A useful thing, kept simple.
TipCalc was built by Sam Levenson, a software engineer who got tired of opening a tip calculator app and being shown a video ad before it would let him split a $42 burrito between three friends. The browser is the operating system; a calculator should load in under a second and never ask for your email.
The whole site is one principle: a tool that does one thing well, with the math out in the open, no upsell, no dark pattern. The tipping guide exists for the same reason — the right answer to "how much do I tip the hotel housekeeper" should be one paragraph, not eight pop-ups.
What we don't do
The pledge
- The calculator runs in your browser. Your bill amount never leaves your device.
- The only third-party script is Google Analytics, used to count page views in aggregate — no ad pixels, no Tag Manager, no session recorders. The privacy page spells out exactly what it collects.
- No sign-up wall, no newsletter modal, no "allow notifications" prompt.
- We don't sell anything, including your data. There's nothing to sell — we don't collect it.
- We don't show ads inside the calculator. The site is supported by a single, non-tracking display ad in the footer of content pages, when it pays for hosting.
How the numbers stay current
Customary tip ranges shift. The pillar guide and every country page are reviewed each year against Bankrate's annual tipping survey, Pew Research's tipping-attitudes data, and the etiquette desks at the major US newspapers. When a number is out of date, we change it and note the year on the page. We do not chase trends or invent "new rules" to manufacture traffic.
Contact
A typo, a wrong number, a service we should add? Mail [email protected]. Bug reports get faster replies than feature requests.