Dormant Labs is a small collection of free, accurate calculators for the kinds of tasks that come up in real life — painting a room, planning a move, making candles, baking with the wrong pan, or finishing a knitting project. Each tool is a standalone page that loads instantly, works on any device, and asks nothing from you.
The site is run by a solo developer. It started out of frustration: too many online calculators are buried behind sign-up walls, cluttered with ads, or just wrong. For a paint calculator to be useful, it needs to know that a gallon of paint doesn't cover the same area as a second coat applied over a first. For a yarn estimator to be trustworthy, it needs to account for gauge and project size, not just pick a round number. Getting the math right matters.
Every calculator on Dormant Labs is built around a specific real-world problem. Before a tool is written, the underlying calculation is researched: industry-standard coverage rates for paint (350–400 sq ft per gallon at one coat), fragrance load percentages for different wax types, average reading speeds by audience type, standard waste factors for tile layout patterns. The goal is that you don't have to look any of that up — you just enter your situation and get a reliable answer.
All calculations run entirely in your browser. Nothing is sent to a server, nothing is stored, and there are no accounts. If you close the tab, the data is gone. That's a deliberate choice — the tools should feel like reaching for a calculator on a desk, not logging in to an app.
New tools get added when there's a calculation that's genuinely annoying to do by hand and doesn't have a good free solution online. If there's something you find yourself working out repeatedly — a craft calculation, a home project estimate, a writing metric — and it's the kind of thing that should just be a simple tool, we'd like to know about it.