About
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A confession before anything else: this site says "we" everywhere, but it's really just one person (me, myself, and I). Standard Calculator is built, coded, and maintained by a retired software engineer who never stopped building things.
Twenty Years of Tools That Work
The background is a computer engineering degree, a career in software engineering and technical management, and an MBA in finance and marketing. But the websites started as a side pursuit, just something to build when the day's business problems weren't interesting on their own. Some began as a technical dare ("can this even be done?"), others simply as "I'd use that." Over the past twenty years, those projects have added up to more than ten million uses.
One conviction runs through all of it: software should just work, and keep working, without constant maintenance. Too many tools break because some underlying package shipped a new release and now everything needs upgrading. The goal here is the opposite: to build something solid enough to run untouched for years on end.
Built From Scratch
That conviction is why almost nothing here depends on outside code. The site runs on a CSS framework built from the ground up, with a layout vocabulary that makes spacing feel less like math and more like nudging things into place, a hair over, a smidgen down, a slight gap here. The JavaScript is all self-written too:the modal popups, the light and dark themes, the calculator engine itself, and a dozen other small engines, none of them from a framework that might change next year.
There's even a custom site builder behind it all, that strips out every line of CSS and JavaScript that the page doesn't use, then obfuscates, minifies, and tree-shakes what's left. As a result, pages load fast and make no outside calls, except for images and fonts. On the server side, it's Perl, which has been dependable for decades and remains a pleasure to work with.
Why A Calculator?
The calculator began the way the best projects do, partly a technical challenge, partly "I would use that." Building the engine in 2018 meant gathering up a number of different calculators, online and physical ones from Texas Instruments and Hewlett-Packard, and testing each new feature across them to see how they handled it. Some surprised me:a few big-name products couldn't take the square root of two and square it back more than a couple of times before their math engine drifted and stopped returning a clean 2. The Windows 7 calculator proved the most robust of the bunch, and it became the model ours was built on — That Story Is Here
Since then the calculator has been through more than 160 versions — each one a few hours of development and refinement, before the engine moved to a new light/dark page framework we created in 2026. It's been refined the slow way, by people who actually use it.
How We Treat You
No sign-up. No account. No tracking-heavy nonsense. The calculator is free, supported by the ads on the page, and that's the whole arrangement. The reason is personal taste: I don't enjoy registering an account all over the web, so I tend to build friction-free tools in the same spirit. Open the page and use it, nothing in the way.
From Star Valley
All of this gets built in Star Valley, an hour south of Jackson Hole, where winter lasts six months and brings several feet of snow. That's a benefit, and not a complaint. The site is also a proud sponsor of Western Lands Preservation, which our son started at fifteen as a passion project. It has since grown into nature-themed products carried in dozens of stores and acres of preserved land. Helping make that real has been one of the better parts of all this.
Questions, ideas, or feature requests? We'd love to
Location
We're located five miles west of this. Click Image to Enlarge.
