About Arise Saga

Arise Saga is a small collection of free tools built by one person, for decisions where an honest answer is worth more than an encouraging one.

Who I am

Sastihari S, software engineer and builder, based in Tamil Nadu, India. I write software for a living and build these in my own time. I am not a financial adviser, a mortgage broker, a solar installer or an SEO consultant, and I hold no commercial relationship with any company in those industries. Nothing here earns a commission on your decision.

That matters more than it might sound. The reason so many free calculators are quietly optimistic is that somebody is paid when you say yes. Nobody is paid when you say yes here, so the tools are free to tell you no. I have written up how that incentive works in why free calculators flatter you.

What I do bring is the ability to read a public dataset, check a claim against its source, and write the arithmetic down so somebody else can check it too. Where that is not enough - where the question needs a licensed professional or somebody physically on your roof - the tools say so rather than guessing.

Why these three exist

Each of them started as a question I wanted answered for myself and could not find an answer to that was not attached to a sales funnel.

Solar Straight - What rooftop solar actually costs and when it pays for itself, using government production data and your own utility's filed rate.

FinCalc - Eleven calculators for mortgages, loans, debt, savings and retirement that show the complete number rather than a flattering part of it.

AnswerRank - Whether an AI assistant can actually read and cite your website, and what specifically is stopping it.

They share nothing technically, but they share a premise: that the useful version of an answer is the one that includes the parts you would rather not hear.

The standards every tool follows

These are not aspirations. They are the rules I check a tool against before it goes up, and the reason results here sometimes look worse than results elsewhere.

• Nothing is invented. Where a figure comes from a government dataset or a published source, that source is named with the date it was checked. Where something is genuinely an assumption, it is labelled as one and you can change it. There are no fabricated lookup tables filling gaps where no data exists.
• Refusing beats guessing. If a tool cannot reach the data it needs, it says so rather than substituting an average and presenting the result with the same confidence. A plausible wrong answer is worse than no answer, because you cannot tell it is wrong.
• The workings are published. Every calculation has a methodology page or a printed formula. You should never have to take a number on trust when you could check it instead.
• The limits are stated. Each tool says plainly what it cannot see - the tree shading your roof, your tax position, whether your job is secure. These handle the arithmetic so your attention goes to the parts that are judgement.

What these tools collect

Nothing. There is no account, no email field, no phone number, and no newsletter. The figures you type are used to produce your result and are not stored, logged against you, or sold. You can use every tool here without telling me who you are, and I would not know if you did.

The privacy policy sets out the detail, including the third-party services involved in hosting and, eventually, advertising.

How this is paid for

Running costs are small. The underlying data comes from free public sources, the calculations run in your browser or on modest servers, and hosting a site like this is inexpensive. The intended support is ordinary display advertising, which does not require knowing anything about you.

What will never happen is the other model: collecting your details and selling them to somebody who wants to sell you something. No tool here asks for an email address, and none of them will. If that ever changes, it will be stated on this page before it happens rather than discovered in a policy update.

Being wrong

These tools deal with tax rules, energy policy and market prices, all of which change - sometimes abruptly, and sometimes in ways that make earlier advice actively misleading. When something changes, the tool is corrected and the change is recorded with the date it was checked.

Two corrections are worth naming here, because both made the answers less flattering and both were made before anybody complained. The solar model assumed electricity prices would rise 3.5% a year; the EIA's data says 2.9%, and for some cities that was the difference between paying back and never paying back. It also charged nothing for upkeep, as most solar calculators still do, which overstated lifetime results by up to 40%. Both are documented in where these numbers come from.

If a figure looks wrong to you, please say so. Being told about an error is more useful to me than being right, and a wrong number on a page about somebody's money is the only kind of problem here that can actually cost them something. Get in touch - the address is a real one and I read it.

What this site is not

It is not advice. I am not licensed to give any, and the disclaimer says so at more length. These are calculators: they do arithmetic on the figures you supply, accurately and with their assumptions on show. The decision, and everything the arithmetic cannot see, remains yours.

Last updated 2026-09-06. Written and maintained by Sastihari S.