Our Independence

The calculators on PayoffRoute exist to show you the total cost of a borrowing decision — including the times the honest answer is don’t. A tool like that only works if it has nothing to gain from your decision. This page explains, plainly, how the site is funded and the commitments that keep it that way.

How the site makes money

Right now, it doesn’t. PayoffRoute runs no advertising, takes no commission from any lender, sells no leads, and has no paywall. It is a small, independent project, and its only running cost is a domain name. That is deliberate: with no revenue tied to whether you borrow, there is nothing pulling the math in any direction.

If display advertising is added later to cover costs, three things will stay true, and they are promises, not preferences:

• Ads will be clearly labelled and kept separate from the tools. An ad will never be dressed up as a recommendation, and the calculators’ results will never depend on who is advertising.
• No lender will ever pay to be ranked, featured, or recommended. The tools compare your numbers against standard financial math — they do not steer you to a particular bank, and there is no “apply now” lead-generation form anywhere on the site.
• The math will always be public. Every formula and assumption is documented on the methodology page, so any change is something you can check, not something you have to trust.

What we will never do

• Sell your data — because we don’t collect it. Every calculation runs entirely in your browser. The balances, rates, and incomes you type are never sent to a server, stored, or shared. There is no account, and nothing to sell.
• Track you. We keep one analytics tool, and we picked the least invasive one that exists: it is cookieless, stores nothing on your device, and cannot follow you to another site. It tells us that a calculator was opened — never who opened it, and never a single number you typed into it. There is no Google Analytics here and no tracking pixel, and the site’s Content Security Policy would block one if there were. The details are on our privacy policy.
• Take a commission to favour one lender over another. The most common way finance sites make money is lead generation — getting paid when you apply. We don’t do it, because it is the exact conflict of interest the site was built to avoid.
• Hide the downside. A lender’s calculator shows you a comfortable monthly payment. Ours shows the lifetime interest behind it, the risk a lower payment can hide, and the cases where borrowing costs you more, not less.

Why this matters for borrowing

Debt decisions are unusually easy to nudge. A slightly lower monthly payment feels like a win even when it stretches a loan for years and costs thousands more in interest; moving credit-card debt onto your house lowers the rate while quietly putting your home at risk. Tools built by companies that profit when you borrow are under constant pressure to emphasise the reassuring number. Independence is what lets these tools show the whole picture instead.

That’s the entire value of the site, and it is why the funding model is written down here in public. If you ever think a calculator is nudging you rather than informing you, that’s a bug — tell us, and we’ll fix it. You can read more about who runs the site on the about page.