Price your work like it's a business, not a hobby

What this hub is

Creator Unit Math is a family of free, single-purpose unit-economics tools for one-person businesses, run by an independent developer (about). The directory above lists only what is actually deployed, which is one calculator today. The guides carry the margin and VAT math with the same discipline the tools use: every figure dated, sourced to the primary authority, and re-verified on a schedule documented in the methodology. No account, no paywall.

The premise is narrow on purpose. A one-person business runs on perhaps five recurring money decisions: what to quote, what to charge for a product, whether VAT applies, when to take the meeting, whether the project is worth the hours. Each of them is deterministic arithmetic over published rates once the inputs are honest. None of them needs a dashboard, a subscription, or a “creator OS”. What they need is the correct current figure (a platform’s real fee schedule, a real VAT threshold, a real tax rate) and the discipline to label everything else as an assumption. That is the whole product.

Start from your decision, not from the tool list

Quoting a new client? Your sequence is day-rate first, VAT posture second, calendar third. Run your fixed costs, target income and billable days through the day-rate calculator. It solves the gross daily rate that hits your net target under your country’s self-employed tax structure (10 EU/UK countries, dataset v2026.06, each row cited to the national tax authority). Then settle whether the quote is VAT-exclusive with a reverse-charge note (B2B buyer with a valid VAT number) or carries your domestic rate. The VAT guide draws that line in four steps. The day-rate guide covers the part the calculator can’t: defending the number when procurement pushes back.

Launching a digital product? Start from the take, not the sticker. The verified deduction stack on Gumroad is 10% + $0.50 platform fee, with 2.9% + 30¢ card processing as a separate line (both checked 12 June 2026 against the published pricing). Add a refund allowance you set yourself and a chunk of the sticker disappears before income tax. The margin guide walks the whole stack line by line, compares the platform trade-offs, and benchmarks the result against your day-rate so the launch competes honestly with billable hours (→ model your product margin).

First EU VAT question? Two facts resolve most cases. Selling through a merchant-of-record platform (Gumroad, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle MoR, Apple, Google)? The platform owes the VAT, not you. Selling direct as an EU-established business? Nothing changes until your cross-border digital revenue passes €10,000/year net. Past that, Union OSS gives you one quarterly return instead of 27 registrations. Non-EU sellers owe from the first sale via Non-Union OSS. The full decision flow covers the B2B reverse-charge and UK edge cases, with the caveat dates for the 2027 EU changes already marked.

How each decision is computed

Day-rate: the rule is (annual fixed costs + target gross income) ÷ billable days, with billable days realistically near 150 of 365 once weekends, holidays, sick days and admin come out. Every term is a client-visible line item — fixed costs from your own ledger, the gross-up from your country’s published self-employed rates — so the result is defensible in a negotiation rather than a vibe with a euro sign on it. Run your exact figure in the day-rate calculator (→ calculate your day-rate).

Margin: price the take, not the sticker. The deduction stack is the verified Gumroad platform fee (10% + $0.50), the separate card-processing line (2.9% + 30¢), and a refund allowance you set yourself, all benchmarked against your day-rate so a launch competes honestly with billable hours. The margin guide walks the stack line by line (→ model your product margin).

VAT: which compliance load applies depends only on how you distribute. Through a merchant-of-record platform (Gumroad, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle MoR) the platform owes the VAT; direct as an EU-established seller, nothing changes until cross-border digital revenue passes €10,000/year net, then Union OSS gives one quarterly return; non-EU sellers owe from the first sale via Non-Union OSS. The VAT guide draws the full decision flow.

Verified vs assumed: platform fees, the OSS threshold and the per-country tax structures are verified against the cited primary sources, with the dates printed where the figures are used. Refund rates, billable-day counts and cost ranges are assumptions: labelled as such in the guides, adjustable to your own numbers, and never dressed up with citations they don’t have. If you only do one thing here, compute your day-rate first. It is the opportunity-cost line that every other decision on this hub compares against, and it takes about two minutes in the calculator.

Hub questions, answered