Ballpark Math

Every real decision runs on numbers nobody actually knows. What the renovation costs. How many hours the side project eats. Whether the raise covers the higher rent. Most of us handle this two ways, both bad: punch one made-up number into a calculator and treat the false precision as an answer, or build a spreadsheet with three tabs you'll never open again. Ballpark is the missing middle. Write what you actually believe — "somewhere between 18 and 26 thousand" — and it hands back a range, a middle, and a picture. Write ranges as easily as numbers Type quoted = $18k to $26k. The to key is the first thing on the keyboard. Names can have spaces, so hours per week is just a variable. It never pretends to know more than you do The answer is shown to the width of its own uncertainty. No $47,382.19 when the real answer is "somewhere in the twenties of thousands". Find out what's actually worth finding out The part that changes what you do next: Ballpark ranks every unknown by how much of your uncertainty it causes. "Pinning down the contractor's rate would cut your range by more than half." That's the sentence that tells you what to go research. Units that catch your mistakes Dollars per hour times hours gives you dollars. Dollars plus hours is an error, not a wrong number. Twelve worked examples to start from Can I afford this house? What should I charge? Will the renovation blow up? How long will my savings last? Is the side project worth quitting for? Each one is written out with the reasoning, not just the arithmetic. Your documents are just text files Plain UTF-8, visible in the Files app. Open them anywhere, back them up, keep them long after you've stopped using this app. Ballpark works entirely on your device. No account, no network, nothing collected. Every feature is in the free tier — the engine, all twelve templates, units, the detail view and the sensitivity view. Ballpark Pro is a one-time purchase, not a subscription, and the only thing it changes is the three-document limit. Nothing is held back to sell back to you.