Cliff: RSU Tax Planner — First Look at the $2.99 App That Shows Your Real Vesting Payout
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What Cliff Actually Does
Most RSU calculators live inside your brokerage account and tell you the gross value of what's vesting. Cliff, a new iPhone-only app, is built to answer a narrower and more useful question: how much actually lands in my bank account after taxes?
You enter your grant details — shares, vest schedule, grant date, and current stock price — and Cliff runs the numbers through federal tax brackets, your state's income tax rules, and standard payroll withholding (Social Security, Medicare, and supplemental wage withholding on the vest itself, which is often the piece people forget). The output is a vesting timeline where each future vest date shows a net-to-bank number, not just a gross share count.
On top of that, there's a what-if simulator: drag the stock price up or down and watch how your net payout changes at each future vest date. For anyone holding RSUs in a volatile stock, this is the feature that turns a static spreadsheet into something you'd actually open more than once a year. The app also supports multiple grants at once — useful if you've been at a company for a few years and have overlapping vest schedules stacked from annual refresh grants — and pulls live pricing for publicly traded companies so the numbers update as the market moves.
Who This Is Actually For
Cliff is aimed squarely at individual employees at public companies who get RSUs as part of comp, not at companies or HR teams. Concrete scenarios where it's useful:
- You have a refresh grant landing on top of your original grant. Cliff shows both vest schedules together so you can see combined net payouts on the same calendar, instead of tracking two spreadsheets.
- You're trying to figure out if you'll owe extra tax at filing time. Because payroll withholding on RSUs is often a flat supplemental rate that doesn't match your actual marginal bracket, Cliff's federal/state modeling can flag when your paycheck withholding is likely to undershoot what you'll actually owe.
- You're deciding whether to sell-to-cover or sell everything at vest. Running a price scenario in the what-if simulator before a vest date gives you a rough net number to plan around, rather than guessing.
- You moved states mid-vest-schedule. Since state tax treatment of RSU income can get complicated with relocation, having a model that at least separates federal from state withholding is more transparent than a single blended number.
What it's not for: modeling ISO/NSO stock options, AMT exposure, or company-specific 10b5-1 trading plans. It's RSU-specific, and it stays in that lane.
Pricing
Cliff uses a simple two-tier model with no subscription:
- Free tier: Core vesting timeline and basic tax estimate, limited features (single grant tracking in the base version).
- Cliff Pro: $2.99 one-time purchase. Unlocks multi-grant tracking, the what-if price simulator, and the fuller federal/state/payroll breakdown.
No recurring billing, no annual renewal — you pay once and keep it. For a tool that's solving a narrow, real problem, that pricing floor is low enough that the main cost is really just deciding to download it.
How It Compares
| Cliff Pro | Carta RSU Dashboard | E*TRADE RSU Calculator | Wealthfront RSU Planning Tool | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $2.99 one-time | Free (bundled with company's Carta cap table access) | Free (bundled with E*TRADE brokerage account) | Free (requires Wealthfront account for full planning features) |
| Tax modeling depth | Federal + state + payroll withholding, per-vest net-to-bank | Shows vest value and basic withholding estimate, less granular state-level detail | Gross value focused; tax estimate is generic, not state-specific | Integrates with broader financial plan, but RSU-specific withholding detail is lighter |
| What-if price simulator | Yes, drag-to-simulate on every future vest date | No | No | Limited — scenario modeling is tied to overall portfolio projections, not per-vest |
| Multi-grant / multi-company tracking | Yes, with live pricing | Yes, but tied to whatever your employer's cap table platform is | Only if all grants are held at E*TRADE | Yes, but framed as part of net worth planning, not standalone RSU planning |
| Best for | Employees who want a fast, private, one-time-purchase check on net vest value | Employees whose company already uses Carta for equity management | E*TRADE account holders who want vesting info alongside their brokerage | People already using Wealthfront for holistic financial planning |
The honest takeaway: Carta, E*TRADE, and Wealthfront are all free, but each one is really an extension of an existing platform relationship — you get the RSU view because you're already using that broker or cap table tool. Cliff is the only one of the four built as a standalone, cross-platform tool you can use regardless of which broker holds your shares or which cap table software your employer picked. That independence, plus the per-vest state/federal/payroll breakdown, is the actual differentiator — not the price, which is close to a rounding error either way.
Is It Worth Downloading Today
If you've got RSUs vesting on any kind of regular schedule and you've ever been surprised by a tax bill after a vest, Cliff is worth the $2.99 purely as a sanity check you run before each vest date. It won't replace a CPA or a full financial plan, and it doesn't try to. What it does is make the gap between "shares vested" and "money actually available to spend" visible in a way that most brokerage dashboards gloss over. For a one-time purchase with no subscription commitment, the downside risk of trying it is basically zero.