Buy or Hire Calculator

An 18,000 machine, kept six years, worth 4,000 at the end, with 1,400 a year of running costs. That costs 4,503 a year to own before it does a single day’s work.

Hiring the same thing at 240 a day, you would need to use it 19 days a year before buying is the cheaper way of having it. Most people who buy use it far less than that, and almost nobody works the number out first.

The reason it goes wrong is depreciation. It is the biggest line on the page and it never leaves your bank account, so it never feels like money — 2,333 a year in this case, quietly, while the thing sits in the yard.

Finance is charged on the average capital tied up rather than on the full purchase price, because the money is released gradually as the thing loses value. Charging the whole price every year is the commonest mistake in this calculation and it makes hiring look better than it is.

The days you would actually use it is the only input that decides the answer, and it is a judgement rather than a figure. It is usually optimistic. The page asks for the honest number rather than the one that justifies the purchase, and shows the whole curve so you can see how much the answer moves.

It does not say owning is a mistake. There are good reasons to own that are not financial — having it on the van at seven in the morning, set up the way you like it, not depending on a hire yard in August. What the page does is tell you what those reasons are costing you a year, so you can decide whether they are worth it.

Save as many versions as you like and put any two side by side, figure against figure, with the better one on each line marked and the difference in its own column. That screen is the one that decides things, and it is the part a free calculator cannot do at all. Two machines, or the same one bought new against second hand.

One HTML file. No account, no subscription, no internet needed. Opens on Windows, Mac and Android; the readme explains the extra step on iPhone and iPad, where Apple blocks JavaScript in downloaded files and every tool of this kind is affected.

Everything lives in your browser on your device. Nothing is uploaded, which is why it works offline and why nobody else can see your figures — and it also means clearing your browsing data deletes it. The tool does not pretend otherwise: the header shows how long since your last export at all times, turns amber after three days and red after seven, and export is one click that produces a plain file you keep.