Altruist prices Hazel planning agent at $3,600 per advisor annually

Altruist has put a price on the Hazel Financial Planning Agent: $3,600 annually per advisor, charged from day one, and sold to any advisor rather than only those who custody at the Culver City, Calif., firm. The launch arrives with a waiting list, early users whose reaction RIABiz describes as effusive, and a four-minute speed promise, and it follows the tax planning software Altruist released in February, a launch RIABiz reported sparked a selloff in legacy brokerage and custodian shares, Schwab, LPL and Raymond James among them.

CEO Jason Wenk tells RIABiz the planning agent "addresses a much larger market" than the tax tool did and "should be more broadly helpful to advisors' end clients," reasoning that not every client benefits from advanced tax planning. Wenk also says the planning launch could carry more impact than the February release, which RIABiz characterizes as widely praised and rattling to legacy financial services firms. This week's targets are the three vendors RIABiz calls another Big Three of planning software — RightCapital, Envestnet's MoneyGuidePro and Fidelity's eMoney — following last week's threat to the Big Three of RIA custody.

The caveat sits on the data side. RIABiz reports advisors must be ready to supply PDFs if the rival vendors refuse API access, which means plan details a client already holds in MoneyGuidePro, eMoney or RightCapital may reach Hazel as documents instead of a live feed. The coverage does not detail how Hazel would read those files, nor whether the fee covers every advisor at a firm or only those who generate plans.

For a practice, the difference between an export and a download is the difference between a setup task and a recurring one. If the onboarding path is a PDF upload, the plan is only as current as the last file the client sends, and the count that matters before signing is how many client plans would need re-uploading in the first quarter. The question to put to the incumbent vendor is narrow and useful: whether its own export runs through an API or a button. An advisor who leaves a platform without that answer is trading a live feed for a filing cabinet, and this is where the reporting stops short — which of the three incumbents has answered Altruist's questions is not in RIABiz's account, only that a document path is the fallback Altruist expects.

Billing per advisor puts the arithmetic in view: a ten-advisor firm is looking at $36,000 a year, squarely planning-software money. Altruist is charging the full fee from the start, and the comparison that decides the purchase is the renewal quote already on the desk, a number Hazel has to beat or displace.

Vanguard supplies the second half of the story. RIABiz reports the firm agreed on Aug. 27 to buy Altruist, a sale still pending, and lists Vanguard as a potential customer for the agent, either to support its in-house RIA or to deliver planning to retail investors directly. In the same 48 hours Vanguard issued a release about expanding access to a better digital experience; Jennifer Clarke, head of the firm's user-experience design, said the updated website was designed "to give investors a clearer picture of their finances the moment they log in."

That pairing is what makes distribution the live question. Vanguard putting Hazel in front of retail investors would hand the agent a channel the three incumbents, who sell to advisors, do not have, and give it an in-house RIA to test on; leaving Altruist to sell to RIAs alone means re-earning its place at every renewal against products most practices already run.

Stephen Chen, chief executive of Boldin, a direct-to-consumer planning firm that leans heavily on agentic AI, tells RIABiz he "would not be surprised if Vanguard goes there." Chen's view is a prediction rather than a report of a decision, and he says the open question is when. He also says former Vanguard staff told him the company historically did not like the added compliance issues.

So the advisor-side read on the $3,600 is straightforward: a custodian now competes for a line item most practices already pay, which is leverage at renewal, but the export question decides whether the switch is a project or a habit. Whether Vanguard answers it with retail distribution or leaves the agent competing advisor by advisor is unresolved in the coverage, and it is the variable that determines how much of the planning market Altruist can reach.