AI for Business Calculator

A free web calculator that walks a service business through a short assessment and estimates the hours and labor cost it could save by automating one workflow.

Live at ai4bizcalculator.online. Built by Epiphany Dynamics.

Why this exists

Most automation pitches ask an owner to accept the savings on faith. This calculator replaces the pitch with the owner's own numbers: their industry, their volume, their hourly staff cost, and the workflow they want to stop doing by hand.

Quickstart

Requires Node 22 or newer.

npm install
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:4321/calculator and answer the questions. The report is computed in the browser and appears as soon as the last question is answered, so you reach a real result in a couple of minutes.

Other commands:

Command	Action
npm run build	Production build. Runs scripts/gen-llms-txt.mjs first.
npm run preview	Serve the built site locally.
npm run gen:llms	Regenerate public/llms.txt on its own.

No environment variables are needed for local development. The email function in api/capture.ts reads RESEND_API_KEY from the hosting environment.

How it works

The calculator runs entirely in the browser. There is no scoring service; the report is computed from static data files, then rendered by React components inside an Astro page.

• src/lib/questions.ts defines 16 base questions plus conditional questions that only appear for certain industries, such as appointment-based practices or field service businesses.
• src/lib/industryEconomics.ts holds a baseline financial model per industry: average transaction value, weekly volume, no-show rate, response-time lead decay, and hourly staff cost.
• src/lib/calculator.ts turns answers into hours lost per week and the cost of those hours, then estimates a return per automation.
• src/lib/automations.ts is a catalog of more than 35 automations, each tagged with the industries, pain points, and complexity it fits, followed by src/lib/scoring.ts, which matches the catalog to the answers and orders the top picks into roadmap phases.
• src/components/Calculator.tsx drives the phase flow: questions, a short calculating screen, then BusinessReport. The optional email step posts to api/capture.ts, a Vercel edge function that sends the report through Resend and notifies the owner.

Content and search: 57 posts live in src/content/blog, astro.config.mjs reads each post's frontmatter date so the sitemap emits a real lastmod instead of the build time, and scripts/gen-llms-txt.mjs regenerates public/llms.txt on every build.

Tests

One suite exists, in tests/faq-schema.test.ts. It covers the FAQ JSON-LD builder and checks that the blog route wires it into the page.

There is no npm test script yet, so run Node directly:

node --test --experimental-strip-types tests/faq-schema.test.ts

That reports 4 passing tests on Node 26.

Roadmap and known limits

• The FAQ suite has to be invoked by hand because package.json has no test script.
• Industry economics are static research baselines, not benchmarks from live customer data.
• The calculation runs in the browser only, so a partial assessment is never saved. A visitor who leaves midway starts over.
• Email capture depends on RESEND_API_KEY. Without it the report still renders, but nothing is sent.

License

MIT (see LICENSE).