There is one question that comes up more than almost any other in daily life. You finish a meal, the bill arrives, and someone at the table says it. You climb out of an Uber and your thumb hovers over the app. You’re sitting in the salon chair watching your stylist finish up and you’re already doing the mental arithmetic.
How much should I tip?
It sounds simple. It isn’t. The answer changes depending on the service, the country, the quality of the experience, and honestly how confident you feel about your mental maths at that particular moment. We’ve Googled it more times than we’d like to admit. We always land on a blog post from 2019 with seventeen paragraphs before the actual answer. Or a tip calculator that only handles restaurants. Or a chart that lists percentages with no context for what any of them actually mean in practice.
So we built our own. And we did it in under 24 hours.
A Tip Calculator – The Idea Was Personal
This wasn’t a calculated gap in the market. It came from genuine frustration. We are the people at the table doing the quiet maths. We are the ones second-guessing ourselves at the valet. We tip too much when we’re unsure because it feels safer, and occasionally too little because we misread the situation entirely.
We wanted one clean tool that answered the question properly. Not a blog post. Not a table you have to scroll through. A tool you open, tap a few things, and get a number. Done. Back to your evening.
Once we knew what we wanted to build, the question was how long it would take. The answer surprised even us.
Built in Under 24 Hours with Claude Code
We used Claude Code for this build. If you’ve read our piece on Crap Coffee, you’ll know we’ve used AI assistance to build full WordPress platforms from scratch. Hot Tip Calculator was a different kind of project. Leaner. Faster. A single HTML file rather than a full content management system.
Claude Code runs directly in your terminal and you work with it conversationally, exactly like chatting with Claude in a browser. You describe what you want, it builds it, you review it, you refine it. The back and forth is fast when you know what you’re building, and we knew exactly what we wanted.
The whole thing, from blank page to live site, took less than a day. That includes the design, all the calculator logic, the international section, the currency selector, the bill splitting, the Spanish version, and getting it live on its own domain. Less than 24 hours. We’re still a little surprised by that ourselves.
What the Tool Actually Does
Nine Service Categories
We didn’t want a restaurant-only calculator. Tipping happens everywhere and the norms are completely different depending on context. Hot Tip Calculator covers restaurants, bars, delivery, rideshare, salons and spas, tattoo artists, movers, hotels, and valet parking. Each one has its own percentage logic baked in because what’s appropriate for a sit-down meal is not what’s appropriate for someone who just carried your sofa up three flights of stairs in August.
The Experience Slider
This is the feature we’re most pleased with. A flat percentage calculator misses something important: the service you actually received. Outstanding service deserves more than a mediocre experience. The slider runs from Poor to Okay to Good to Great to Wow, and it adjusts the suggested tip accordingly. It also generates a short contextual note for each combination, so you’re not just getting a number, you’re getting a reason. Something like “20% is the comfortable norm. This is what good service deserves” or “Five star ride. Give five star money.” Small details, but they make the tool feel human rather than mechanical.
Tipping Around the World
This section came from a different kind of frustration. Tipping culture is not universal and getting it wrong in another country can range from mildly awkward to genuinely offensive. In Japan, leaving a tip can be seen as rude. In Australia, it’s genuinely optional. In South Africa, it’s expected and economically significant. In France, the service charge is already in the bill and most people don’t even know it.
We built a full international reference covering eighteen countries, each one colour-coded by status: Expected, Appreciated, Optional, Unusual, or Can Offend. Every entry expands to give you the actual context, not just a percentage, because context is what you actually need when you’re travelling.
Bill Splitting
Because someone always needs to split it. You can increase the number of people sharing the bill up to twenty, and the calculator immediately shows tip per person and total per person alongside the main figures. Clean, instant, no separate calculator required.
Currency Support
Eleven currencies available including USD, GBP, EUR, CAD, AUD, MXN, JPY, INR, ZAR, SEK, and CHF. The symbol updates live throughout the calculator as soon as you switch. It was a small addition that makes the tool genuinely useful for anyone outside the US.
Custom Tip Percentage
The preset buttons cover 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%, and 30%. But sometimes you want something specific. A custom input field lets you type any percentage you like. The presets and the slider all stay in sync with whatever you’ve chosen.
The Spanish Version
This one was important to us and it came together more seamlessly than we expected.
Spanish is the second most spoken language in the United States. Tipping culture in the US is particularly confusing for Spanish speakers who grew up in countries where it isn’t the norm. Mexico, most of Latin America, and Spain all have completely different expectations. We wanted to serve that audience properly.
The Spanish version lives at hottipcalculator.com/es/ and it’s a full translation, not a rough approximation. Every label, every tip note, every experience description, every country entry. The country list in the Spanish version is also reordered to lead with Spanish-speaking countries: Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and Spain appear first. The bill split reads “Solo tu” and “X personas.” The footer says “Sin matematicas. Sin drama. Solo propina.”
We also implemented hreflang tags correctly on both versions so Google knows these are intentional language variants of the same tool, not duplicate content. The search engine will serve the right version to the right audience automatically.
Claude Code handled the translation and implementation in one session. The quality was genuinely good. We didn’t have to go back and fix cultural missteps or awkward phrasing. It just worked.
The Domain
We registered hottipcalculator.com. Before we built a single line of code we checked the search volume on “tip calculator” and found it sitting at 100,000 to 1,000,000 monthly searches with low competition. That’s a significant keyword for a brand new domain to be targeting. The domain has both words in it. That matters for search.
We also checked “tip suggestion” separately. The three-month change on that phrase was plus 900 percent. Something is shifting in how people search for this information and we got there early.
The site is live, indexed by Google, running on HTTPS, and tracking visitors through Google Analytics. That all happened within the same 24 hour window as the build itself.
What It Cost
The domain was the only real expenditure. Everything else ran through infrastructure we were already paying for.
One HTML file. One domain. No plugins, no database, no WordPress, no monthly platform fees, no theme licence. The entire codebase is a single file you could read start to finish in twenty minutes. It loads fast, works perfectly on mobile, and does exactly one thing very well.
This is a different kind of build to Crap Coffee. That was a full community platform with map integration, user accounts, and a custom theme. This was a focused tool with a specific purpose. Both approaches have their place and AI assistance made both achievable without a development background.
Go Use It
Head to Hot Tip Calculator the next time you’re sitting across from a bill wondering what the right number is. Pick your service category, enter the amount, move the slider to wherever the experience actually landed, and get your answer. If you’re splitting, add the people. If you’re travelling, switch the currency.
If you’re a Spanish speaker or travelling to a Spanish-speaking country, try the full Spanish version.
No maths. No drama. Just tip.
More posts are coming covering the full Claude Code workflow, how we approach new tool ideas, and what we’re building next. Follow along.
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