About Us

Toolsque is a set of free calculators that run in a web browser. I am Najeeb, a developer, and I write and maintain all of them. More than fifty are live and grouped by trade and task: construction quantities and building regulations, pricing and break-even arithmetic for small businesses, freelance rate and tax work, and a batch of QR code generators and scanners. No account. No email wall. Nothing that expires.

Why this site exists

I kept needing the same calculations while working with small contractors and freelancers, and kept finding the same three problems with what was available. The result arrived with no formula attached, so there was no way to tell whether it applied to the situation in front of me. The tool wanted an email address before it would show a number. Or it quietly assumed a jurisdiction, a tax year or a code edition without saying which.

So each tool here prints the formula it used, states its assumptions, and works without an account. That is the whole idea. It is a narrow one, and it is the reason the site has no reviews, no software comparisons and no rankings of any kind. It is calculators, and the guides that explain them.

The numbers stay on your machine

Every calculator is client-side JavaScript. When you type a labor cost into the job costing calculator, that figure is handled by code already sitting in your browser and is never posted to a server. The QR tools work the same way. A WiFi password you encode is turned into pixels locally, and a screenshot you drop into a scanner is decoded in the page rather than uploaded for processing.

You can verify that instead of trusting it. Load a tool page, disconnect from the internet, then use it. It keeps working. Or open your browser's network panel and watch while you type; the calculator makes no requests.

How a tool gets built

Each tool starts from a published source rather than from someone's blog post. Stair geometry comes from UK Approved Document K. Joist spans come from the IRC span tables, self-employment tax from the IRS rules, QR symbol structure from ISO/IEC 18004. The arithmetic is then written to match, and the formula is printed on the page underneath the result.

That last part carries more weight than it sounds like. A worked example from the 1099 tax calculator: net profit of $60,000 is multiplied by 0.9235 to give $55,410, then by 15.3%, giving self-employment tax of $8,477.73, of which half ($4,238.87) is deductible against income tax. All three steps are shown. If you think 0.9235 is the wrong multiplier for your situation, you can argue with a specific number rather than with a black box that just says $8,478.

What checking looks like

Test cases come first, run against examples worked by hand from the specification. Then the boundaries: zero, a negative, an input typed with a comma in it, a value large enough to push the display into scientific notation. Then rounding, which is where quiet errors live. Money rounds to cents. Materials round up to whole purchasable units, because 7.41 cubic yards of gravel is bought as 8, and a waste factor applied after rounding gives a different answer than one applied before.

The other recurring failure is definitional. Markup and margin get swapped constantly. A $100 cost with 40% markup sells at $140, and the margin on that sale is 28.6%, not 40%. The contractor markup calculator states which of the two it is computing, because quoting all year on 28.6% while budgeting as though it were 40% compounds into a real gap by December.

What this site deliberately does not do

No personalised financial, legal or tax advice is given here, and none should be read into a result. I am not an accountant, a licensed contractor or a solicitor. A figure from this site is a starting number for a conversation with someone who is.

Codes carry local amendments. A span result does not survive contact with an inspector working to an adopted local variation, and it knows nothing about point loads, notching, or timber grade beyond what you entered. Tax tools handle the federal calculation and ignore state and city liability completely. Cost estimators use the rates you supply, so if your regional prices are out by 15%, the total is out by 15% in the same direction and will look perfectly confident about it.

Finding an error

Wrong answers are the reports I want most. Use the contact link in the footer and include four things: the tool name, the exact values you entered, the figure it returned, and the figure you expected with a source or a hand calculation behind it. Those go ahead of feature requests. When a formula turns out to be wrong, the code and the printed formula get corrected in the same change, so the two never drift apart.

Advertising and privacy

Toolsque may display advertisements to help cover hosting and the time spent maintaining it. Nothing on the site is ranked, recommended or placed in exchange for payment, and there are no affiliate links in the tools or the guides.

No data is collected beyond what is needed for the site to function, and the calculators themselves send nothing anywhere, as described above. Anything optional, such as a contact form submission, only happens because you chose to send it. The privacy policy sets out the detail.

The person behind Toolsque

Toolsque is written and maintained by Najeeb, a former IT consultant and web developer based in the United Kingdom. Read the full bio, editorial standards, and how to reach him for corrections.

Contact

For questions, corrections or feedback, use the contact form, or email hello@toolsque.com.