About Toolsish
Estimating materials should be fast, honest and free. Toolsish is the calculator site we wanted to use ourselves — clear formulas, real waste factors and results you can take to a supplier without a second guess.
What we care about
Three commitments behind every calculator on Toolsish — they do not change with the trade.
Honest numbers
Waste is applied before rounding, formulas are printed next to the results, and cost lines stay at zero until you type your own price. The calculator will never quietly inflate a number or invent a quote.
Your project stays yours
Every calculator runs in your browser. The dimensions, prices and estimates you type are never uploaded to us — there is no account to make and no data to leak.
Fast and simple
Open the tool, type the measurements, copy the result. No sign-up walls, no clutter, no waiting — on a phone at the job site or a desktop in the office.
Why Toolsish exists
Estimating materials is one of the oldest jobs on a building site, and one of the easiest to get expensively wrong. Order short and the crew stands around waiting for a second load. Order long and the surplus sits behind the garage for a decade. Somewhere between the tape measure and the supplier there is arithmetic — and that arithmetic should be fast, visible and honest.
Most calculator sites treat that arithmetic as bait: the number hides under ads, the formula stays a mystery, and the rounding always seems to favour somebody else. Toolsish is the opposite of that. Each tool shows its working, applies the same waste rules an experienced estimator would, and hands you a clean summary you can send straight to a supplier.
The site is built and maintained by people who care about both construction and software — and who believe a free tool can still be a serious one.
How the tools are built
Every calculator follows the rules working estimators use on paper: volumes in the units suppliers bill in, waste factors that match real job conditions, bag yields from the manufacturer’s own numbers, and coverage rates straight from the trade. Where a judgement call exists — how much waste to add, how thick a slab should be — the tool states its default in plain language and lets you change it.
Cost references are reviewed on a yearly cycle so the example figures stay in the right ballpark, but the final price is always yours: type your local rate and the estimate becomes a quote request, not a guess.
Good to know
See the tools for yourself
Open the directory, pick a trade and run the numbers — or write to us if something looks off.