Altruist's $3,600 AI planner takes aim at planning's Big Three

Altruist likes its entrances in pairs. In February the first Hazel, an AI tax-planning agent, helped send Schwab, LPL and Raymond James stock lower; this week the second Hazel arrived with far less fanfare to go after the systems RIAs use to draft plans. Priced at $3,600 per advisor per year, with a waiting list, early user praise, and a four-minute result attached, the Hazel Financial Planning Agent turns a market scare into a run at actual revenue.

Jason Wenk, Altruist's chief executive, gives the product a bigger lane than tax software: he told RIABiz that tax strategies apply to a handful of households, while a financial plan applies to every one of them. The planning agent addresses a much larger market and should be more broadly helpful to clients, since not all clients benefit from advanced tax work, and that breadth matters because planning is the recurring deliverable of an advice relationship—the document a client expects once a year and the reason to come back.

The pricing alone says this is not a trial balloon: $3,600 a head is a full-service software commitment, and a four-minute planning promise is a workflow announcement. If the agent lives up to the claim, it takes the most time-consuming part of a planning engagement—the assembly of data into a presentable document—and squeezes it into the same minute a client asks a what-if question.

The market under attack is among the most stable in independent advice. RIABiz puts Fidelity's eMoney at 35.62% of RIA planning, Envestnet's MoneyGuidePro at 24.23% and RightCapital at 21.37%, which together give those three systems 81.22% of the market—and they are not shelfware products but the systems of record for the planning function.

RIABiz also flagged the obstacle that could make the four-minute promise a formality: if any of the three incumbents declines to open an API, advisors would have to export a plan as a PDF and hand it to Hazel to read, and the workflow then starts with a file conversion rather than a clean data link. For a practice, the test is immediate—does the advisor want planning data locked in a system that will not talk to the new agent?

That test is sharper because of the ownership backdrop: Vanguard agreed to buy Altruist on Aug. 27, and Vanguard is a potential customer for Hazel, either to support its in-house RIA or to deliver planning directly to retail investors. Boldin chief executive Stephen Chen, who runs a direct-to-consumer planning service built around agentic AI, told RIABiz he would be surprised if Vanguard did not go there—the question is when—and his conversations with former Vanguard employees add a caution: the company historically disliked the added compliance burden of advice plans.

What looked like a negotiation window when Vanguard signed the Altruist deal in August is now becoming a product question. A planning agent changes how quickly advice gets drafted, not the need for an advisor to accept responsibility for it, and Vanguard's reluctance was never about writing speed but about who owns the plan.

As this publication has argued, the AI adoption gap is becoming a practice split, and Hazel's planning launch pushes that split into the central recurring meeting an RIA runs. If the agent genuinely produces a plan in four minutes, the advisor can build it in front of the client and spend the second hour on judgment; a legacy workflow needs that second hour to get the first draft done, a competitive gap no fee schedule will hide.

The strategic bet for an independent practice is easy to test: take a live client case, put it through Hazel and through the current planning platform, and count the hours from data to document. The side that wins that benchmark is the side the client will see at the next review, and waiting for incumbents to open their APIs is a choice to stay inside the slower workflow. Altruist has decided that the document is a commodity and the conversation around it is the product; the practice that acts first gets to keep that conversation.