Era vs FlowCog

Era links your bank accounts, cards, and investments to AI assistants through a personal MCP server called Context. You connect accounts once, then ask Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Codex, or any MCP client about balances, spending, and goals without uploading spreadsheets or leaving the chat window.

Most budgeting apps keep your data inside their own dashboard. Era takes the opposite path: it exposes typed financial tools over the open Model Context Protocol, with shared memory that carries goals and preferences when you switch assistants. Context is read-write, so an agent can categorize transactions, set rules, and move money between your own accounts only after you approve each transfer.

Era also ships Agency, a native app for proactive alerts and automations, and Thesis, a research-grade investing product. The free Basic plan covers two connected accounts with 250 daily MCP tool calls. Paid tiers add faster sync, edit access, higher MCP limits, and more connected accounts. Era Financial Advisors LLC is SEC-registered, and the company states it never sells user financial data.

FlowCog turns growth assumptions into five-year income statements, cash flow, and balance sheet projections without rebuilding spreadsheet logic. Founders connect QuickBooks, Xero, or Puzzle, tweak headcount and customer behavior inputs on a visual canvas, and get break-even timing, cash runway, and board-ready charts. A free tier covers break-even and dilution tools for pre-revenue teams.

Baremetrics-style dashboards replay historical SaaS metrics, but FlowCog builds bottom-up forecasts from marketing, sales, churn, and hiring assumptions. It runs scenario and simulation analysis across hundreds of outcomes instead of a single hardcoded growth line. The trade-off is focus: it targets SaaS fundraising and board models, not general ledger bookkeeping.

Startup founders use FlowCog for investor updates and SAFE conversion math. Finance leads at sub-$30M ARR SaaS companies automate monthly model refreshes with unlimited seats for investors. Teams without clean books can start on the free canvas or lean on the eight-minute onboarding form plus industry benchmarks.