The number nobody
wants to give you
Three free tools for decisions where an honest answer is worth more than an encouraging one. No account, no email, and nothing you type is sold to anybody.
七転び八起き
The tools
Each one exists because the honest version of the answer was hard to find anywhere else.
Solar Straight
What rooftop solar actually costs and when it pays for itself, using government production data and your own utility's filed rate.
Open 02FinCalc
Eleven calculators for mortgages, loans, debt, savings and retirement that show the complete number rather than a flattering part of it.
Open 03AnswerRank
Whether an AI assistant can actually read and cite your website, and what specifically is stopping it.
OpenMost free tools are quietly optimistic
Nearly every free tool on the internet pays for itself somehow, and a great many pay for themselves by collecting you. The calculator is the bait, your contact details are the product, and they are sold to whoever wants to sell you something. That model has a consequence people rarely notice: the tool has to give an encouraging answer, because a discouraging one produces fewer leads.
So you get a whole category of software that leans one way. Solar estimators still subtracting a tax credit that no longer exists. Mortgage calculators reporting a monthly payment you will never actually make, because it omits the tax and the insurance. Retirement projections that never mention the money is taxed on the way out. None of it is quite a lie. It is an answer to a more comfortable question than the one you asked.
These tools collect nothing, so they have no reason to flatter you. Sometimes that means telling you solar will never pay for itself where you live. That is the entire point of them.
The rules every tool follows
Nothing is invented
Where a figure comes from a government dataset or a published source, that source is named on the page with the date it was checked. Where something is genuinely an assumption, it is labelled as one and you can change it.
Refusing beats guessing
If a tool cannot get the data it needs, it says so rather than substituting an average and presenting the result with the same confidence. A plausible wrong answer is worse than no answer when real money is involved.
The workings are published
Every calculation has a methodology page or a printed formula. You should never have to take a number on trust when you could check it instead.
The limits are stated
Each tool says plainly what it cannot see: the tree shading your roof, your tax position, whether your job is secure. These handle the arithmetic so your attention goes to the parts that are judgement.
One person, and no commission
I am a software engineer, not a financial adviser, a solar installer or an SEO consultant, and I have no commercial relationship with any company in those industries. Each of these began because I wanted an honest answer to something and could not find one that was not attached to a sales funnel.
If a number here is wrong, I would rather be told than be right. There is more on the about page, and you can get in touch directly.