About calqcomp

calqcomp is three decision tools for the financial moments between the math and the signature. Not a "loan calculator" — those are a commodity, and the SEO is impossible. This is for the part of the decision where you've already seen the monthly payment and you need to know what to actually do.

Why this exists

The author kept ending up at the same kind of decision — should I take this loan, how much extra should I pay each month, should I borrow or pay cash — and the existing tools all answer "what's the monthly payment" without answering the actual question. calqcomp answers the question.

The point is to make the comparison legible, not to tell you what to do. The Tools show the trade-off; the decision is yours. That distinction is repeated below and on Terms for a reason.

The three tools

  1. Compare loans — paste in two to four loan offers side by side and see them ranked by total cost. Same principal, different rates and terms — the cheapest loan is not always the one with the lowest monthly payment.
  2. Amortize + extra payments— generate the full amortization schedule for any fixed-rate loan, then add an extra monthly payment and watch the months and total interest collapse. Great for "what if I round up to $X per month?"
  3. Borrow vs invest— the actual decision. Borrow at R% and keep the cash invested, or pay cash and miss the returns? The model computes the break-even point (it's exactly the loan APR) and flags which scenario wins.

All three tools run entirely in the browser. No account, no email, no input storage. You can share a loan scenario as a URL; you can save a scenario to your browser's localStorage. That's it. See the Methodology page for what the tools assume and what they intentionally ignore.

Who built this

Hyrum Rhodes. Network admin by day, builds small focused websites on the side. This is the third site in a small collection — the other two are howbadisthetrain.com (NYC subway quality scoring) and sysadmintools.dev (free DNS, subnet, and WHOIS tools for IT pros). Same philosophy: no signup, no tracking, no Stripe-driven funnel. Just the tool.

The calqcomp tools themselves were prototyped in a personal spreadsheet before they became a website. The motivation was the amortization-with-extra-payments case — a real, specific loan where the difference between paying the minimum and paying an extra $100 a month was six months and several thousand dollars, and existing online calculators made that comparison painful.

How to use it

  • Compare loans — paste in 2-4 loan offers and see them ranked by total cost.
  • Amortize + extra payments — see your full schedule, then add extra monthly payments and watch the months and interest disappear.
  • Borrow vs invest — the actual decision: borrow at R% and keep your cash invested, or pay cash and miss the returns?

Every tool page accepts URL parameters (e.g. ?amount=200000&rate=6.5&term=30) so you can save a specific scenario as a bookmark or share it with your partner / advisor / whoever else should see the same numbers.

Design choices that matter

  • Tabular numerals, always. When comparing numbers, a column of figures needs to line up on the decimal. The site sets font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums on every numeric input and output.
  • Generous whitespace. There are not many things on the page; each one breathes. Decision pages should not feel cluttered.
  • No emoji accents in body, no marketing voice. This is finance; the way the page is written should match that. The author would rather a page read like a spreadsheet than like a landing page.
  • The shareable URL is the source of truth. Refresh the page; the inputs come back. Bookmark a specific loan offer; come back next month; the offer is still there. No login.

What this site is not

  • Not a lender. calqcomp does not originate loans, broker loans, or accept loan applications.
  • Not a financial advisor. No fiduciary relationship exists between you and the operator of this Site, regardless of what the calculations show.
  • Not a credit marketplace.We don't sell your info to lenders and we don't recommend products. There is no product recommendation engine here.
  • Not affiliated with any bank or lender. The reference numbers and formulas used are in the public domain; we have no commercial relationship with the institutions whose products you may be comparing.

What's next

More tools, better decision framing, and (eventually) AdSense ads on content pages. No newsletter, no signup, no "sign in with Google" — just tools. If a specific tool would help you make a real decision, that is the suggestion the author wants to hear about, by far.

Contact

Status and incident reporting

Each tool surfaces its own error state inline. There is no third-party status page; this Site isthe surface we operate. If the Site is broken, it's because the container's down or the code has a bug, and it's the operator fixing it.

Credits and attributions

The math comes from the standard installment-loan formulas in any introductory finance textbook. The Site code is original. The font is Inter by Rasmus Andersson, under the SIL Open Font License. Hosting is on a small VPS via Cloudflare's CDN.