Earlier this month I shipped PayBrackets, a free calculator that tells Americans what they actually keep from their paycheck after federal tax, state tax, and Social Security take their cut. It covers all 50 states plus D.C., it has no database, no backend, no APIs, and my total running cost is the domain.
I want to walk through how it's built, because the interesting part isn't the code. It's how much you can get out of very little code if the data underneath is right.
Why a tax calculator, of all things
Every month, millions of people type things like "75000 after taxes texas" or "25 an hour is how much a year" into Google. I looked at what they find. Mostly it's ten-year-old calculators buried under popups, or freshly generated AI pages where the numbers are confidently wrong.
That gap felt workable for one person. Salaries and taxes are pure math. The rules are public. Nothing about it needs a server, an account system, or content writers. It needs someone to sit down, get the rules right once, and present them clearly.
