About BriskCal

A calculator for British money questions, built on the belief that the working matters more than the answer.

What it is for

Most UK money questions are arithmetic over rules somebody has already published. What you keep from a salary, what a pension contribution actually costs you, what stamp duty is due on a house in Cardiff rather than Carlisle — these have exact answers, and they change every April when the thresholds move.

There is no shortage of calculators for them. What is short is calculators that show you how they got there and tell you which year's numbers they used. A single figure from a black box is not much use when you cannot tell whether the box has been updated since the last Budget.

Who publishes it

BriskCal is published by BriskLabz, which also publishes BriskFile, a browser-based file toolkit. The two sites share their engineering and nothing else — separate domains, separate subjects, and no cross-promotion, because a site about money and a site about file formats have no business borrowing each other's credibility.

There is no named author. That is a real cost rather than an oversight, and it is set out plainly on the methodology page: search engines assessing money content reward an identifiable person with stated expertise, and a brand name is a weaker signal. The bet here is that a claim you can check beats a credential you have to trust — so every rate is linked to its source, every page is dated, and the calculation engine will be open source.

How it is paid for

Advertising, and nothing else. There is no account, no subscription, no premium tier and no data to sell — the figures you type never leave your browser, so there is nothing to sell even if we wanted to. Ads sit in boxes whose size is fixed in the stylesheet before anything loads, so an advert can never move the page under your finger.

What it will not do

It will not recommend anything. Working out a number is arithmetic; telling you what to do about it is regulated financial advice, and that is a different activity requiring different permissions. Where an answer depends on a choice you have to make, the page will explain what the choice changes and stop there.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, it needs fixing quickly and quietly — a wrong calculator is worse than no calculator, and nobody reports one. Email hello@briskcal.com with the page and the figure. See contact.