The exchange, stated plainly
You get a calculator that works, loads in about 4 KB, and keeps a reader on your page instead of sending them to a search result. We get one credit link underneath it. That is the entire arrangement, and it is worth being direct about both halves of it rather than describing the free part and going quiet about the rest.
The credit link has to sit outside the frame. This is not decoration and it is not negotiable, so it is better explained than asserted. A link placed inside our own iframe is our page linking to our page: it credits nobody, and a search engine reading your article never sees it, because the contents of a frame belong to the framed document rather than to yours. Moved four lines down, into your HTML, the same link becomes what a citation is everywhere else — your page naming where something came from. That difference is the whole reason the program exists, and pretending otherwise would insult anyone who has looked at an iframe before.
What runs inside the frame
The calculator, and nothing else. These are measurements taken from the HTML actually served, not intentions:
| What a visitor's browser loads | Present in the frame |
|---|---|
| Cookies | None |
| Analytics or tracking | None |
| Advertising | None |
| Third-party requests | None |
| External scripts | None |
| Total transferred | About 4 KB |
The cookie row carries a practical consequence worth naming. Embedding something that sets no cookies does not create a consent obligation for a page that did not already have one, so a widget like this does not drag a cookie banner onto an otherwise simple page. Many embeddable calculators cannot say that, because the free version is paid for by whatever the frame is loading alongside it.
The advertising row deserves the same candour. The full tool pages do carry advertising, and that is how the network is funded. The frames do not, because a widget that arrives on someone else's article carrying our advertising is not a gift, it is a rental of their audience without asking.
What the frame does not include
Twenty of the twenty-three frames contain the whole tool. Three stop earlier on purpose, and it is fairer to list them here than to let a host discover the boundary after publishing:
| Tool | The frame returns | Kept on the full page |
|---|---|---|
| Hard Money Loan | Monthly interest, points at closing, balloon at payoff | Effective APR, LTC and ARV constraints, carry and sale costs |
| Margin and Markup | Margin, markup, and the conversion between them | Breakeven pricing against fixed cost and volume |
| Severance Pay | Weeks owed and gross total | Gross-up for a target net figure after withholding |
Each of those three frames says so in its own footer, so the visitor is told by the widget rather than by an absence they have to notice on their own.
Choosing the right one for the page it lands on
An embedded calculator earns its space when it answers the question the surrounding article already raised. A roofing article that discusses tear-off and disposal is a natural home for the roofing cost frame, and a poor home for the margin frame even though both concern money. The value to you is that a reader who would have opened a new tab to run the number stays on your page to run it, and readers who stay are readers who reach the end.
Height is set at 430 pixels for every frame, chosen so the inputs and the result are visible
together without scrolling on a phone. Width is fluid. The snippet marks the frame
loading="lazy", so a calculator placed below the fold costs nothing until the
reader scrolls to it.
Conditions, in full
There is one: keep the credit link, in your page's HTML, visible, and pointing at the tool. You may reword the sentence around it, restyle it to match your typography, and place it above the frame instead of below.
What is not permitted is stripping the link, marking it rel="nofollow" or
rel="sponsored", hiding it with CSS, or presenting the calculator as your own
work. None of those are enforced by anything technical, and that is deliberate — a frame
that phones home to check whether it is being credited would violate the promise made in the
table above. The arrangement runs on the assumption that a site owner who took a free tool
will leave a line of credit under it, which is an assumption that has held up well
everywhere else on the web.
If something breaks
A frame that stops rendering, a calculation you believe is wrong, or a result that disagrees with your own spreadsheet are all worth reporting, and a disagreement over arithmetic is the most welcome of the three. We have published an audit of other people's calculators; it would be a poor look to be precious about our own. The contact page reaches a person.
Frequently asked questions
Does embedding a calculator require an account, an API key, or approval?
No. The frame is a public URL. Paste the snippet and it works. There is nothing to register for, no key to rotate, and no request to approve, which also means there is nothing that can be switched off at your end without you editing the page yourself.
What does the frame load on the visitor's browser?
The calculator and nothing else. Measured on the served HTML: no cookies, no analytics, no advertising, no third-party requests, and no external scripts. A frame weighs roughly 4 KB. Because it sets no cookies, embedding it does not add a consent obligation to a page that did not already have one.
Why does the attribution link sit outside the iframe rather than inside it?
Because a link inside our own frame is our page linking to itself, which credits nobody and is invisible to a search engine reading your page. Outside the frame it is your page citing a source, which is what a citation actually is. That is the exchange stated plainly: you get a working calculator, we get a readable citation.
Can the calculator be modified, restyled, or hosted on our own servers?
The frame renders as served and cannot be restyled from the host page, which is a consequence of browser origin rules rather than a policy. The border and corner radius in the snippet are yours to change, since they apply to the iframe element on your page. Self-hosting is not offered, because the calculations are corrected over time and a copied version stops receiving those corrections while still carrying our name.
Does the frame contain the whole tool?
For most of the twenty-three, yes. Three deliberately stop at the core calculation and keep the deeper analysis on the full page: the hard money frame returns monthly interest, points, and balloon but not effective APR; the margin frame omits breakeven pricing; the severance frame omits gross-up. Those pages say so on the frame itself rather than leaving the visitor to discover the gap.
What happens if the tool is renamed or retired?
The frame URL is the tool's canonical path and is treated as a public interface. If a tool is ever retired the path will redirect rather than 404, because an embed that breaks silently on someone else's page is worse for them than for us.