How long will it take, and how much will it cost? Answer it before you commit.
PlanX turns what you actually know — phases, people, test demand, equipment, travel, capital, outside services — into a time-phased cost, FTE and duration envelope. Every number traces back to a row you can point at. One self-contained file. Nothing to install.
Deterministic — same inputs, same outputsRuns in your browserYour data never leaves your machine
Sample plan · FY26 · Program envelopeTraceable
$4,182,600
Total cost · 19 months · peak 11.4 FTE
People14 allocations across 6 phases$2,611,400
Testing & equipmentThermal, vibration & life demand on 4 machines$918,700
Capital & direct purchase9 expense lines$486,000
Travel & outside services12 expense lines$166,500
rowDemand row 14 — Thermal cycling, sample set B, 14 units, available 2026-03-09
engine1-week conditioning lead-in + 3-week test × 14 occurrences → 56 machine-weeks, placed earliest-fit on Thermal Chamber 2
labor24 touch-hours per occurrence × 14 = 336 h ÷ 2,080 h per FTE = 0.16 FTE
cost0.16 FTE × $142,000 loaded rate = $22,720, spread across Q2–Q3 by phase shape
Nothing here is a black box. Change the sample availability date and every figure above recalculates — the same way, every time.Outputs — every plan on one axis, with the portfolio total and what doesn’t fit called out beneath it
The problem
Estimates don't fail on the arithmetic.
They fail because nobody can show where the number came from. The annual planning spreadsheet is a black box with a total at the bottom. When finance challenges a line, the PM defends it from memory. When the year goes red, nobody can reconstruct which assumption broke. And next January, the whole exercise starts again from nothing.
Estimate too low and you spend the year in the red. Estimate high without being able to justify it and the work doesn't get funded. The gap between those two outcomes is not accuracy — it's whether you can defend the number line by line, in the room, under pressure.
PlanX is built for that room. It doesn't claim your estimate is right. It makes every figure in it inspectable, reproducible, and arguable.
The model
Four layers. Phases hold everything up.
PlanX isn't a blank spreadsheet with formulas. It's a model with a shape, and the shape is what makes the numbers traceable. Each layer feeds the next, in this order.
The PlanX modelEach layer depends on the one above
Projects & Phasesthe spineA multi-year phase timeline per project. Everything else attaches here. Move a phase and its people, expenses and test demand shift with it — pattern preserved, exactly.
People & Expensesthe driversNamed people allocated across phases with a shape — flat, ramp, peak, plateau — day-prorated at the edges into real monthly hours. Plus travel, capital, direct purchases, outsourcing and outside services as inspectable lines.
Testing & Equipmentthe constraintTest demand with lead-in soak and duration, scheduled against a shared pool of capital equipment. Real projects compete for the same rigs, so PlanX schedules them against one pool rather than pretending each plan owns it.
Outputsthe deliverableTime-phased cost and FTE by month and quarter, per project and rolled up across the portfolio. Findings that name what's overflowing and why. Excel, PDF, Word and PowerPoint out — plus JSON that carries the whole workspace.
Deterministic throughout. No randomness anywhere in the engine. The same inputs produce the same outputs today, next quarter, and on someone else's machine.
Why PlanX
Built for the argument, not the brochure.
One file, fully offline
A single HTML file. No install, no server, no cloud, no macros, no executable for IT to vet. Open it in a browser and work — on a laptop, a network drive, or a USB stick.
Every number has a row
Cost, FTE and duration all decompose back to the inputs that produced them. When someone asks "where does that come from?", you open it rather than explain it.
Shared equipment, honestly modeled
Capital equipment is a global pool, not a per-plan assumption. Two projects fighting over the same rig show up as contention instead of as two plans that each look fine alone.
It refuses to render fiction
When demand exceeds capacity, PlanX shows the work as unscheduled and flags the overflow. It never quietly overlaps jobs to produce a comfortable answer.
Scenarios, not simulations
Optimistic, expected and pessimistic input sets through the same deterministic engine. You can see exactly which assumption moved the number — which a confidence interval will never tell you.
People allocate across phases
A person is spread over the phases they work on, with a shape and day-proration at the edges. It's how staffing actually behaves, and it removes a whole class of silent estimating errors.
Baseline vs. current
Snapshot the plan you got approved. As inputs change, see what moved against the number you committed to — and be able to say why.
Portfolio, not one plan
Model many projects competing for the same people and the same equipment, then roll the cost and FTE up. That competition is the whole point of annual planning.
Your data stays yours
Everything lives in your file, on your machine. Nothing is transmitted, synced or tracked — by design, for environments that require it.
“This machine buys you nothing. It arrives after the work it was meant to serve has already finished.”
The kind of sentence a capacity study exists to produce
A look inside
See the model, not a Gantt chart.
One workspace, walked end to end: the case each project makes for itself, the phases everything hangs off, the equipment every plan competes for, the cost that falls out of it, and the artifact you carry into the funding conversation.
Every project carries its own case
The charter lives in the model, not in a separate document that goes stale. Description, problem, proposed solution, recommendation and a costed benefit table sit alongside the plan they describe — and the derived cost is checked against the target you typed, so you find out you are 18% under before someone else does.
Project overview — the case, the benefits, and derived cost measured against the target you entered
Phases hold everything up
The phase gantt is the spine. Anchor a person, an expense or a test to a phase, then move or stretch that phase — everything on it follows, with nothing to retype. And when a phase can’t contain the testing inside it, PlanX says so and recommends a date; it never quietly moves the end for you.
Phases — the backbone every cost, person and test hangs off
Testing is a portfolio problem
Projects compete for the same rigs, chambers and benches, so testing is never a per-project question. What each project needs, where the scheduler actually put it, what that does to every machine, and what it costs you when it doesn’t fit.
Demand — one row per unit, anchored to the phase that needs itJob schedule — every occurrence, on the machine it landed onUtilization — the same schedule, from the machine’s sideFindings — which phase, which machine, and who took it
The shared pool, in detail
One pool of equipment, shared across every plan. Set each resource’s capabilities, calendar and downtime once — and weigh a proposed rig against the capacity you already own. Then read the demand as a register of every process type per unit, and drill to the job register: every scheduled occurrence, with its resource, dates, touch hours and FTE.
Resources — the shared pool, its capabilities, and a costed capacity study
Process register — every process type per unit, by contenderJob register — every occurrence, fully detailed and traceable
Where the cost lives
Every dollar and hour, time-phased against that same spine. People allocate across phases by a shape rather than a flat number, a shared roster carries their rates and locations, and a monthly roll-up combines labor and expense into the Total cost on the project header — nothing re-keyed, every figure still traceable to its row.
People & expenses — hours and dollars, month by month, on the phase spine
Phase allocation & roster — how hard each person works, per phaseMonthly roll-up — labor plus expense, the number that feeds Total cost
The annual-planning artifact
What you actually walk into the room with. Every one of these is generated from the same model you have been editing — nothing re-keyed, nothing to drift, and every figure still traceable to the row that produced it. Click any report to read it full size.
Project plan — the full model, two pagesPDF · WORD · PPTX
Portfolio — cost and FTE by quarterPDF · WORD
Testing & equipment — the shared poolPDF · WORD
The case, across the portfolio
Every plan’s cost against what it returns, side by side — modelled cost, the variance to your approved estimate, payback, and how well each case is actually made. Plus the whole portfolio on one timeline, and the cost broken down by where it goes, against baseline as the year unfolds.
Business case — cost vs. return, variance, and how well each case is made
Portfolio outputs — timeline and business case across every planCost composition — where the money goes, plus baseline vs. forecast
Works with your AI assistant
Hand an assistant a model, not a spreadsheet.
Point Copilot, ChatGPT or Claude at a planning spreadsheet and it sees numbers with no structure behind them. It can't tell which figure is an input and which is a result, or what would change if a phase slipped.
PlanX exports the whole model in one readable file — phases, allocations, demand, the resolved schedule, and the outputs those inputs produced. An assistant reading it can trace a cost back to its source, explain what a change would do, or draft the justification narrative for a business case.
The file introduces itself, so the assistant knows what it's looking at without being told. PlanX transmits nothing on its own — what you choose to share stays your call.
Export for AI — the whole model, ready to read
Who it's for
For people who have to defend a number.
PlanX is built for program and engineering managers producing funded plans under time pressure — hardware development, test and validation, capital-intensive engineering, anything where people, rigs and money are all constrained at once and all three have to be justified.
It asks more of you than a spreadsheet does. You have to state your phases, who is on them and in what shape, what your test demand looks like and where it lands. That is exactly why the answer survives its first real challenge — and why next year's plan starts from this year's model instead of from nothing.
A built-in guide — the method, inside the tool
Pricing
Buy once. Yours to keep.
One complete product · no tiers
PlanX™
$349 one-time
Multi-year phase modeling across unlimited projects
People allocated across phases with flat, ramp, peak and plateau shapes
Travel, capital, direct purchase, outsourcing and outside-services lines
Test & equipment scheduling against a shared capital pool
Contention and overflow findings with recommendations
Time-phased cost and FTE by month and quarter
Portfolio roll-up across competing projects
Baseline snapshots and baseline-vs-current comparison
Excel, PDF, Word and PowerPoint export
JSON workspace export and import — always unlocked
One-time purchase with one year of updates included (*). Your version runs forever — renew only if you want newer releases. No subscription, no lock-out, no phone-home. Licensed per organization.
Questions
What you're probably wondering.
Is this a replacement for MS Project?
No. PlanX doesn't do critical path, task dependencies or resource levelling, and doesn't pretend to. It answers a different question — what a project will cost and how long it will take, before it's approved. Phases are declared, not solved. If you need a working schedule to run the project, build it in a scheduling tool.
Does it do Monte Carlo or risk-adjusted estimates?
Deliberately not. Probabilistic output is defensible mathematically and indefensible in a planning meeting, because nobody in the room can reconstruct it. PlanX runs optimistic, expected and pessimistic input sets through the same deterministic engine, so the difference between scenarios is visible rather than buried in a distribution.
Do I need to install anything?
No. PlanX is a single HTML file. Save it and open it in your browser — no installer, no admin rights, no executable, no macros. In locked-down environments, that's the point.
Does it work offline?
Yes. PlanX never needs an internet connection to model, compute or export, and it never transmits your data anywhere. It works the same on an air-gapped machine as it does online.
Where is my data stored?
In your browser's local storage and in the JSON files you export. Nothing is uploaded, synced or tracked. You own the file and everything in it, and you can back it up like any other document.
What happens when the trial ends?
Editing and reports lock until you enter a license key. JSON export never locks — ever. A tool whose entire claim is that your numbers trace to your inputs must not hold those inputs hostage.
Do updates cost extra?
Your purchase includes one year of updates, and your version runs forever. After that first year you only renew if you want access to newer releases — there's no recurring charge and nothing stops working.
How is this different from DARIL?
They're separate tools that share a philosophy. PlanX models the program that hasn't happened yet — cost, FTE and duration before approval. DARIL governs the one that has — decisions, actions, risks, issues, lessons and deliverables. Each stands entirely on its own; you don't need one to use the other.
Which browsers does it support?
Any modern desktop browser. Chrome or Edge are recommended. PlanX is designed for desktop use on Windows, macOS and Linux — on tablets and phones the browser restricts how a local file stores its data, and your work may not save reliably.
Can I use it with an AI assistant?
Yes. PlanX exports the whole model — inputs, resolved schedule and outputs — as one readable file, and the file describes itself so an assistant knows what it's looking at. PlanX itself transmits nothing; because it stays on your machine, you control what you choose to share.
Try it
Free 30-day trial.
The trial is the complete product — the same single offline file, every feature unlocked. It runs for 30 days, marks exports with a small "trial" watermark, then asks for a license. Thirty days rather than fourteen, because PlanX is judged against a real planning exercise and you may not have real numbers to model for a fortnight. Tell us where to send it.
Your download is ready.
Unzip it, then open the HTML file in your browser — no install, no admin rights. It works the same offline.
(*) How updates work. PlanX is a single offline file. When a newer release comes out, download the latest copy (the same file linked above) and paste in your license key. Your key unlocks any release dated within your one-year update window; your existing copy keeps working forever either way, and you only renew if you want releases beyond that window.
