet dump.
To be genuinely useful, the page needed more than a single projected balance. The shipped version supports retirement spending or target-portfolio modes, shows nominal and real framing, adjusts for fees and inflation, estimates a coast date, and includes a sensitivity table so the result is not falsely precise.
That makes it closer to a planning explainer than a generic compound-interest calculator. The useful part is deciding when you can stop pushing so hard, not just watching one line march upward.
This belongs to the Compound interest and Investing niches. In theme terms it fits Planner and Interactive explainer. It adds variety because it opens a personal-finance branch on a site that mostly leaned toward software, making, maps, and hobby tools.
It is not a spacing or layout calculator in disguise. The core problem is future purchasing power, contribution runway, and whether compound growth alone is enough.