About this site
What it is, who it is for, and how it stays honest.
Cliff & Vest publishes free calculators for equity compensation — the tax that arrives with incentive stock options, restricted stock units, and the decisions people have to make about them under time pressure and without good information.
Who this is for
People who have been granted equity by their employer and have discovered that the tax treatment is considerably more complicated than the grant letter suggested. Engineers at private companies weighing whether they can afford to exercise before their options expire. Employees at public companies who have just watched a vest disappear into withholding and want to know whether that was enough. Anyone who has been told to "talk to your accountant" and would like to arrive at that conversation already understanding the shape of the problem.
The calculators assume you know your own numbers — your strike price, your 409A valuation, your salary — and nothing else. They do not assume you know what a preference item is, or why your employer withheld 22%.
How it is published
The site is written and maintained editorially rather than under a personal byline. That is a deliberate choice, and it costs something: in financial content a named expert with verifiable credentials carries weight that an organisation name does not.
What stands in its place is process rather than reputation. Every figure is checked against hand-verified test cases on every deploy, the method behind each number is shown on the page, every rate traces to the statute or to the IRS, and the whole verification apparatus is described and its output published at how we verify. Where a figure has not met that standard, the option that would use it is withheld rather than guessed. You do not have to take our word for any of it, which is the point.
How it is funded
By advertising, and by nothing else. There is no paid tier, no email capture, no lead-generation form, and no arrangement with any financial adviser, brokerage, or option-financing company. Nobody pays to be recommended here, because nothing here is recommended.
Advertisements are clearly separated from the calculators and never placed between your inputs and your results. If that ever stops being true, it is a mistake and we would like to hear about it.
What we do with your data
Nothing, because we never receive it. The calculators run entirely inside your browser as static JavaScript. Your salary, your grant size and your strike price are never transmitted, never logged, and never stored — you can disconnect from the network after the page loads and everything still works. See the privacy policy for the full detail, including what third-party advertising does involve.
Corrections
If a number here is wrong, that is the most important thing anyone can tell us, and we would rather hear it bluntly than not at all. Get in touch. Corrections are made promptly and the verification date on the affected page is updated when they are.