Every tool on this site is arithmetic you could do on paper. That is the point. None of them contain a projection, a ranking or a hidden model of player quality — you supply those numbers, the calculator does the part people get wrong, and the formula is printed next to the answer so you can check it or rebuild it in a spreadsheet.
What each one does
| Tool | You supply | It returns |
|---|---|---|
| Replacement level finder | Team count and starting slots | The baseline rank at each position |
| Player value comparison | Two projections and two baselines | Value over replacement for each, and the gap |
| Auction budget allocator | League size, budget, roster and starting spots | Real maximum bid, starter budget, price per slot |
| Playoff odds | Weekly average and spread, games, wins needed | Per-week win probability and season odds |
| Waiver budget planner (below) | FAAB budget, spend to date, weeks left | What a bid costs you in future flexibility |
The first two are the draft-preparation pair, and they run in that order: find your baselines, then rank against them. The auction allocator converts that ranking into money. Playoff odds is the reality check you run afterwards, when the roster is built and you want to know what it is actually worth.
Waiver budget planner
Free-agent acquisition budget — FAAB — is a fixed pot for the whole season, usually 100 units, spent in blind bids. The bids themselves are a judgement call. What is not a judgement call is what a bid costs you: every unit spent in September is a unit unavailable in November, when injuries have thinned the pool and a usable starter is more expensive.
This works out that trade-off. It does not tell you what a player is worth.
The arithmetic, written out:
remaining = budget − spent
spendable = remaining − reserve
adds expected = waiver runs left × adds per run
average per add = spendable ÷ adds expected
after a bid = (remaining − bid − reserve) ÷ (adds expected − 1)
Two things fall out of it that are worth stating plainly. The first is that FAAB left over at the end of a season is worth exactly nothing, so a manager finishing with sixty units unspent has not been disciplined, they have declined to use a resource. The second is the opposite failure: spending most of the budget in the first fortnight, on players who looked essential because the season was three games old and every signal was noise. The variance page explains why three games tell you so little.
The reserve input is the deliberate middle. Hold back enough to cover one genuine emergency at the position where you are thinnest, treat the rest as money that must be spent, and the planner will tell you whether any individual bid sits inside or outside that plan.
What these tools deliberately do not do
They do not project players. Every calculator here takes projections as an input and none supplies them, because a projection is a claim about a coming season and this site does not make those — for the reasons set out on the about page.
They also do not hide their assumptions. The playoff model treats weekly scores as independent normal draws. The replacement level finder splits shared flex slots by starting demand unless you tell it otherwise. The auction allocator assumes a one-dollar minimum bid and that every roster spot must be filled. Each of those is stated on its own page, because an assumption you cannot see is the part of a calculator most likely to mislead you.
If one of them returns a wrong answer, tell us — with the inputs you used — and it gets fixed ahead of anything else.