Editorial policy

How a figure gets onto the site

It starts as a document — a manufacturer’s data sheet, a code clause, a federal dataset, or a price survey we ran ourselves. The document is registered with its publisher, title, edition and the date it was opened. Only then can a calculation reference it, and it references it by identifier, not by a sentence someone typed.

That is why the sources page is generated rather than written. A citation on a calculator and the entry on that page are the same record, so they cannot drift apart, and a figure with no source cannot be shipped — it fails to compile.

Who reviews it

Every page carries a byline and a review date, and both are real. The review date changes when someone re-reads the page against its sources; it is not refreshed automatically on deploy, because a date that updates itself tells you nothing.

Where a figure is a judgement rather than a citation — a waste allowance, a crossover point, a rule of thumb from the trade — it is labelled as a judgement and the reasoning is printed next to it. You are meant to be able to disagree with a specific number without having to distrust the whole page.

What we will not do

• We do not sell materials, take a cut of a quote, or pass your details to a contractor. There is no lead form on this site and there will not be one.
• We do not let a sponsor set a number. If a supplier ever pays for placement it will be labelled as advertising, kept away from the calculators, and it will never change a default, a price range or a recommendation.
• We do not cite other calculators. A figure that can only be traced to a competitor is not sourced, it is copied — and copied figures are how the same error ends up on thirty sites.
• We do not publish a number the model produced. The takeoff reader turns your words into geometry and nothing else; every quantity comes from the same engines that run the calculator pages.
• We do not fabricate precision. Where a range is honest, you get a range. A single confident figure that hides its tolerance is worth less than a range that admits it.

How the site is funded

Today it is funded by its author and carries no advertising, no affiliate links and no sponsored content. If that changes, this paragraph changes with it, on the date it changes, and the entry goes in the changelog — advertising is a business decision, but concealing it is an editorial one.

Mistakes

Wrong numbers get published in corrections, with what they said, what they say now, how the error was found and how far off it was. Not edited away quietly. That page exists and is empty today, which is the only moment at which promising it costs nothing — and the reason to promise it now.

What this site is not

It is not a quote, and it is not engineering advice. It does not know your soil, your access, your local amendments or your inspector. For anything structural, the drawing and the building official win over anything a web page told you.