A freelance rate calculator that also does the tax step.
Hourly ↔ daily ↔ monthly ↔ yearly, in both directions and counting the weeks you actually bill. Then the part everyone gets wrong: adding a percentage to a base, or extracting it from an amount that already includes it. Offline, in your menu bar.
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The four numbers you get asked for, from whichever one you know.
A client asks for a day rate. A recruiter asks for an annual figure. A retainer is monthly. They are all the same rate wearing different clothes, and converting between them in your head — with vacation in the mix — is how you end up quoting two inconsistent numbers in the same week.
Type your hourly rate and the day, month and year fall out of it. Or go the other way: type the yearly income you are targeting and get the hourly rate that reaches it. Two inputs shape both directions — hours per week (default 40) and billable weeks per year (default 48) — so the result reflects your actual working year instead of a theoretical 52-week one. The day rate is derived from your weekly hours over a five-day week, not a hardcoded eight hours.
- Hourly, daily, monthly and yearly — always in sync
- Solve from the rate or from the yearly target
- Hours per week and billable weeks are yours to set
- Pure calculation, unit-tested — no rounding surprises
Subtracting the percentage is not how you get the base.
This is the one worth internalizing. A client transferred 121 and the rate is 21%. What was the base? Almost everyone reaches for “take off 21%” and gets 95.59. The right answer is 100, because the tax was applied on top of the base: you divide, you don’t subtract. base = total ÷ (1 + rate).
So the widget has two explicit modes instead of one ambiguous field. Add takes a base and gives you the invoice total. Extract takes an amount that already includes the tax and splits it back into base and tax. Each mode says in one line what it assumes about the number you typed, which is exactly the ambiguity that produces wrong invoices.
The percentage chips are configurable: load the rates you use — 21%, 10.5%, a withholding rate, your local sales tax — and they are one tap away.
- Add: base → tax → invoice total
- Extract: total → base + tax, by division, not subtraction
- Configurable percentage chips + free-typed rates
- Base, tax and total always shown together, never just the answer
Arithmetic you can check, not advice you have to trust.
This widget does not know your tax residence, your deductions, whether you cross a registration threshold, or which of two rates applies to the service you sold. It applies the percentage you give it, in the direction you pick, and shows you base, tax and total so you can sanity-check the result in a second. It is not accounting or tax advice — that conversation belongs with your accountant.
What it is good for is the moment before you send something: the sanity check on a quote, the reverse-engineering of a payment that arrived with the tax baked in, the “wait, what does that make my hourly rate?” before you agree to a monthly retainer. It lives in your menu bar precisely because those moments are 20 seconds long, and neither a spreadsheet nor a web calculator with a cookie banner is worth opening for them.
- No account, no cloud, no numbers leaving your machine
- Currency setting affects formatting only — never a conversion
- Every intermediate value visible, so nothing is a black box
- Not tax, legal or financial advice
Installed from the catalog, in one click.
Rates & Tax isn’t bundled into the app — it’s a widget in the Webstarted Toolbox catalog. Download Toolbox, open the catalog tab (🧰), press the “+” next to Rates & Tax, and it lands in your Finance tab. No reinstall, no app update. Here are a few of its neighbors:
Questions, answered.
Why does it ask for billable weeks instead of assuming 52?
Because you do not bill 52 weeks. Take out vacation, public holidays and the weeks that go to admin, sales and sick days, and most independents land somewhere between 44 and 48 — the widget defaults to 48. That single field is the difference between a rate that looks fine on paper and one that actually reaches your target income: at 40 h/week, dividing a yearly goal by 52 weeks instead of 48 undershoots your hourly rate by about 8%.
Can it work backwards, from the income I want?
Yes — it runs in both directions. Type an hourly rate and you get the day, month and year it implies. Or type the yearly income you are aiming for and it tells you the hourly rate that gets you there, given your hours per week and billable weeks. The second direction is the one that matters when you are setting a price rather than reporting one.
What does “extract” tax mean?
It splits a tax that is already inside an amount. If a client paid you 121 and the rate is 21%, the base is 121 ÷ 1.21 = 100 and the tax is 21. The intuitive move — subtracting 21% from 121 — gives 95.59, which is wrong, and it is wrong every single time. Extract mode does the division for you: base = total ÷ (1 + rate). Add mode does the other direction, turning a base into an invoice total.
Can I set my own percentages?
Yes. The quick-percentage chips are configurable in the widget’s settings — put in the ones you actually use (21% and 10.5% VAT, a withholding rate, your local sales tax) and they are one tap away instead of retyped every time. You can also type any percentage directly.
Does it convert currencies?
No. The currency setting only changes how numbers are formatted — the widget never applies an exchange rate. Conversion lives in the Currency Converter widget in the same app, which is explicit about which quote it is using.
Is this accounting or tax advice?
No. It is arithmetic: it applies the percentage you give it, in the direction you choose. Which rate applies to your invoice, what is deductible, and how any of it should be filed are questions for your accountant — this just makes sure the number you write down is the number you meant.
Is it free?
Yes. Webstarted Toolbox is free and needs no account, and Rates & Tax is a free widget in its catalog — you install it in one click from inside the app.
Get Webstarted Toolbox
Free to use. Download the app, then add Rates & Tax from the catalog in one click. macOS 12+ and Windows 10+.
One icon, many small tools
This is just one of the widgets in Webstarted Toolbox. Here are the rest: