Who Really Pays for "Free" Benefits Calculators? Here’s How We Fund Ours

Benefits calculators don’t build or maintain themselves. Somewhere behind every "free" tool, someone is paying the actual cost of the software, the legal review of the rules it applies, and the ongoing work of keeping it accurate as rates and thresholds change every April. The honest question worth asking about any free tool is simple: who’s actually paying for this, and does that change how it’s built or who it’s built for?

How some calculators in this market are funded

A number of established UK benefits calculators are licensed commercially to local councils, housing associations and charities, with published pricing for local authority customers running from a few thousand pounds a year up into the tens of thousands, depending on the size of the organisation and the services included. Those licence fees are ultimately paid from public funds (council budgets funded by taxpayers) or from charitable funds (donations and grants intended to help the people those charities serve). Neither of those is necessarily wrong — councils and charities clearly see enough value to pay for it — but it is public money and donor money paying a private software supplier, and that’s worth being visible about.

How we fund ours instead

Our free Benefits Calculator and Claim Pack tools cost nothing to any council, charity, or member of the public who uses them — and they’re not funded by taxpayer money, charitable donations, or costs baked into a bank’s or insurer’s operating charges passed on to customers. They’re funded the same way the rest of our business is: by the no-win, no-fee service we charge for when someone asks us to complete and submit their Attendance Allowance or Pension Credit application for them. If nobody ever converts into a paying client, the free tools still cost the person using them nothing.

• No licence fee charged to councils, charities or housing associations to use or link to our tools.
• No public money, grant funding or charitable donations used to build or run them.
• No fee passed through from a bank, insurer, debt collection agency or any other third party that might use eligibility data commercially.
• Funded entirely by our own paid application service — and only when that service actually succeeds for a client.

Why this distinction matters

We think it’s a genuinely fair question for any organisation to ask a benefits-tech supplier: who is this really free for, and who’s quietly paying for it? We’d rather answer that plainly than let "free" do the work of hiding where the money actually comes from. If you’re a council, charity or housing association currently paying a licence fee for a benefits calculator, we’re happy to talk about what a genuinely no-cost alternative could look like for your residents.