The Social Security Planning Category Has No Dominant Incumbent. Here's Why That Matters.

In his May 2026 #AdvisorTech column, Michael Kitces walked through Wealth.com's $65M Series B and speculated on where the platform might expand next. Tax was already taken. Estate was their starting point. And then he wrote a sentence that should have made every Social Security planning vendor in the country sit up.

The Social Security and retirement income planning space, he observed, has "no one dominant Holistiplan-like incumbent."

He is exactly right. And the reason that's true is the same reason MySSAgent exists.

Why the Category Has Stayed Empty

Social Security is the most consequential single financial decision most Americans will ever make. The SSA's own benefits engine is governed by 2,728 distinct rules. Filing earlier or later — or coordinating with a spouse, or factoring in survivor strategy, or accounting for the earnings test, or sequencing against Medicare — can swing lifetime household benefits by six figures. According to the United Income study, 96% of retirees claim suboptimally, costing the average household roughly $111,000 in lifetime benefits.

You'd think a problem that big would have produced a Holistiplan. It hasn't. Here's why:

The expertise barrier is real. Building a Social Security optimization engine that actually models the 2,728 rules — and the interactions between them — requires deep specialist knowledge. Generic comprehensive planning tools have SS modules, but those modules are blunt instruments. They handle the easy cases. They miss the spousal-deemed-filing edge cases, the survivor optimization windows, the WEP/GPO repeal implications, and the Medicare IRMAA collisions.

The incumbent that did exist got absorbed. SSAnalyzer — the tool many independent advisors used for serious SS analysis — was acquired by Retiree Inc., which was then acquired by T. Rowe Price in 2023. Open independent access has narrowed considerably since. For an advisor who left the wirehouse precisely because they wanted independence, running their Social Security analysis through a $1.6 trillion asset manager's tool stack is a strange place to land.

The all-in-ones haven't filled the gap. Kitces' own AdvisorTech Research shows 61% of advisors use some form of all-in-one platform — yet best-in-class users (advisors who pick specialized tools per category) actually report higher revenue per advisor. Specialization beats consolidation when the underlying problem is technical enough.

That's the gap. That's why advisors keep telling us they don't have a "good enough" answer for clients who walk in with the Social Security question.

What We're Building

MySSAgent is the Social Security planning platform built for the gap Kitces named.

The engine runs 2,728 federal SSA rules. The AI agent — Maxine — handles the modeling, scenario comparison, and client-ready narrative. The expert layer is Jackie Payne, RSSA® and licensed Medicare Insurance Broker, with credentialed advisor review baked into the Professional and Premium tiers. The output is a branded client dashboard and PDF the advisor can hand the client.

We are independently owned. No asset manager equity. No incumbent's roadmap shaping ours. The only incentive baked into the analysis is the right answer for the client.

For advisors, that means three things:

• A defensible, situation-specific filing recommendation for every client — without becoming a Social Security specialist yourself.
• Spousal, survivor, and Medicare coordination modeled in the same analysis, not bolted on after.
• A workflow designed for an advisor who already has a CRM, a planning tool, and a portfolio system — and just needs the missing Social Security layer.

Pricing starts at $79/month for solo practitioners and scales to $249/month for firms that want quarterly business reviews, API access, and a dedicated account manager.

The Window Is Now

Kitces' column noted that Wealth.com plans to use its Series B to make acquisitions in specialized planning. Social Security was on his shortlist of where they might go.

That's a fair read of the strategic landscape. The window for a focused, independent Social Security platform to establish itself as the category-defining player won't stay open forever.

That's the company we're building.

For advisors: Book a 20-minute demo or explore B2B pricing and features.

For consumers: Run your own Social Security optimization analysis at myssagent.com/start.

Patrice Ayling is the Founder of MySSAgent. The platform was built in collaboration with Jackie Payne, RN, BSN, RSSA® — credentialed Social Security analyst with 30 years in nursing and a decade of patient advocacy woven throughout.