Because they aren't reliable for personal finance.

AI chatbots are great starting points for learning about finance or getting a second perspective on a decision. They do this by explaining concepts in plain language, summarizing common wisdom, and helping you think through trade-offs.

But they aren't built to give you accurate, personalized analyses grounded in your personal data. Their answers are probabilistic. Ask the same question twice and you may get two different replies. There's no standard output for common questions on the subject, and the only way to adjust an answer is to rewrite your prompt in words. That's fine for a conversation, but it's not ideal when you don't know what to ask and real money is on the line.

In contrast, Icedtea is built specifically for personal finance. It runs deterministic models. The same inputs give you the same answers, every single time. The interface is designed for financial decisions, with curated analyses and tailored controls that let you tweak data & assumptions directly instead of describing them in text.

There are more reasons (privacy, auditability, hallucinations) that we'll explore in a future blog post.

No, not in the near future.

It can only read your data, not act on your behalf. It uses your data to build financial models, construct analyses and provide guidance.

Features that allow a user to take informed action in-app is on our roadmap, but that is a medium term plan.

The only people who can see your data are those *you* decide to share it with.

Icedtea employees, infrastructure providers, etc. cannot see your data because your data is structurally private. We ensure this by using a zero-knowledge architecture.

Data ingestion and processing happens only on your devices, not a server. It is then encrypted and our servers will syncronize encrypted blobs between all your devices. Your devices decrypt your data, and computation happens on the device.

Most financial calculations in Icedtea are done by an extensive library of deterministic, non-AI models. The `Language Model` interprets conversations, calls on the appropriate deterministic models, converts the results into a conversational format, and then shows them in chats, dashboards and other UIs.

Open Source Language Models that work offline on laptops and mobiles exist. They aren't as powerful as commercial models from Open AI, Anthropic etc, but they are powerful enough for what Icedtea needs. They will get much better by Icedtea's public release in 2027, and will be included in the Icedtea app itself.

The videos you see on our channels do use commercial LLMs currently, but Local Language models will be integrated by the time Icedtea is available to the public.

Every Icedtea user is in full control over what data is shared, and with whom.

Icedtea enables this by segregating User-spaces from Pool-spaces. User-spaces provide individual users their privacy controls, and Pool-spaces provide household-level views.

A user that wants to keep all their data private could just set up their own Pool.

"If you are not paying for the product, you are the product."

Icedtea will be available through a monthy or annual subscription. We will commit to specifics closer to the public release.

At the moment we estimate that we'll have a 10$-20$ per-pool tier that will fulfill most people's needs. We are also considering a perpetually free single device version that will fulfill some basic needs.

We won't run ads and we can't sell your data (see FAQ on privacy). We're designing Icedtea on the assumption that subcription fees will be our primary source of revenue. This ensures that users get a product that works only in their interest.

Almost all currencies and many Cryptocurrencies are supported.

Icedtea is built for families that move or span national borders.

Icedtea's financial primitives allow modelling detailed multi-national and multi-currency scenarios. Both Icedtea's founders worked with complex derivatives on trading floors in Bulge Bracket investment banks. Icedtea's models encode their expertise.

Users from any country will be able to use Icedtea from the beginning, but with a few caveats.

Supporting a country involves mainly 2 items: 1. Banking Data Aggregation 2. Taxes (explained in the FAQ on Tax)

The ease of access of Banking data to third parties (like Icedtea) varies across countries and juristictions. Open-Banking style regulations make data more accessible in UK, EU and Australia. Private or semi-private companies provide aggregation systems in USA and India.

Icedtea will aggregate data using these systems where available. Where such systems are unavailable, users may upload data in a variety of formats using Icedtea's purpose-built UIs.

At launch, Icedtea will model taxes for a UK, India, some of EU and a few other large markets.

Taxation is integral to Icedtea's financial models. Every transaction is examined for it's impact on Tax (and hence Net-Worth), and a guided workflow helps a user categorize a transaction and understand the tax-impact in-context. Taxation of a single stream of income across multiple jurisdictions is in-built.

However, Taxation is the least generalizable aspect of a global financial model. So, every supported Tax Jurisdiction has to be individually modelled to be reliable. We will onboard new jurisdictions after launch depending on where we see demand.

Meanwhile, we're planning a plug-in system where users can integrate their own models for other countries.

Icedtea is not intended to be a regulated Tax-Filing application. Our intention is to closely model current and future net-Worth and help the user plan their financial lives. We don't plan to provide 100% coverage on Tax. Our intention is to model common use cases for most of our users, allow easy exports to take to a Tax consultant, and eventually onboard Tax Consultants in-app.

No, not for now.

Financial 'Advice' is a regulated activity. We're currently restricting Icedtea to give Financial 'Guidance'.

Financial Guidance includes information and tools that help you understand your situation, your options and think through decisions. It explains concepts, shows you trade-offs, and points out aspects worth considering. Financial Advice involves giving specific recommendations on what to do, and can only be given by certified professionals in most countries.

In the medium term, we will enable onboarding a Personal Financial Advisor or tax consultant in-app to help with Financial Advice.

In the long term, when regulation sufficiently addresses generative AI, we will enable AI-advisors that can complement human advisors.