Betting on "give value first" instead of a signup wall

I keep going back and forth on this, but I think I've landed on something. Most of Selfinance sits behind a signup, which makes sense for a dashboard that tracks your actual money, but it also means someone has to trust me before they get anything at all. That's a big ask for a random app they found on the internet.

So I'm flipping it for one piece. I'm building a FIRE calculator that's just... there. No account, no email, nothing. You put in your savings, what you're adding monthly, expected returns, and it gives you your number and roughly when you'd hit it. You can mess with the inputs and see how it shifts if you save more or retire earlier or the market does worse than you hoped.

The bet is pretty simple. If the calculator is actually good, people will use it, some of them will come back later wanting to track that number over time instead of just checking it once, and by then they've already gotten value from me for free. That feels like a much better first impression than "sign up to see if this is useful."

It also means I've got something concrete to share instead of just linking a homepage and hoping people take my word for it. A calculator is easy to try in two minutes and easy to argue with if my math is off, which honestly I'd rather know now than find out later.

Still working out how far to take it. Inflation adjustment, part time income after FIRE, maybe letting people save a scenario without forcing an account. If you've built something similar or used a FIRE calculator that actually earned your trust, I'd like to hear what made it feel legit versus what felt like a black box spitting out a random number.