user

Fire Tools — User guide

Welcome. Fire Tools is a free, open-source planner that helps you reason about your path to financial independence. It is local-first, without mandatory accounts or analytics. Optional market/model requests and local OCR/backend features have their own explicit configuration.

This guide walks through every tool in the app. Each page below has a short walkthrough and a screenshot so you can see exactly what to expect.

Pages in this guide

• Dashboard & navigation
• FIRE calculator
• Monte Carlo simulation
• Withdrawal rate options (SWR / LTWR / PWR)
• Asset allocation manager
• Portfolio backtest
• Expense tracker
• Cashflow planning, savings goals and offline rules
• Net-worth tracker
• Questionnaire (guided setup)
• Settings, language, data export

How to install

• Desktop — grab the .dmg (macOS), .exe (Windows) or .AppImage (Linux) from the releases page.
• Self-hosted — see the engineering docs for the Docker Compose stack.
• Web demo — try it instantly at https://fire-tools-inc.github.io/app/demo/. It's a read-only preview seeded with sample data (nothing you type is saved) — install the desktop app or self-host to keep your own data.

Where your data lives

• Renderer financial stores — existing encrypted SafeCookies/localStorage stores remain authoritative for the tools. Cashflow history and planning use encrypted localStorage, including in Electron.
• Local backend — SQLite inside the desktop's userData directory or a self-hosted volume owns receipt originals and its API records. Its planning API is separate from the renderer snapshot; a PostgreSQL driver is not implemented.

The hosted web demo is read-only: it loads sample data and doesn't persist anything you type. Use the desktop app or the self-hosted stack for real planning.

You can wipe everything from the Settings page — clearing data is a single click.

Currency, language, regional formatting

Currency and language are independent. Set currency once and switch language on the fly — labels translate, your numbers don't get re-denominated. The default language is English; Italian, French, German and Spanish ship in the box.

Sharing scenarios

The FIRE calculator serialises its inputs into the URL. Copy the URL and send it — the recipient opens the same scenario without any data leaving either device.