The Sandbox tier is free for a reason. It exists to answer one question: does the engine think the way I'd want my money managed? Once you've watched a few harvest cycles, the next question is whether to bring real money.
Below the right account size, you should not. A broad-market ETF is cheaper, simpler, and ~95% of the way there. Above it, the math flips. This article is about the threshold.
What Guided buys you
- One linked broker. The engine sees your real positions, real cost basis, real wash-sale state. Not a sandbox approximation.
- The full AI Designer. Same model the Sandbox uses, but designing against the actual capital you have at your actual broker.
- Manual approve every trade. The engine proposes; you press Approve with PIN. Same review surface as Sandbox; just real orders flow through.
- Tax Bank, year-round. Realized losses bank against future gains. The dashboard tracks it as a running total per tax year.
What Guided does not buy: autonomous execution (Autopilot), short overlay (Alpha), multi-account households (Alpha). One broker, manual approve, long-only.
The threshold math
Guided is $49/mo monthly, $490/yr annual (two months free).
For tax-loss harvesting to be worth $490/yr, the engine has to bank at least $490/yr of after-tax savings. Translating that to required loss harvested:
| Your marginal rate | Losses needed to break even on $490/yr |
|---|---|
| 22% (mid-bracket) | $2,228 / yr |
| 32% (high-bracket) | $1,531 / yr |
| 37% (top-bracket federal + ~10% state) | $1,043 / yr |
Translating to portfolio size: a typical TLH program harvests 1-3% of portfolio value per year as realized losses. So at the bottom end (1%), Guided breaks even at:
- 22% bracket: ~$220K portfolio
- 32% bracket: ~$150K portfolio
- 37% + state: ~$100K portfolio
Below those numbers, a Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO, 0.03% expense ratio) is cheaper and ~95% of the result. There is no shame in that — direct indexing is a leverage tool that needs leverage to work.
Why direct indexing fails below the threshold
The mechanic that makes direct indexing valuable is also why it doesn't work small. To harvest a loss on a position, the position has to drop enough that the loss is worth banking. With a single ETF, you can't harvest part of the holding — it's one position. With direct indexing, you can harvest the names that dropped while keeping the names that rose.
That asymmetry only matters when individual position sizes are large enough that a typical 5% drop produces a meaningful dollar loss. The math:
= $5,000 × 5% = $250 per harvest
= $50,000 × 5% = $2,500 per harvest
At a $5K position, the harvest is too small to bother with after fees and friction. At $50K, it's a real number. So the direct sleeve needs positions averaging ~$5K minimum, which means a 25-stock sleeve needs ~$125K. With the typical 60/40 direct/beta split, that's ~$200K total — right around the Guided threshold.
The sandbox-to-real bridge
If you've been running the Sandbox at $250K-$1M, you've probably noticed:
- Loss Watch finds 5-15 candidates per month on a $500K simulated account.
- Realized losses accumulate at $4K-$15K/year on ordinary market noise.
- At a 32% rate that's $1,300-$5,000/yr of after-tax savings.
If those numbers track in your sandbox, they'll track on your real account. That's when Guided pays itself back.
What's the path
- Stay in Sandbox until you trust the engine and your portfolio is at or above the threshold.
- Upgrade to Guided in Settings → Billing.
- Connect your broker (E*TRADE, Schwab, or one of ~10 SnapTrade-supported brokers) in Settings → Brokers.
- Apply your existing manifest design to the real account, or run the Designer against your real capital.
- Watch the first proposal. Approve it. Watch the second. Approve it. After about a month, you'll have your own data on whether the engine + the subscription is a good trade for your specific portfolio.
If at any point the answer is no, downgrade. Settings → Billing handles it; your data stays.