CloudbreakAbout Cloudbreak
The spreadsheet that finally broke
I’m Croix. I’ve kept spreadsheets for almost everything since I was a teenager. When I started working, that habit turned toward money — saving strategy, budgets, projections. They were useful, right up until they weren’t.
The breaking point was a house. When I started thinking about buying one, I built a huge spreadsheet to model what it would do to the rest of my financial life. That’s when I understood what I actually wanted: not a savings calculator, but a working model of my entire financial life — work, saving, spending, investments, taxes, and how they all push on each other. A spreadsheet is the wrong tool for that job. Mine had become very complex, very difficult to test, and far too easy to break without noticing.
An engineer’s answer
My degree is in biomedical engineering, with an emphasis in instrumentation. I spent a few years as a mechanical engineer at a medical-device company, working on machines that produce radioactive injectable drugs — an environment where a model that quietly disagrees with reality is not acceptable. In 2021 I left to retrain as a software developer, which turned out to be a much better fit for how I think, and I’ve been writing software professionally since 2022. In fall 2025, I started building Cloudbreak.
The thing a spreadsheet can’t give you is the thing I wanted most: testability. Cloudbreak’s tax and benefit formulas are checked against answer keys derived from the U.S. Code, CFR, and IRS, SSA, and CMS publications by a process that never sees the code — so the answer key can’t be bent to match the implementation. Over 12,000 automated tests run against the calculation engines. The full method is on the methodology page.
I’m the first user
I built Cloudbreak because I needed it. My own plan runs through it, and I use it the way I hope you will.
What this is — and isn’t
I’m an engineer, not a financial advisor. Cloudbreak shows what the math says based on your inputs and assumptions — what you do with that is your call.
As for your data: calculations run in your browser, plans save on your device and back up automatically to your account, and everything is manual entry — no bank or brokerage connections, and the tool never asks for outside-account credentials. One control deletes it all, on this device and in the cloud. The details are on the privacy page.