A tool for makers who are guessing at their own prices

Correction first: in my very first post here, I described one of my tools as "a cost-estimation calculator for quoting freelance work." That was sloppy. It's actually built around ingredients and materials, not hourly freelance rates — so I fixed that post. This is the tool that description should have described in the first place.

The problem it's for: if you sell something you make by hand — baked goods, jewelry, crafts — it's easy to price by feel. "That seems fair" isn't the same as "that covers what it actually cost me to make," and the gap between those two only shows up later, as a margin that's thinner than you thought or, sometimes, negative.

How it actually works

Two tabs, in order:

• Materials. You log what you buy the way you actually buy it — a name, what you paid, how much you got, and the unit (grams, milliliters, individual units). Buy flour in a 1kg bag for a set price, and the tool works out the per-gram cost from that, not from a price you'd have to look up and calculate yourself each time.
• Products. You build a product out of the materials list — how much of each ingredient it actually uses — then add anything else that isn't an ingredient (packaging, your own labor, whatever you want to count). If you enter a selling price, it shows the profit margin directly, in green if it's positive and red if you'd be losing money at that price.

Everything is saved locally in the browser, and one small detail I added after thinking about how this would actually get used: if you try to delete a material that's already being used in a product, it stops you and lists which products depend on it, instead of silently breaking their cost numbers. That's the kind of edge case that's easy to skip when you're focused on the main flow, and easy to regret later if you don't handle it.

Why this one felt different to build

The other tools on this site solve a workflow problem — batching image edits, making a catalog page. This one is closer to a decision-support problem: it doesn't do anything you couldn't do with a notebook and a calculator, it just removes the friction that makes people skip the math and price by instinct instead. The actual computation (unit cost times quantity used, plus flat costs, compared against a selling price) is simple. The value is entirely in making it easy enough that someone actually runs the numbers before setting a price, not after.

I don't have a real seller's data running through this yet, so I can't tell you it changed anyone's pricing. What I can say is that building it made me more aware of my own instinct to round numbers in a favorable direction when I'm not forced to look at them directly — which is probably worth admitting on a site about being honest with numbers. It's the same instinct I had to watch for while building the image/PDF tool with its unfinished payment system, and the same reason the product catalog prototypes are described here as prototypes, not finished products.

Frequently asked questions

Is this the same tool described as a freelance cost-estimation calculator in an earlier post?

The site's very first post called it "a cost-estimation calculator for quoting freelance work." That was inaccurate — it's built around ingredient and material costs, not hourly freelance rates. The earlier post was corrected once this one was written.

Does this work for pricing freelance hours or services?

No. It's built around logging materials (what you bought, how much, and the unit) and building products out of those materials — it's aimed at people who sell things they make, like baked goods, jewelry, or crafts, not hourly service work.

Is my pricing data private?

Everything is saved locally in the browser. There's no account, upload, or server involved.

What happens if I delete a material that's already used in a product?

The tool stops you and lists which products depend on that material, instead of silently breaking their cost numbers.

Has this actually changed anyone's pricing?

Not that I can point to yet — there's no real seller's data running through it so far, so I can't claim it changed anyone's outcome. What building it changed was my own awareness of how easy it is to round numbers in a favorable direction instead of looking at them directly.