A business simulator that feels like a game. Build a business out of blocks — revenue streams and expense categories — tune them with sliders, and watch a rigorous 36-month P&L and cash flow projection react instantly.
Paper Route lives halfway between a game and a financial tool: the interface and interaction feel like gameplay, but the analysis underneath is real. "What if I hire two people and raise prices 10%?" is answerable in under a minute, and every number behind the answer traces line-by-line to a real monthly statement. The engine is deterministic — same inputs, same outputs, always — because that's what makes the analysis trustworthy.
Local-first: no accounts, no server, no tracking. Your scenarios live in
localStorage, and export to JSON any time you want a backup or to hand a
scenario to someone else.
Supported business models: manufacturing / physical products, e-commerce / retail, and services / consulting.
The Shelf — your scenarios as save-slot cards, each with a mini cash sparkline. Fork one to try a variant without losing the original.
The Board — lanes of revenue and expense blocks; clicking a block slides in an inspector with its sliders and fields, rendered straight from the block catalog. Every change recomputes the full 36-month projection live.
Compare — pick 2–3 scenarios and see their cash curves overlaid, plus a KPI table with deltas called out ("break-even 2 months later," "low point $9,294 deeper").
The Ledger — a real monthly statement: revenue by block, COGS, gross profit, opex by block, operating profit, then the cash section. Every number on every other screen traces back to a line here. CSV export included.
- Live sandbox — drag a slider, every chart and KPI recomputes and animates instantly.
- Block-based builder — 13 block types across revenue and expenses, each with catalog-defined sliders, fields, and help text.
- Starter templates — Manufacturing, E-commerce, and Services templates drop 4–6 tuned blocks so you see live numbers within 30 seconds.
- Scenario forking & comparison — duplicate a scenario like a save state, change one thing, compare side-by-side.
- The full ledger — a real 36-month statement with year toggles and CSV export, so nothing on screen is a black box.
- Import / export — every scenario (or your whole collection) exports as pretty-printed, versioned JSON and re-imports cleanly, with validation that never crashes the app on a bad file.
computeProjection(scenario) is a pure function — no React, no DOM, no
side effects — that turns a scenario into a 36-month projection. It runs on
every slider tick.
- Revenue per block, by its own math (unit ramp × price, retainer clients × fee, billable hours × utilization × rate) → total revenue.
- COGS per block, split into a materials-like portion and an "other" portion — tracked separately because they cash-flow differently → gross profit.
- Opex per block (staff, rent, marketing, shipping, one-time purchases, etc.) → total opex.
- Operating profit = gross profit − opex.
- Collections lag revenue by your customer terms: immediate (0 months), net-30 (1 month), or net-60 (2 months). Sales in the final months of the 36-month window may collect after it ends — that cash is honestly left out, not smeared back into the window.
- Materials payments follow your supplier terms: paid in the sale month (on delivery), or one month early (prepay). The prepay month-1 edge case: a month-1 purchase can't be paid before the window starts, so month 1's payment covers both month 1's and month 2's materials — the total paid across the horizon is conserved, just front-loaded by one month.
- Everything else — labor cost, all other opex, one-time purchases — is paid in the month it's incurred.
- Net cash per month = collections − materials paid − everything-else paid. Running cash balance = starting cash + the cumulative sum.
- Cash low point — the minimum running balance and the month it hits. The headline "will this business survive" number.
- Sustained break-even month — the first month after which operating profit stays ≥ 0 for the rest of the horizon. A business that dips back into the red later doesn't get credit for an earlier false start.
- Per-block unit economics — contribution margin, in dollars and percent, for every unit-based revenue block (product lines, retail SKUs).
- Break-even monthly revenue — fixed opex ÷ blended contribution margin, computed at the month-12 cost structure. "Blended" means revenue-weighted across your revenue blocks, with shipping and percent-of-revenue expenses counted as variable.
- Year totals — revenue and operating profit for years 1, 2, and 3, plus ending cash at month 36.
Whenever a metric is mathematically undefined — no break-even, a
non-positive margin — the engine returns a typed n/a. The UI shows an
honest empty state. It never shows NaN, Infinity, or a cheerful fake
number. Money is computed in floating point and rounded only at display
time; the engine's golden-file tests assert every value to the cent.
No taxes, no loans or funding mechanics beyond starting cash, no depreciation, no balance sheet, no run-the-clock simulation or random events. These are honest simplifications, not oversights — see §12 of the design spec for the full list and reasoning.
pnpm install
pnpm dev # start the dev server
pnpm test # run the test suite
pnpm typecheck # tsc --noEmit
pnpm lint # eslint
pnpm build # typecheck + production buildRequires pnpm and Node 22+.
Vite · React 19 · TypeScript (strict) · Tailwind CSS v4 · Zustand · Zod · Recharts · Vitest · ESLint · pnpm · GitHub Actions · GitHub Pages.
No backend, no accounts, no database. All data lives in your browser's
localStorage, plus whatever you explicitly export.
MIT — see LICENSE. Full design spec:
docs/superpowers/specs/2026-08-02-paper-route-design.md.