The incumbent sells advisors a tool that produces a static PDF. Lumio centers the client — handing them an interactive Planning Playground where they drag a Roth-conversion dial and watch brackets, cliffs, and IRMAA tiers move in real time — powered by an engine that doesn't just recompute scenarios but solves them: "the highest conversion that stays under your next IRMAA tier is $47,300."
Everything is a wrapper around one deterministic function —
compute_tax(facts, year, jurisdiction, assumptions). The differentiated surface is the
interactive client explorer sitting on top of an automated optimization layer.
Deterministic, auditable, versioned by tax year. Pure function, exact Decimal math,
a line-level trace that explains every number. Everything depends on it; it depends on nothing.
Not "recompute a scenario" but find the optimal input under a constraint — plus the response-surface sweep and breakpoint enumeration that make the client's sliders smart instead of dumb.
◆ DifferentiatorAn automated report plus a gamified sandbox the client explores. Live knobs → live surface; breakpoints light up; honest captions ("$12,000 of room left before the 24% bracket").
◆ DifferentiatorOCR a finished 1040 or IRS transcript into the baseline in seconds, with confidence scoring and human-in-the-loop review. Advisors will not hand-type returns at scale.
Roll forward N years for lifetime tax / after-tax-wealth comparison (Roth ladders) — but with the discount, growth, and inflation assumptions made explicit and advisor-tunable.
Roster, documents, comms, engagement letters, §7216 consent, IRS-notice tracking — so the prep engine (ProConnect / Drake) becomes a swap-out component, not a foundational dependency.
Scenario modeling and lifetime projection are not differentiators; Holistiplan already markets both. The honest wedge is the four things it does not do — and a client surface it has never had.
The broad market — active CPAs, EAs, PTIN-only preparers, and inactive-CPA practitioners. The advisor is the operator and the buyer.
The end consumer receives the report and the live Playground. Saved scenarios route back to the advisor — turning an annual chore into an ongoing conversation.
The incumbent just raised prices. A challenger enters on price, an interactive client experience, and automated optimization — not by out-OCR-ing a corpus moat.
Mixed inputs converge to one schema; a single pure engine feeds a fan-out of analytics that each call it hundreds-to-thousands of times; the results converge into one response surface, rendered once into three deliverables for two kinds of user.
Parity on the foundation; the wedge is automated optimization, multi-variable surfaces, breakpoint enumeration, adjustable assumptions, and a genuinely interactive client surface.
| Capability | Lumio | Holistiplan | FP Alpha | RightCapital |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ingest & data | ||||
| OCR ingest — 1040 / IRS transcript | ◐ | ● | ● | ○ |
| Tax-prep import (ProConnect / Drake / Lacerte) | ◐ | ◐ | ○ | ◐ |
| Tax engine | ||||
| Deterministic, tax-year-versioned engine | ● | ● | ◐ | ◐ |
| Line-level explainable trace (every figure sourced) | ● | ◐ | ○ | ○ |
| Scenario & optimization | ||||
| Side-by-side scenarios (Roth / gains / charitable) | ● | ● | ◐ | ● |
| Automated constrained optimization ("highest under constraint") | ● | ○ | ○ | ○ |
| Multi-variable optimization (2-D surface / heatmap) | ● | ○ | ○ | ○ |
| Breakpoint / cliff enumeration to the dollar | ● | ◐ | ○ | ○ |
| Multi-year lifetime projection | ● | ● | ◐ | ● |
| Explicit advisor-adjustable assumptions (discount / growth / inflation) | ● | ○ | ○ | ◐ |
| Client experience | ||||
| Client-facing interactive explorer (live sliders) | ● | ○ | ○ | ◐ |
| White-labeled PDF report | ● | ● | ● | ● |
| Hosted, access-controlled interactive report | ● | ◐ | ● | ● |
| Practice & trust | ||||
| Practice OS (roster · status · docs · comms · §7216 · IRS notices) | ● | ○ | ○ | ◐ |
| Estate / insurance breadth | ○ | ● | ● | ◐ |
| SOC 2 / RBAC / per-tenant encryption | ◐ | ● | ● | ● |
| Pricing model | ||||
| Go-to-market pricing | Hybrid — advisor seat + metered reports (resale-friendly); enters under the incumbent's raised price | Per-seat advisor subscription (recently increased) | Per-case (~$13–15 / case) | Per-seat advisor subscription |
Competitor capabilities reflect Lumio's own competitive analysis (consolidated-plan.md §0) and
public marketing as of early 2026; marketing routinely outruns shipped depth, so these are positioning
estimates pending direct validation (plan §13). Lumio's marks reflect the designed product per the
consolidated plan; the current build is a structural demo on placeholder tax rules — see Build status below.
Every dollar threshold loads from PLACEHOLDER_2025.json — figures that preserve the right
structural shape (where a bracket exits, where a cliff sits) on a self-consistent dataset, but are
not real IRS / SSA / CMS values. A non-dismissable banner sits on every screen that shows a figure,
and CI fails any production build pointed at a placeholder file.
Pure-function engine with a 14-step traced pipeline; the candidate-enumeration + adaptive-bisection optimizer matched to a brute-force sweep within $1; 230+ Python tests, 28 Vitest tests, clean build.
Replace placeholder rule tables with verified figures; SOC 2 + RBAC + per-tenant KMS before any multi-tenant data; a real OCR vendor backend; Hawaii N-11 verified values.
"Lumio" is a working name pending a formal trademark-clearance search in software / financial-services classes. Irreversible brand buildout is on hold until clearance.