Even Keel

Even Keel is a small set of free money tools built for people who work for themselves. The pitch on the site is clear money tools for freelancers, solopreneurs, and consultants, and the focus is squarely on the pricing and cash-flow decisions that trip up independent workers. Instead of a full accounting suite, it hands you two calculators that answer the two questions freelancers ask most, what to charge by the hour and how to price a whole project.

The problem it addresses is that most freelancers set their rates the wrong way. They take a salary they'd like to earn, divide it by working hours, and call it a rate. That math quietly ignores self-employment taxes, the benefits an employer would otherwise cover, unpaid admin time, business expenses, and time off. Even Keel's Freelance Rate Calculator builds those factors back in, so the number it returns reflects what you actually need to charge to hit your target income rather than a figure that looks fine until tax season arrives. Each of those inputs is a place freelancers routinely leak money, and seeing them laid out tends to be an education on its own.

The second tool, the Project Quote Builder, moves from hourly thinking to fixed-bid pricing. You feed it your scoped hours, a risk buffer, and an allowance for revisions, and it turns that into a fixed quote. The point is to protect you from scope creep, the slow drift where a project grows past its original brief while the price stays put. By pricing in a buffer and a set number of revisions up front, the quote holds up when the work expands, which is exactly where a lot of freelance projects quietly lose money. It nudges you toward quoting the real shape of the work instead of an optimistic best case.

Both calculators are genuinely free and need no signup. You open the page, plug in your numbers, and get an answer, with nothing to install and no account to create. That makes them easy to reach for at the moments they matter most, right before a client call, while drafting a proposal, or when a prospect asks for a number on the spot. Because there's no friction, they work as quick sanity checks rather than a separate task you have to schedule, which is the difference between a tool you actually use and one you only mean to.

What ties the two calculators together is a single idea, that a freelancer's price has to carry everything a salary quietly used to. An employee sees one number on a payslip while an employer absorbs the taxes, the health coverage, the paid holidays, the downtime between assignments, and the overhead of the desk they sit at. When you go independent, all of that lands on you, and if your rate doesn't account for it, you're effectively paying your own employer costs out of pocket. Even Keel's tools exist to make those hidden costs visible before you quote, so the rate you set and the projects you take actually leave you with the income you were aiming for rather than a number that shrinks every time a real expense shows up. It's a small shift in method with an outsized effect on what you take home.

For people who want more than the free calculators, there's a paid piece called The Freelance Pricing Toolkit. It's a spreadsheet that sells for a one-time $29 and pulls the rate model, the project-pricing model, retainer math, and pricing-adjustment logic into a single reusable file. So the free web tools cover the common one-off calculations, and the toolkit is there for anyone who'd rather own a spreadsheet they can tweak, save, and return to across many projects. The purchase comes with an instant download and a 14-day refund window, and there's an optional newsletter for product updates.

Who it's for is narrow on purpose. This isn't invoicing software or a bookkeeping platform, and it doesn't try to be. It's aimed at solo workers who need help with the pricing side specifically, the part that's less about tracking money you've already earned and more about deciding what to ask for in the first place. If you're a freelancer who has ever undercharged and only realized it after the taxes and unpaid hours added up, that's the exact gap these tools are built to close.

On access, the split is simple. The calculators are free forever with no gate, and the only paid product is the $29 toolkit spreadsheet, which is a one-time purchase rather than a subscription. That keeps the barrier to trying it at zero, and it means you can get real value without ever spending anything, then decide later whether the reusable spreadsheet is worth the one-off cost. For a freelancer testing the waters, there's very little reason not to run the numbers first.