Why this calculator is free

The honest answer, including the money we turn down to keep it that way.

Last reviewed 16 August 2026.

If a tool that helps you spend a quarter of a million dollars costs you nothing, the right instinct is to ask who is paying for it. Usually the answer is that you are the product. So here is ours, in full, with nothing left out.

We believe nobody should have to find out what a property is worth from someone who gets paid when they buy it.

That belief is the whole reason this exists. Many free rental calculators are funded by a mortgage lender, a listing site, a brokerage or a property manager. Those are real businesses providing real services, and there is nothing wrong with them. But they all share one thing: they earn something when the deal closes, and nothing when you walk away.

A calculator funded that way has no reason to ever tell you no, because a no pays nobody.

How DealGauge actually makes money

We sell spreadsheets. That is the entire business.

If you want to go deeper than the free calculator, we sell one paid spreadsheet model. That is the only revenue line there is. You can use the calculator forever without buying anything, and most people do.

In August 2026 we took that model off sale for several days while we audited it. We found and fixed calculation defects across several rounds, verified the corrected file against the free calculator deal for deal, and only then put it back on sale. What we found is on the methodology page. We are telling you on this page in particular because a page about how we make money should also tell you when we chose to make none.

What we refuse, and what it costs us

As of 16 August 2026, no agent, lender or seller pays us and we carry no affiliate links of any kind. If that ever changes we will say so on this page, and date the change here, before the first paid link goes live.

Anyone can claim to be independent. It only means something if it is expensive. So here is the money we say no to, and roughly what it is worth.

Revenue we could take	Do we	What turning it down costs us
Sending you to a mortgage lender	No	Lead vendors publicly advertise exclusive mortgage leads in the range of tens to low hundreds of dollars each, which makes it one of the largest revenue lines available to a tool like this.
Affiliate commission from insurers, lenders or property managers	No	Standard practice for this kind of site, and easy money. We carry no affiliate links of any kind.
Requiring an account to see your result	No	An email list is the most valuable asset a business like ours can build, and many tools in this category ask for one before showing you a result. We give up that list rather than hold your result hostage.
Keeping the numbers you type	No	A database of what people are considering buying, and at what price, would be genuinely valuable to lenders and data buyers. We never collect it, so we can never be tempted to sell it.
Advertising	No	No display ads, no sponsored placements, no paid inclusion. Nobody can buy a kind word here.
Selling you a spreadsheet	Yes	This is how we pay for the calculator. It is optional, it is one price with no subscription, and you get thirty days to ask for your money back and keep the files.

The part where we tell on ourselves

A promise is only worth anything if it includes the awkward bits, so here are ours.

We do count visitors. We use Cloudflare Web Analytics, which tells us how many people visited a page and roughly which country they were in. It sets no cookies and does not follow you around the internet. What it can never see is anything you type into the calculator, because that never leaves your browser in the first place.
Payment is handled by other companies. When you buy something, the checkout is run by Gumroad or by Etsy, and they see what any shop would see. We never handle your card details.
No individual is named here, and that is a real cost to you. The operating company is Velocity Workflows, but you cannot look up a person, and you have to weigh that. What we can offer instead is that every formula behind every number is published on our methodology page, so you never have to take our word for the arithmetic. You can check it.
We could be wrong. The calculator is only as good as the numbers you put in, and estimates are estimates. We publish what it cannot do alongside what it can.

You can verify the privacy claim in about five seconds.
Turn off your wifi. Then use the calculator. It still works, because the arithmetic runs entirely inside your browser and nothing you type is ever sent anywhere. A tool that needed your data would stop working the moment you disconnected.

What this buys you

Only one thing, but it is the thing that matters when you are about to sign something. This calculator is free to tell you the deal is bad, because a bad deal costs us nothing. It will grade a property an F, and it will tell you the highest price you could pay and still clear all three of our published targets: $150 a month in cash flow, 8% cash-on-cash, and a lender DSCR of 1.20. That is another way of saying the price above which this property stops working.

In our experience most deals you look at will not be good ones, and at 2026 financing costs that should not surprise you. You deserve to hear that from someone who does not get paid either way.

Go and grade a deal →

DealGauge is an educational analysis tool only. It does not provide investment, tax, legal or financial advice, and is not a broker, lender, appraiser or advisor. All grades, verdicts, metrics and prices are estimates generated from the figures you enter and may be inaccurate. Benchmarks shown are common rules of thumb, not promises or projected results. Verify every number and consult a qualified professional before making any real estate decision. DealGauge is operated by Velocity Workflows. Questions: [email protected]