About Quanta

Quanta is independently owned and privately held. We are not funded by, affiliated with, or writing on behalf of any of the institutions whose published figures we cite.

We can be reached at hello@quantacalculator.com. Corrections are welcome and read by a person — see “Corrections” below.

Each calculator is a working tool, not an article with a number in it. The arithmetic runs in your browser, the formula is printed on the page with its symbols explained, and a worked example shows the same calculation done by hand so you can check the tool against it.

We publish the formula because a result you cannot verify is not much use. If you disagree with an answer, the page should give you enough to find out which of us is wrong.

Figures come from the body that defines them, not from other calculator sites. Tax figures come from the IRS. Sports statistics come from the league's own rulebook or official stat glossary — MLB, the NBA, the NFL, the USGA and R&A, the ICC. Standards come from the standards body: IETF RFCs for network addressing, SMPTE for timecode, CIPA for camera exposure, NIST for password entropy, USDA and FDA for food safety.

Every citation URL is fetched and checked to contain the figure attributed to it before a page ships. A citation that merely looks authoritative is worse than none, because it transfers credibility the source never actually lent.

Where a formula has more than one accepted variant, the page names which one it implements. NFL and NCAA passer rating are different formulas. Baseball batting average divides by at-bats; cricket batting average divides by dismissals. Pages that could be confused with each other say so and link to each other.

The rule we hold to most strictly is that we do not invent a number we cannot verify. When a required constant is proprietary, paywalled or simply unpublished, we narrow the calculator's scope and say so on the page — or we do not publish it at all.

Some worked examples: we do not offer an ESPN Total QBR calculator, because ESPN does not publish the coefficients and an approximation carrying that name would mislead. Our exposure-value calculator returns no lux reading, because ISO 2720 lets each manufacturer choose the calibration constant that conversion depends on. Our TV viewing-distance page does not quote the widely repeated “SMPTE 30 degrees” figure, because the SMPTE documents behind it are paywalled and we could not verify it. Our net run rate calculator does not implement Duckworth-Lewis-Stern adjustments, because those tables are proprietary.

Each of those is a page that would have been easy to publish and slightly wrong. We would rather answer a narrower question accurately.

Some questions have no exact published answer. Where we ship an estimate — a heuristic, a linear approximation, a model with assumptions baked in — the page says so plainly and states what the estimate does and does not capture.

This matters most on pages where a false precision could affect a decision. Financial, medical and safety calculators carry the tax year or guideline revision they implement, the date the figures were last reviewed, and an instruction to consult a professional where the stakes warrant it. A calculator is a starting point for those questions, never the last word.

Quanta's calculators are built with substantial AI assistance. We would rather tell you that plainly than have you deduce it. What matters is not whether a language model helped write a page, but whether the number it produces is right and whether anything would catch it if it were not.

So the process is built around not trusting the writing. Every formula is implemented as code and covered by automated tests — the catalog currently carries 31,730 of them. Every worked example on every page is computed by running that same code, not typed from memory; a check compares the two and fails the build if the prose and the program disagree. That check exists because it caught exactly that: a page quoting figures that its own code did not produce.

Sources are checked the same way. Every citation URL is fetched and confirmed to resolve before a page ships, and each formula is verified against a second, independent authority recorded separately from the public citation list. Where two authorities genuinely disagree, both readings go on the page rather than one being quietly chosen — our customer-lifetime-value page documents a conflict inside its own primary source, and a test asserts we implement the defensible reading.

None of that makes a page infallible. It makes a wrong page unlikely to be wrong silently, which is the property we can actually engineer for.

The clearest evidence of how a calculator site works is not what it publishes but what it declines to. Across the last two build cycles we researched 600 candidate calculators and did not ship 119 of them, each with a written reason kept alongside the ones that did ship.

A cat chocolate toxicity calculator was refused because the published dose-response data is canine, and extrapolating it across species would have been guessing wearing a lab coat. Test-score calculators for AP, GMAT and LSAT were refused because no universal raw-to-scaled conversion exists — those tables are equated per exam form and per year, so a single calculator carrying that name would be confidently wrong for most visitors. A 0-60 calculator was refused because the result depends on traction, launch, gearing, shift time and surface, none of which a visitor can supply.

We also publish no medication dosing calculators of any kind, for people or for animals. A weight-based dosing error causes real harm and no disclaimer makes a wrong number safe.

Every calculator page shows when it was published and when its substance was last verified. Those dates are derived from our own revision history rather than set by hand, so they cannot drift into flattery — a page that has not been re-examined since it shipped says so.

Where a page carries a specialist review, it names the reviewer and their credential. Pages without that line have not had one, and we would rather leave the space empty than fill it with a name that did not do the work.

If a figure is wrong, out of date, or a source no longer supports what we attributed to it, tell us at hello@quantacalculator.com. Include the page and, if you can, the source you think is correct.

Published figures change — tax rates are revised, governing bodies amend their formulas mid-season, standards are superseded. We would rather hear about it from you than leave it wrong.

All 1560 calculators are free to use, with no account required. A free account adds saved calculations and nothing is placed behind payment today.

We intend to fund the site with advertising. When advertising is enabled, it will be disclosed in our Cookie Notice and Privacy Policy before it runs, and it will not influence which figures a calculator reports.