About MileGrade
The whole cost of the drive.
MileGrade started at a gas pump, with a number that didn't mean anything. Fifty-eight dollars, most weeks, for a car that was already paid off. Somebody says an EV would be cheaper. Would it? That depends on how far you actually drive, what your utility charges at 11pm, and how long you plan to keep the car — and until you know all three, the fifty-eight dollars tells you nothing at all.
None of that math is hard. It is division, mostly.
What Eric couldn't find was a calculator willing to show him the division. The ones that ranked first wanted an email address, or buried the assumed fuel price and the assumed annual mileage somewhere he couldn't reach them, or handed back one confident number with a financing offer sitting underneath it.
So he built the missing half. MileGrade is a set of free, no-account-required tools that price a driving decision in the open: the formula printed on the page, every assumption exposed as an input you can change, and a named source for anything we didn't compute ourselves.
Eric builds and maintains MileGrade, writes its methodology sections, and reviews the figures that go stale — fuel prices move, tax credits expire, EPA test procedures get revised.
He is not a mechanic, a dealer, or an automotive analyst. The site is built so that doesn't matter. Nothing here asks you to take his word for what a car costs. It asks for your fuel price, your mileage and your rate, does the arithmetic in front of you, and prints the formula it used. If the formula is wrong, you can see that it is wrong. That is the whole design.
Part of the Veraino network of free websites.
How it works
Every tool on MileGrade is grounded in a documented, citable method — a published formula, an authoritative standard, or a well-established model. We don't approximate or invent numbers. If we can't cite a primary source for the logic, we don't publish the tool.
Here, an authoritative source is a published one: EPA fuel-economy ratings, IRS-published credit amounts and standard mileage rates, manufacturer specifications, lender-disclosed APRs. Anything that varies by driver — what you pay per gallon, per kWh, or per month — never gets baked in as a national average. It becomes an input. A tool that would have to assume one of those numbers on your behalf doesn't ship until it can ask you instead.
Our commitments
- Free, no sign-up required. Every tool on this site is free to use with no account, subscription, or paywall.
- We show our work. Every tool explains its methodology, cites its sources, and surfaces assumptions — so you can verify the logic, not just trust the output.
- Honest about limitations.Where precision is limited or assumptions are required, we say so. Tools compute; they don't replace professional judgment.
- Kept current.Tools that use figures that can change over time carry a “last reviewed” date and are treated as an ongoing maintenance responsibility, not a one-time build.
Get in touch
Questions, corrections, or suggestions: hello@milegrade.com. Eric reads every message personally.