Consumer society runs on nominal numbers. A raise feels like a raise even when it is a real-terms pay cut. TrueWorth is a free, open-source tool that makes that gap legible — what inflation quietly did to a salary, the opportunity cost of a purchase across asset classes, and the life of a dollar over a century — all on real U.S. BLS CPI data. I built the whole stack solo: the data pipeline, the inflation engine, the interface, the copy, and the legal pages. It is a mirror, not a lecture, and it is not financial advice.
A complete, free, open-source consumer-finance product built solo on real BLS CPI-U data (1913–2026). Four surfaces — Real Salary, Opportunity Mirror, Life of a Dollar, and a full Methodology page — in vanilla HTML/CSS/JS with no build step, behind a deterministic inflation engine that is unit-tested in Node. The discipline is the point: real data, labelled assumptions, no tracking, not financial advice.
value_B = nominal × CPI(B) / CPI(A); cash-erosion computed from real CPIPeople reason in nominal dollars because that is the number they are handed — the offer letter, the bank balance, the price tag. Inflation works in the gap between that number and what it buys, and the gap is invisible until someone draws it. TrueWorth draws it. A salary of $60,000 in 2019 that became $70,000 today looks like a 16.7% raise; measured against the same basket of goods it is a 10.4% real-terms pay cut. Nobody is lying to that person — the structure just never shows them the real number. The product’s entire job is to show it, calmly, with the data behind it one click away.
Enter a salary and the year it started; the tool returns the nominal change, the real change, and a one-word verdict — real raise, treading water, or real pay cut — computed from the CPI series, not a vibe.
Takes a past purchase and shows what the money could have become across asset classes. $1,000 in 2015 reads as ~$2,853 in stocks — or, held as cash, now buys only what $712 did. Returns are labelled long-run assumptions; the cash-erosion is exact CPI.
A century of purchasing power: $1 in 1913 carries the buying power of $33.64 today. Paired with a factual timeline of U.S. monetary history — the Fed’s founding, the gold pivot, the 1970s shocks, 2022 — computed from real CPI, not invented prices.
A full page naming every source and every assumption — the CPI series, the return models, the price anchors and where they came from. The audit trail is part of the product, not an afterthought.
The CPI series was not pulled from memory; it was sourced from the BLS CPI-U record and cross-validated against the monthly series before it was allowed into the engine — the deflation years (1921, the early 1930s, 1949, 2009) line up with the historical record, which is how you know the numbers are real. Where a true series did not exist — long-run asset returns — I refused to fake a backtest and instead used clearly-labelled long-run assumptions, stated on the page and again in the methodology. This is the same discipline behind the Finlogix methodology note and the data-verification record, pointed at a consumer product: a number a stranger reads on a free tool should be as defensible as one in front of a regulator.
Most personal-finance products either shame the user or bury them in a course. TrueWorth does neither. The voice is motivational and plain — it names what happened (“your raise lied to you”), shows the real number, and offers a small nudge rather than a syllabus. It is built to be glanced at and shared, not studied. That restraint is a product decision: the moment a free public tool starts lecturing or harvesting, people stop trusting it — and trust is the only thing a tool like this has.
TrueWorth is vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with no build step. The data ships as JS
globals so the tool runs straight from file:// with no server and no CORS; the inflation engine is
a pure, deterministic module that runs in the browser and in Node, so the maths is unit-tested rather than
trusted. The design system carries zero orphan classes across every page, the eight scripts all pass
node --check, and the whole thing is MIT-licensed and readable end to end. It is the same
full-stack ownership — data, engine, interface, copy, and legal — that lets one designer move like
a small team.
What it evidences: that I ship complete, real consumer products solo — not just institutional concepts — with the data integrity, product judgment, and full-stack execution to take an idea from a CPI table to a polished, shareable tool with its own methodology and legal pages. It is the consumer counterpart to the regulated-finance work: same honesty discipline, different audience.
What it deliberately does not claim: TrueWorth is self-initiated, not a client deployment with a user base; its asset-return figures are labelled assumptions, not measured outcomes; and it is not financial advice. Those limits are stated in the product itself — which is the point.
TrueWorth connects two threads that run through the whole portfolio: shipping zero-to-one consumer products solo, and holding every number to a verifiable standard.
Whole products taken from idea to working build by one person — data, engine, interface, copy, and the unglamorous legal pages.
Every number traceable to a source or a labelled assumption — the same standard whether it faces a regulator or a stranger on a free tool.