Launching early: Freelance Tax Calculator — Need feedback from actual freelancers
Hey IH 👋
I’m soft-launching a small tool I’ve been building the past days — a Freelance Tax Calculator for quick, no-nonsense tax estimates.
🔗 https://freelance-tax-calculator-lime.vercel.app/home.html
It’s still early, very minimal, but already working. I built it because every freelancer I know (myself included) ends up guessing how much they should set aside for taxes. Most tools out there are bloated, slow, or built for accountants — not for people who just want a clean number.
What’s working now:
— quick tax estimate based on income
— simple UI, no login, no ads
— basic presets for common tax rates
What I’m unsure about:
— which inputs freelancers actually want
— how detailed the tax logic should be
— whether this is useful enough to grow
— what countries/regions matter most
What I need from you:
If you're a freelancer:
• does this solve a real annoyance?
• what numbers do you expect a calculator like this to show?
• what features would make it worth returning to?
If you're a builder:
• how do you validate tools in “boring but useful” niches?
• which direction feels more promising: expanding tax logic or turning this into a bigger finance-planning tool?
It’s an early build, but I’d love to hear what you think. Even one sentence of feedback helps. Thanks ❤️
Built something similar for EU company formation. A few things I learned:
Progressive tax brackets are the hard part. Most EU countries have 4-6 brackets with different rules for social contributions, caps, and deductions. Germany alone has 5 income tax zones plus a solidarity surcharge.
Simplifying this loses accuracy, but keeping every detail makes the UI overwhelming. I landed on "accurate enough to make the decision, with a link to the full rules."
People don't understand what "corporate tax" means in practice. They see "20% corporate tax" and compare it to their "42% income tax" and think they're saving 22%.
They're not. You still need to pay yourself a salary (taxed as income) and dividends (taxed again). The calculator needs to show the full pipeline: revenue to corporate tax to salary to dividend to what's actually in your pocket.
The most useful output isn't a single number. It's a comparison: "at your income, freelancing costs X/year, a company costs Y/year." People need to see both side by side to make the decision.
What data sources are you using for the tax rates? That was my biggest time sink. Government sites are surprisingly inconsistent.