Field note · July 16, 2025

Why Experiment Calculator works the way it does

Sample size before you launch, and a confidence interval after you stop. Both directions, with the assumptions written on the screen rather than buried in a footnote.

1 min read ·Visualization ·visualization

Every tool on this site runs in the page. No upload, no account, no server that could be reading your file. That constraint is not a privacy slogan — it is a design decision with costs, and Experiment Calculator pays them.

What it buys: you can drop a CSV with real customer data into it during a meeting and nothing leaves the machine. There is no data-processing agreement to sign, no question about retention, and no answer needed to "where does this go". For anyone who has tried to get a useful tool past a security review, that is the entire value proposition.

What it costs: everything has to fit in a tab, so there are row limits. The CSV parsing is ours rather than a well-tested server library, which means it handles the common cases and will surprise you on an exotic one. And there is no persistence — reload the page and you are starting again, because there is nowhere for state to live.

The trade only works because the datasets are small on purpose. That is not a limitation we worked around; it is the same decision made twice. A dataset small enough to reason about teaches better than one large enough to need infrastructure, and it also happens to fit in a browser.

A tool that requires a cluster teaches you about the cluster.

Experiment Calculator — Sample size before you launch, and a confidence interval after you stop. Both directions, with the assumptions written on the screen rather than buried in a footnote.

All seven tools are on the toolkit page, and every one of them reads the same dataset library.