About ClearRate
ClearRate exists for one reason: freelancers and small-business owners make money decisions every week, and the numbers behind those decisions should be easy to see.
What should I charge? What will I actually keep from this invoice? What will this loan cost me in total? These are simple questions with answers that are surprisingly hard to find — buried in jargon, hidden behind sign-up forms, or answered by a calculator that gives you a number and no explanation of what it means. ClearRate tries to do the opposite: a clear answer, a worked example, and a plain-English guide that explains the judgment calls a calculator cannot make.
What this site is
- Free calculators for the three decisions freelancers make most often: pricing, take-home pay, and borrowing. See the freelance rate calculator, the take-home pay calculator, and the loan payment calculator.
- Guides that explain the numbers, not just the arithmetic. Each tool has a supporting article that answers the search question behind it — how to set a rate, how much tax to set aside, how a loan payment is really calculated.
- Fast and private by design. The site is a small set of static pages. The calculators run entirely in your browser, so the numbers you type are never sent to a server, stored, or shared. There is no account to create and no download to install.
What this site is not
ClearRate is not a bank, a tax firm, or a financial advisory service. The calculators provide estimates for planning purposes only, and every tool page carries a disclaimer to that effect. They do not replace an accountant, a tax professional, or a financial adviser, and they should not be the only basis for a borrowing, pricing, or tax decision. If a decision involves a large amount of money, a contract, or a tax filing, talk to a qualified professional who knows your situation.
The site is also not a get-rich-quick promise. No calculator can make a business profitable. What it can do is show you, honestly, whether your rate covers your costs, whether an invoice leaves enough after tax, and whether a loan costs more than the thing it buys. Those are the numbers a business runs on, and knowing them early is cheaper than learning them late.
Who runs it
ClearRate is run by an independent writer and builder. Meet the author on the author page. The site is built and maintained in the open spirit of the small web: a few useful pages, kept fast, kept honest, and improved a little at a time. If you find an error, or a calculator result that does not look right, please let us know — corrections are welcome, and they make the site better for everyone who uses it.
What is coming next
More calculators in the same cluster are planned — for example, a salary-to-hourly converter and a quarterly tax estimator — along with more guides answering the questions freelancers actually search for. New pages will follow the same rule as the first ones: a working tool, a real explanation, a worked example, and no placeholder content.