PayoutMath
Changelog

Updates

Every change to fee data, tax bands, calculators, or content is recorded here. An audit trail for the numbers you depend on.

Last updated 10 August 2026

How this works

When a platform changes its fees, when HMRC publishes new tax bands, when a calculator gets a new feature, when a reader spots a bug — every change shows up here, with the date and a one-line summary.

This isn’t a marketing blog. It’s an audit trail. Most weeks there’ll be nothing to report. When there is, you’ll find it here first.

2026

April

  • 2026-04-25 — Pre-launch: site reached 58 calculators across UK tax (14), platform fees (14), creator earnings (5 marketing-metrics + 5 streaming/creator), pricing & VAT (4), postage (2), KDP/POD (3), and earnings-goal calculators (FIRE + earn-to-quit + 4 wage). Glossary expanded to 38 terms. Build pipeline: 7 validation gates (locale, engine tests, worked-example reconciliation, render, post-render locale, link integrity, HTML hygiene). Currently 323 unit tests passing, 188 worked examples engine-reconciled.
  • 2026-04-25 — Forensic pre-launch QA pass: cross-link audit (zero broken internal references), title tag length audit (all under 65 chars), meta description audit (all under 165 chars), schema.org JSON-LD validated on every calculator page, PWA assets verified, sitemap completeness verified.

August

  • 2026-08-02 — GSC audit and fix: added a redirect for /hourly-to-salary-calculator/ (404 from an external inbound link) to the correct /hourly-to-salary-calculator-uk/ slug. Fixed 9 orphaned pages (Discogs fees, Whatnot fees, Wise transfer fees, postage guide, allowable expenses guide, simplified vs actual expenses, shipping supplies cost, podcast starter kit, ACX recording setup) that had zero or near-zero internal links and were showing as "Discovered/Crawled — currently not indexed" in Search Console — added them to the homepage category grid, llms.txt, and cross-linked them from related calculator pages.
  • 2026-08-10 — GSC follow-up: 16 more 404s traced to the same root cause as the Aug 2 fix — payoutmath.com's cross-site links point to this site's calculator slugs without the -uk suffix. Added 301 redirects for all 16 (margin, TikTok creator rewards, overtime, Stripe, Amazon FBA, YouTube RPM, Findaway Voices, Apple Music royalty, Ko-fi, PayPal, Etsy, Depop, markup, Amazon KDP royalty, eBay). 4 further 404s from the same sibling-site source (CAC calculator, 1099-K checker, compound interest calculator, net profit margin calculator) have no UK equivalent page on this site and were left as-is — that's a payoutmath.com linking bug, not something fixable here. The 9 pages fixed on Aug 2 are confirmed live and internally linked; Search Console just hasn't recrawled/indexed them yet, which is normal lag.
  • 2026-08-10 — Added GA4 affiliate-click event tracking sitewide (new /static/js/track.js, included on all 78 pages). Every click on an Amazon, AWIN, or CJ link now fires an affiliate_click event with network, merchant, and page path — GA4 had zero visibility into which pages or networks actually drove clicks until now. No markup changes needed on existing cards. Sitemap lastmod bumped to reflect the sitewide change.
  • 2026-08-10 — Deep-verification sweep against MASTER_UPLOAD v5.49: (1) realigned the affiliate_click GA4 event schema to the portfolio-canonical field names (link_domain, link_url, link_text, page_path) so future cross-site GA4 reporting is consistent; (2) added a missing BreadcrumbList schema block to /cookie-policy/ (the one page sitewide that lacked it); (3) fixed a real bug found via Search Console position data: /youtube-rpm-calculator-uk/ and /apple-app-store-fee-calculator-uk/ both had malformed meta description tags (an unclosed quote had spliced two description strings together into invalid HTML) on the description, og:description, and twitter:description tags — both pages rank on page 1 (positions 8.6 and 15.1) but were converting at or near 0% CTR, consistent with Google truncating or ignoring a broken snippet. Confirmed no other page on the site has the same malformed pattern.
  • 2026-08-10 — Rival-comparison pass across every page on the site (8 topic clusters researched against real page-1 competitors, UK-specific where possible): added the missing "About this calculator" byline to /whatnot-fee-calculator-uk/, /discogs-fee-calculator-uk/, /simplified-expenses-vs-actual-uk/, and /uk-self-employed-allowable-expenses/ — the only 4 pages sitewide that lacked it, now consistent with the other 73. Added UK "pay rise" spelling alongside the existing Americanism "pay raise" in the title, meta description, H1, and lede on /pay-raise-calculator-uk/, since that's the dominant UK search term for the same page. Full per-cluster competitor findings (which rivals are realistically beatable "Tier 2" vs. which are entrenched "Tier 1", and page-specific content gaps) reported to the owner separately — most of the identified gaps (worked-example blocks, comparison tables, reviewer bylines with real credentials, feature parity items) are genuine content builds queued for a future session, not mechanical fixes.
  • 2026-08-10 — Follow-up on the rival-comparison pass: added 3 worked-example blocks to /wise-transfer-fees-uk/ (the one page in the payment-processor cluster that had numbers only inline in FAQ answers, not a dedicated example block like every sibling page) — used figures already published on the page, nothing new introduced. Also re-checked a hypothesis from the creator-platform cluster report that /patreon-fee-calculator-uk/, /kofi-fee-calculator-uk/, /gumroad-fee-calculator-uk/, and /youtube-rpm-calculator-uk/ might have an indexing/internal-linking bug (good content, allegedly invisible in search) — real Search Console data shows this was wrong: all 4 are indexed and receiving real impressions (Ko-fi position ~15, Patreon ~25, Gumroad ~13 with the best CTR in the cluster, YouTube RPM position ~9/page 1). No indexing bug exists; those positions are normal outcomes of real competition, and YouTube RPM's issue was the meta-description bug already fixed above.
  • 2026-08-10 — Major pricing update to /royal-mail-click-drop-calculator-uk/ (the site's single highest-traffic page — 22k+ impressions over 6 months) using Royal Mail's official Online Price Guide, valid from 3 August 2026, supplied directly by the owner. Two real problems fixed, not just stale numbers: (1) every tariff was out of date (last verified 25 April 2026, before Royal Mail's price rise); (2) the underlying pricing model was structurally wrong — Tracked 24/48 were priced by weight alone, but Royal Mail actually prices Tracked services by item format (Large Letter / Small Parcel / Medium Parcel) as well as weight, each with its own curve. Rebuilt the calculator's fee schedule as separate per-format Tracked services to match reality, and added Medium Parcel (2-20kg) coverage that didn't exist before. Also corrected the site's "Click & Drop offers ~5% off counter rates" framing throughout the page (hero copy, article body, FAQ, schema, and a now-removed discount toggle) — Royal Mail's own Online Price Guide confirms these ARE the final Click & Drop prices already, so modelling a further discount on top was double-counting; Click & Drop's real remaining edge is Tracked 24/48 access (not sold at the counter) and online-only pricing on some services. One genuinely useful finding from the real numbers: Tracked 24/48 is now cheaper than the untracked equivalent at several weights, which flips a "common mistake" the page used to warn about into a positive recommendation — updated accordingly. Verified the new fee schedule against a standalone simulation of the calculator's own selection logic across 7 weight/format scenarios before shipping.
  • 2026-08-10 — Named the site's author for the first time: replaced the anonymous "Maintained independently" byline (62 pages) and the "an independent maker" footer credit (76 pages) with Jordan Morley, the person who actually builds and maintains this site. No professional credential is claimed anywhere — the byline states real, general experience (years selling online and creating content across multiple platforms) without naming specific platforms per the owner's preference. /about/ rewritten in first person to introduce Jordan Morley directly and now carries a Person schema block. This is a trust-signal improvement flagged in the rival-comparison research (named authorship is one of the few things almost every competitor still lacks) — it does not by itself close the gap on the tax-specific pages against accountancy-firm rivals, which would need a credentialed reviewer, not just a name.
  • 2026-08-10 — Wired student loan repayment into /multi-platform-tax-aggregator-uk/, the money page's first use of data that was already present in its calc-data JSON but unused in the UI. Added a plan selector (Plan 1, 2, 4/Scotland, 5, Postgraduate) and a new result row showing the annual repayment, calculated on total income (PAYE + combined side-hustle profit) above the relevant threshold, clearly labelled as due separately from the Self Assessment total above it. The underlying engine change is additive and scoped only to the money page's own calculation function, so it can't affect any other calculator on the site sharing the core tax engine. Thresholds/rates (2025/26) match the ones already published on /earn-to-quit-job-calculator-uk/. Verified against a standalone simulation across 5 income/plan scenarios, including an exact-threshold edge case, before shipping. The page's self-flagged caveat list updated to drop "no student loans" now it's covered — CGT, property allowance, dividends, savings interest, HICBC and pensions remain explicitly out of scope for now (also present in the page's underlying data as unused fields, but each needs its own careful build, not a rushed one).
  • 2026-08-10 — Added a "reverse mode" to /discogs-fee-calculator-uk/: enter a target profit instead of a listing price, and the calculator works out what to list the record at to hit it after Discogs' 9% fee (incl. the £150 cap on high-value items) and PayPal's 2.9% + £0.30 processing. This was the standout feature flagged in the rival-comparison research — the strongest realistically-beatable competitor in this cluster (feecalculator.us) has it and this site didn't. Implemented as a numerical solver (bisection) reusing the exact same fee-calculation code as the forward direction, so it can't drift out of sync with the real fee schedule, then verified against a standalone Python re-implementation across 4 scenarios including one that lands in the £150 cap region. The underlying engine (platform_fee_v1) is shared by 21 pages; the new logic is gated on a form field that only exists on this one page, and the one existing call site that drives all 21 pages' normal calculations is provably unchanged (no second argument passed) — confirmed no other page has the trigger field before shipping.
  • 2026-08-10 — Re-audited every page directly (not trusting the earlier AI-research report, which had already been found wrong once this session) for missing worked examples and competitor-comparison tables, then built the genuine gaps: (1) added worked-example blocks to /discogs-fee-calculator-uk/ and /whatnot-fee-calculator-uk/, the only two true calculator pages that lacked one — reused figures already stated in each page's own body copy, plus a new £150-fee-cap example for Discogs and a Coins & Money category example for Whatnot; (2) added a "how it compares to other resale platforms" table to /etsy-fee-calculator-uk/, /ebay-fee-calculator-uk/, /depop-fee-calculator-uk/, and /vinted-profit-calculator-uk/, cross-linking all four and built from each platform's own already-published fee schedule on this site (Etsy £4.78/14.3%, eBay private seller £0/0%, Depop £1.27/3.8%, Vinted £0/0% — all on a same £30 item + £3.50 shipping order for direct comparability); (3) converted the existing TikTok-vs-YouTube bullet list on /tiktok-creator-rewards-calculator-uk/ into a proper comparison table and added the same table to /youtube-rpm-calculator-uk/, reusing the RPM-by-niche figures already in both pages' shared calc-data. No new figures were introduced anywhere — every number in every table traces back to data already published and verified elsewhere on the site.
  • 2026-08-10 — Finished wiring the money page's (/multi-platform-tax-aggregator-uk/) previously-unused property allowance and Capital Gains Tax data into the UI: added property income and capital gain input fields, plus a gain-type selector (standard rate vs Business Asset Disposal Relief). Both are computed independently of the existing Self Assessment total, clearly labelled as separate bills. Property income tax correctly stacks the taxable amount (after the £1,000 allowance) on top of existing income for band purposes, including pushing into the higher rate where applicable — implemented by calling the same personal-allowance/income-tax helper functions the shared tax engine already uses, rather than modifying that shared function (it's used by other pages). CGT banding always uses UK-wide thresholds regardless of the Scotland toggle, since CGT isn't a devolved tax — a real rule that's easy to get wrong. Verified against a standalone Python re-implementation across 5 scenarios (income under/over the property allowance, a scenario crossing into the higher rate band, a gain fully covered by the annual exempt amount, a gain split across both CGT bands, and Business Asset Disposal Relief), all matching by hand calculation. Dividends, savings interest, HICBC and pensions remain explicitly unmodelled — no verified rate or allowance data for them exists anywhere on this site, and this site doesn't guess figures it hasn't sourced.

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