Meet Molecule — what it is, what it isn’t.
Molecule is the chat assistant on every page of this site, available through the floating button in the bottom-right corner. It’s powered by Anthropic’s Claude and answers from a knowledge base we built ourselves from verified-facts files — US federal tax and benefits, all 50 US states, Canada federal, and every Canadian province and territory (Quebec in its own file because of how different its tax system is).
Always disclosed as AI.
The chat panel header reads “Ask Molecule.” The footer of the panel reads “Money Molecule is an AI and can make mistakes.” If you ask Molecule directly whether it’s a human, it will tell you it isn’t — that disclosure is hardcoded into the system prompt and isn’t something the model chooses whether to share.
What Molecule does well.
- Plain-English explanations of financial terms and concepts — marginal tax rate, RRSP carry-forward, FSA vs. HSA, the difference between APR and APY.
- Walking you through a calculator’s output — what each number means, which assumptions drove it, which lever moves which result.
- Answering questions about content on this site — finding the article that covers your situation, summarizing it, pointing at the source citation.
- Surfacing the catch that marketing usually hides — the fee buried in the fine print, the contribution rule that quietly disqualifies you, the “0%” that resets after six months.
What Molecule will not do.
- Pick specific stocks, ETFs, or cryptocurrencies by name. Not even when asked directly. If you ask “should I buy $TICKER,” Molecule will redirect to the structural question (asset allocation, time horizon, fees) rather than name a ticker.
- Give personalized tax, legal, or major-financial-decision advice. For those, it will tell you to talk to a qualified professional — a CPA, a CFP, an enrolled agent, a licensed attorney.
- Process documents containing account numbers, SSN, or SIN. If you paste one, Molecule will flag it and ask you to remove the sensitive identifiers before continuing.
- Replace a real CPA, CFP, or licensed advisor. Big decisions — buying a house, rolling over a retirement account, restructuring a business — deserve a human who knows your full situation.
How it answers questions.
Molecule answers in two steps. First it searches our knowledge base — currently 96 chunks covering US federal tax and benefits, all 50 US states, Canada federal, and every Canadian province and territory (Quebec in its own dedicated file because of how different its tax system is). The chunks are embedded with Voyage AI and stored as vectors in Supabase pgvector.
When the top knowledge-base match is strong — cosine similarity at or above 0.55 — Molecule answers from those chunks and cites the official source URL at the bottom of the answer: irs.gov, ssa.gov, canada.ca, a state Department of Revenue page, whichever the chunk was sourced from.
When the match is weak, or when the question is about a fast-changing live figure (today’s Bank of Canada rate, today’s mortgage rate, today’s stock prices), Molecule uses the Anthropic web-search tool instead, marks the answer live, and cites the web source it pulled from. That way you always know whether a number came from our verified KB or from a live page on the open web.
Quotas and costs.
Each question to Molecule has a real API cost — token costs to Anthropic, embedding costs to Voyage, web-search costs when it falls back to live. The site is reader-funded, so the quotas have to be real. Today:
- Anonymous visitors — 3 lifetime questions per IP fingerprint.
- Signed-in free tier — 3 questions per day.
- Paid tiers — more, with the exact limits shown on the pricing page when they open.
The remaining quota is visible inside the chat panel so there’s no surprise mid-conversation.
What we do with your questions.
Per the privacy policy: your questions are stored for 30 days so you can scroll back through your own history and so we can spot abuse patterns, then auto-deleted. Anthropic does not train on API traffic per their stated policy. We don’t share your questions with anyone — not advertisers, not data brokers, not partners.
When Molecule is wrong.
It will be wrong sometimes. That’s the honest version. Knowledge-base numbers are kept current with the annual January refresh and the source URL is always cited so you can verify in one click. Web-search numbers are as current as the page Molecule found — we mark those answers live so you know to double-check before acting on them.
If you spot a bad answer, email info@moneymolecule.com with the question, the bad answer, and — if you can — the right answer with a primary source. Real reports earn a dated entry on the corrections page and a fix to the underlying KB chunk so the next person asking gets the right answer.
Models and libraries.
For the technically curious — the current stack:
- Knowledge-base embeddings: Voyage AI
voyage-4-lite(1024-dimensional). - Answer model: Anthropic Claude (latest production Sonnet).
- Vector store: Supabase pgvector.
- Web search: Anthropic’s web-search tool, gated to fallback only.
We change models when better ones ship. The public-facing behavior — citations, AI disclosure, the things Molecule won’t do — stays the same regardless of which model is underneath.
Email info@moneymolecule.com to report a problem.