Finally! After years of backburnering this task, I built a digital tool to help people decide where they fall on a sliding scale, and how their economic reality may compare to others they are trying to figure out how to share costs.

In the past, I’ve shared an article about sliding scale that’s remained wildly popular, a visual to help with assessing a sliding scale, and two years ago a community member offered to translate the visual into Spanish, both of which you can download here. 

But, words and PDFs can be hard to parse, and while they are conversation starters, they ~make people do math~ which few people like (it’s me, I like math).

So, I took best practices from years of consulting with partners and groups and building sliding scales and equity-adjusted shared cost plans to create a series of prompts which comprehensively assess someone’s experience, access, and roadblocks, and made a computer do the math. The less roadblocks and financial constraints you have, the lower your score, which puts you in a higher-paying part of the scale.

Plus: given the many privacy concerns out there, this tool doesn’t store or share any data – so if you want to use it with someone else, take a screenshot or fill it out together and look at your answers.

I have a form version of this for use with Ride Free clients, if you do want something that stores and shares data with you, that you can customize. Book consulting time to build it together if you like.

Check out the self-assessment tool here – looks like this:

USE AS YOU LIKE

You’re welcome to link to my calculator and use it for clients, group decisions, or out of curiosity. If you link to it, I simply ask you cite me.

And if you’re a supernerd like me and want to adapt this for your own needs, it’s on github. This is a single HTML file that has JS running the calculations – no db, email, or data collection; it is WCAG 2.1 AA compliant and optimized for SEO/AEO/GEO discoverability, because it’s 2026.