Fire Tools — User guide

Welcome. Fire Tools is a free, open-source planner that helps you reason about your path to financial independence. Everything runs on your device — no accounts, no servers in the loop, no analytics tracking you.

This guide walks through every tool in the app. Each page below has a short walkthrough and a screenshot so you can see exactly what to expect.

Pages in this guide

How to install

Desktop — grab the .dmg (macOS), .exe (Windows) or .AppImage (Linux) from the releases page.
Self-hosted — see the engineering docs for the Docker Compose stack.
Web demo — try it instantly at https://fire-tools-inc.github.io/app/demo/. It's a read-only preview seeded with sample data (nothing you type is saved) — install the desktop app or self-host to keep your own data.

Where your data lives

Desktop app (Electron) — your inputs are stored in a local SQLite database inside the OS-managed userData directory (e.g. ~/Library/Application Support/Fire Tools/firetools.db on macOS). Nothing leaves the machine.
Self-hosted — the Docker Compose stack keeps everything in a volume-backed SQLite (or Postgres) database on your own server. Nothing leaves your hardware.

The hosted web demo is read-only: it loads sample data and doesn't persist anything you type. Use the desktop app or the self-hosted stack for real planning.

You can wipe everything from the Settings page — clearing data is a single click.

Currency, language, regional formatting

Currency and language are independent. Set currency once and switch language on the fly — labels translate, your numbers don't get re-denominated. The default language is English; Italian, French, German and Spanish ship in the box.

Sharing scenarios

The FIRE calculator serialises its inputs into the URL. Copy the URL and send it — the recipient opens the same scenario without any data leaving either device.