Start here: free tools for your trade, and how to pick the right one

A guide for tradespeople and small-business owners to the 1,200+ free browser tools: the trade pages, how to pick one, and what an estimate is not.

Start here · 5 min read · Source
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If you fix roofs, clean houses, run a food truck, sell on Etsy or rent out a flat, and you landed on a catalogue of more than 1,200 free tools wondering which one is for you, start here. This post explains what the tools are, how to find the few that fit your work, what you get from them, and what a number from a calculator can and cannot tell you.

Who it is for

  • A contractor who prices jobs from memory or from the last job's figure, and has a nagging feeling some of them lost money.
  • Someone thinking of starting a cleaning, landscaping, detailing or pet business who wants to know what they would have to charge before they quote a real customer.
  • A marketplace seller who wants to see what is left of a sale after the platform's fees.
  • A freelancer, landlord, tutor, trucker or salon owner who needs a quick, private answer to a money question and does not want another app account.

The problem, in your words

"I charge what the guy down the road charges." "I gave a weekly customer a discount and now I'm not sure I make anything on them." "Every pricing app wants my email, a card, and a monthly fee." "I just need the number, and I don't want to type my customers' details into somebody's website."

What you get

A tool built for your kind of job. Most of the catalogue is narrow on purpose: a bid calculator for metal roofs, another for gutter cleaning, another for window cleaning, a quote tool for house cleaning, fee calculators for each marketplace. Each one asks for the things your trade actually prices by, not a generic "hours times rate".

Your own numbers, worked through. You type your wages, material costs, travel time and the margin you want. The tool does the arithmetic and shows its working, so you can see which input moves the price.

No account, nothing uploaded. The tools run in your browser. There is no sign-up, no card, and the figures you type are not sent anywhere.

Free to keep. Every tool is MIT licensed. If you want to be sure a tool stays available, you can save the page's folder and run your own copy.

Two examples

The roofing bid calculator turns a house's footprint into roof squares by pitch, adds waste and tear-off layers, prices loaded crew labour (wage plus payroll burden), then shows the price at your target margin and a walk-away price: total job cost, below which the job makes nothing. Type a price that is already on the table and it scores that against the same costs. Copy bid summary gives you plain text to paste into a proposal, and Copy share link lets a partner open the same bid, with the figures held in the link itself rather than sent to a server. Its README is open about the limits: single currency, residential reroofs only, no hip, valley or ridge takeoff beyond the waste percentage.

The house cleaning quote calculator takes the home, your own cleaning pace, wages, supplies and drive time, and the frequencies you sell (one-time, weekly, every two weeks, monthly) with the discount each gets. It shows the cost of each visit, the lowest price that earns your margin, the largest discount each frequency can take, and annual profit by frequency. Its README says it was tested on hand-calculated examples, not a real company's books, and does not model insurance, taxes, cancellations or employment rules.

Your first ten minutes

  1. Find your trade on the front page of the repository, or open its page directly. There are pages for 27 kinds of business, among them roofers, HVAC contractors, plumbers, electricians, painters, cleaning businesses, landscapers, auto detailing and repair, restaurants, cafes and bars, Etsy sellers, landlords and hosts, freelancers, salons and beauty pros and truckers. Each lists only the tools that serve that trade.
  2. Pick the tool named after the job you quote most often, not the biggest one. A tool for "gutter guards" will ask better questions about gutter guards than a general job pricer.
  3. Before you type anything real, look at the starting figures. Presets are ballpark starting points, not a supplier quote; replace every one you know with your own.
  4. Run a job you have already done, with the price you actually charged. If the tool says that price was below your walk-away or margin floor, that is worth knowing before the next quote.
  5. Then run the job you are about to quote. Copy the summary or the share link if the tool has one, and keep your inputs: the pages are hosted best-effort, with no promise a link will keep working, so do not treat one as your system of record.

If your trade is not listed, browse the full catalogue in the repository (ventures/README.md), which groups everything by job: trade and contractor bids, marketplace seller fees, service-business pricing, restaurant costing, back-office money and contracts, compliance checks, UK tax and more.

What an estimate is, and what it is not

A number from one of these tools is arithmetic on the figures you typed. It is as good as your inputs and the model behind it, and the READMEs say which costs that model leaves out.

It is not a supplier quote, a building code check, an engineering or safety rating, or legal, tax or financial advice. It does not know your local prices, your insurance, or the job you have not seen yet. You are responsible for checking a figure before you rely on it, and the tools come with no warranty. Used that way, as a check on your own thinking before the price goes out, they do their job.

Where your data goes

On the tools themselves: nowhere. The calculation runs on the page. Some tools keep a small anonymous tally in your browser of which features were used; the roofing calculator's README, for example, says it stores only feature counts and the date, never the roof, wages or prices, that you can switch it off from the footer, and that it is skipped when your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control. A tool's README is the place to check what it stores.

When you need more than a calculator

Some of the catalogue goes deeper than a single calculation:

Where to go next

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