CalculateItNow vs CalculatorSoup
Twenty years of math-teaching pages, with TI BA II Plus keystrokes and a formal citation for every calculator.
Everything said here about CalculatorSoup was read off their live site on , and the pages we opened are listed at the bottom. They may have changed since — if something below is out of date, believe them and not us.
CalculatorSoup describes itself as “a comprehensive resource of professionally designed and programmed free online calculators”, organised into Mathematics, Financial and Practical. Its footer reads “© 2006 - 2026 CalculatorSoup® All rights reserved.” — twenty years of the same site.
Its character is teaching. The loan calculator offers “Find the Loan Amount / Find the Interest Rate / Find the Number of Months / Find the Monthly Payment”, gives the present-value-of-an-annuity formula, notes that the rate is solved by the Newton-Raphson method, and then — the detail nobody else bothers with — gives the keystroke sequence for doing the same thing on a TI BA II Plus. The page ends with a citation: “Furey, Edward ‘Loan Calculator’ at https://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/financial/loan-calculator.php from CalculatorSoup, https://www.calculatorsoup.com - Online Calculators”. That page's stated last update is August 1, 2025.
It sells display advertising: its ads.txt redirects to Ascendeum.
What CalculatorSoup does better than us
It teaches the exam, not just the answer
The TI BA II Plus keystrokes are the clearest example: if you are sitting a finance course or a professional exam where the physical calculator is what you are allowed to bring, CalculatorSoup tells you which buttons to press. We show the formula and the steps, and nothing about your hardware.
Something you can put in a bibliography
A formatted citation naming Edward Furey sits at the foot of the loan calculator, ready to paste. For coursework, that is a real advantage — a marker can see who to credit. We give you a URL and a date and leave the rest to you.
Twenty years of math pages
Its footer reads 2006 to 2026 — two decades of serving the same kind of math page, with the corrections and the polish that come with that. Our math section is days old.
A clean menu for solving backwards
“Find the Loan Amount / Interest Rate / Number of Months / Monthly Payment” is easier to understand at a glance than a general goal-seek panel, even though ours can solve for more. The simple thing is often the better interface.
Side by side
| CalculatorSoup | CalculateItNow | |
|---|---|---|
| Online since | 2006 | September 2026 |
| Physical-calculator keystrokes | Yes — TI BA II Plus sequences on the financial calculators | None |
| Citation block | Yes — a formal citation naming the author on the calculator we checked | None. Cite the URL and the “Updated” date. |
| Solving backwards | Yes — a fixed menu of the quantity to solve for | Goal seek on 265 of 331 calculators, solving for any numeric input, not a preset list |
| Steps shown | Yes — step-by-step solutions on the math calculators | Yes — every result carries the steps with your numbers substituted in |
| Display advertising | Yes — ads.txt redirects to Ascendeum | None |
| API for developers or AI assistants | Not offered on any page we checked | Free JSON API and a hosted MCP server, no key |
What we do that they don’t
Goal seek is not limited to a preset list
Their reverse-solve offers the four quantities they wrote in. Ours solves for any numeric input against any numeric output, so you can ask questions nobody anticipated — what home price gets total interest under $200,000, for instance.
What moves the number
A sensitivity table on 258 of our 331 calculators ranks the inputs by how much each one actually shifts your result. There is no equivalent there.
No advertising
Advertising through Ascendeum is how twenty years of free math pages are paid for, and it is a fair trade. Ours is a different trade: no ads, no consent banner, and no revenue.
Calculators that carry across
Everything you type is in the URL, every calculator can be embedded on your own site, and the whole catalogue is callable as JSON or through an MCP server.
Sources and dates on the finance and health pages
329 of our 331 calculators cite their sources and list their assumptions, and every one shows the date it was last updated.
Where we are weak
Against CalculatorSoup specifically, these are the things you would be giving up by using this site:
- No keystroke instructions for a TI BA II Plus or any other physical calculator.
- No citation block — citing this site is manual.
- Our math pages are days old; theirs have been taught from for twenty years.
- A general goal-seek panel is more powerful and less obvious than their fixed menu.
- No name on the page: their citation credits Edward Furey, ours credit nobody.
Use CalculatorSoup instead if…
- You are learning to do the calculation on a TI BA II Plus or a similar financial calculator.
- You need a citation for coursework.
- You want step-by-step arithmetic teaching for fractions, algebra and similar school math.
- You would rather use a site that has been in the same place since 2006.
Go to CalculatorSoup. We would rather you got the right answer somewhere else than the wrong one here.
How we checked
On we opened these pages and took the claims above from what they said that day. Nothing here comes from memory or from a third-party estimate; where we could not verify something, we left it out rather than guessing.
- Home page (positioning, categories, copyright)
- Loan calculator (reverse-solve menu, TI BA II Plus keystrokes, citation, last updated)
- Fractions calculator (step-by-step solutions)
- ads.txt (how the site is funded)
Our own figures are counted from the code that builds this site, at the moment you loaded this page: 331 calculators, 265 of them with goal seek and 258 with a sensitivity table. The test count is the exception — nothing here can count it — so it was taken by running the suite on 11 September 2026 and is written as a floor, because it goes up most weeks.