MacLaine Finance Reviews — Discover what people think of this product.

What makes MacLaine Finance unique?

Three things, in order of how much they matter:

• It is built for one country, properly. Most personal-finance calculators are generic tools with a currency symbol swapped in. This one models Swedish rules directly: grundavdrag and jobbskatteavdrag, the ISK schablon, tjänstepension including ITP1 and ITP2, riktålder, amorteringskrav, uppskov, CSN repayment. The tax logic follows Skatteverket's published technical specification for the income year, and automated tests lock Skatteverket's own worked examples so a refactor cannot quietly change a number.
• The tools are connected, not 30 separate pages. Salary, municipality and birth year are entered once into a shared profile, and every calculator reads it. A decision flowchart sits on top and walks through what to do with your money in order, so the answer to "what should I actually do" comes before "here is a calculator".
• Privacy is architectural, not a policy page. There is no backend and no account system, so financial inputs stay in the browser's own localStorage. It is not that the data is protected, it is that it never leaves the device in the first place.

Why should a person choose MacLaine Finance over its competitors?

Honestly, for a single quick sum, a bank's own calculator is fine. This is worth choosing when:

• You want the whole picture rather than one number. Comparing a job offer, planning retirement or deciding whether to buy involves salary, tax, pension and investment rules at once. Here those tools share data instead of making you retype it.
• You do not want to hand over an email address. No sign-up, no newsletter wall, no "book a call". Nothing is gated.
• You want to see the working. Every result breaks down into its components, and a 78-article wiki plus 32 long-form guides explain the concepts rather than assuming them.
• You are suspicious of who profits. There are no ads, no affiliate links to banks or brokers, and no premium tier. Bank calculators are honest but they are also marketing for the bank. This one is not selling anything, so nothing tilts the output.

It is also fully bilingual, which matters for the large number of people living in Sweden who do not yet read Swedish comfortably.

How would you describe the primary audience of MacLaine Finance?

Private individuals in Sweden working out their own money, not businesses or advisers. In practice:

• Salaried employees checking net pay, comparing a job offer, or seeing what a raise is actually worth after tax.
• People planning retirement, from FIRE-minded savers in their 30s to people near retirement deciding when to start drawing a pension.
• First-time buyers working through amortisation requirements, affordability and whether buying beats renting.
• Internationals living in Sweden, who face an unfamiliar tax and pension system and often in a second language. The complete English mirror exists specifically for them.

It is deliberately not aimed at financial advisers or companies. There is no advice, no client management and no B2B offering.

What's the story behind MacLaine Finance?

I moved to Sweden from Scotland and had to work out how a completely unfamiliar system treated my money. Every calculator I found wanted an email address, showed ads, or turned out to be a funnel for a bank. The ones that were free were usually wrong in small ways, or answered one narrow question and left me to stitch the rest together myself.

So I built the thing I wanted to exist: one net salary calculator that was actually correct, and then a pension one, and then it kept going. It became a suite because the questions are connected. You cannot sensibly answer "can I afford this flat" without also knowing your net pay, and you cannot plan retirement without understanding both tjänstepension and allmän pension.

I work in IT infrastructure, not finance, so I approached it the way I would any system: read the specification, test against the published examples, and write down every assumption. It is a side project with no revenue and no ambition to have any. I would rather it be the reference toolkit for Swedish personal finance than a business.

Which are the primary technologies used for building MacLaine Finance?

• Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. No frontend framework, no npm dependencies at runtime, and no build step during development. Each tool is a self-contained page.
• Chart.js, bundled locally rather than loaded from a CDN, for all visualisations. It is the only third-party runtime dependency.
• The browser's localStorage as the entire persistence layer. There is no database because there is no server holding user data.
• Cloudflare Pages for static hosting, with a deploy-time build step that minifies. Cloudflare Web Analytics provides cookieless, aggregate page counts.
• Vitest for the test suite covering the tax and pension calculations.

The zero-dependency constraint was deliberate. It keeps pages fast, removes a supply-chain attack surface, and means the tools will still work years from now without maintenance churn.

Who are some of the biggest customers of MacLaine Finance?

There are none, and by design there cannot be.

The product is free with no accounts, no sign-up and no tracking of individuals, so there is no customer list and no way for me to identify who uses it. Aggregate, cookieless analytics tell me how many pages were viewed and nothing about who viewed them.

Users are private individuals in Sweden. There are no business customers, no enterprise tier and nothing for sale.