What the tools can do
- Compute. Payment schedules, the FY2026 guarantee fee on any amount, the financed-versus-cash trade, 504 blended structures, first-year all-in cost. The math is deterministic and the inputs are yours.
- Explain. How rates are constructed, why fees are tiered, what underwriters actually weigh, and where applications fail. With sources and dates on every data-driven number.
- Prepare. A readiness profile across the factors lenders scrutinize, and a document checklist filtered to your situation, printable.
- Stay private. Everything runs client-side. Your numbers never leave the browser; there is nothing to leak because nothing is collected.
What the tools cannot do
- Approve or decline anything. Only a lender with delegated SBA authority (or the SBA itself, on non-delegated files) makes credit decisions. No calculator output is a pre-qualification, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
- Quote you a real rate. Rates are prime plus a lender-specific spread, set in a negotiation we are not part of. We model ranges from the published prime rate and say so on every page.
- Underwrite your file. The readiness check maps your answers to the factors lenders weigh. It cannot see your tax returns, your bank statements, or the three other applications you have in progress.
- Replace professionals. We are not lenders, brokers, accountants, or attorneys. Tax questions go to a CPA; deal questions go to an attorney; loan decisions go to lenders.
- Broker or sell your information. There are no lead forms here. Affiliate links, where they appear, are marked, and applying through one is entirely your choice.
Why we are strict about this
Loan shopping is a moment when people are stressed and optimistic at the same time, which is exactly when inflated promises do damage. A tool that hinted at approval odds would push owners toward borrowing they cannot carry, or away from deals they could carry. The estimate-and-prepare posture is not legal caution; it is the difference between useful and harmful.
What actually decides your loan
In practice: whether operations cover the payment with room to spare, how long you have been operating, the state of your personal credit, the equity you bring, and the paper trail behind all of it. Those are the levers, they are all documented across our guides, and they are all things you can strengthen before an underwriter ever sees the file. The readiness check is the fastest way to see which lever is yours to pull.
How the numbers on this site stay honest
Fee tables are versioned data files, cited to their source, stamped with a verification date, and computed by the calculators rather than hard-coded into pages. Prime rate carries its own date and source. When a fiscal-year rollover changes a table, the pages that cite it change with it, and the update log on the FY2026 fees page records when. If you ever find a number here without a date, treat that as a bug and tell us.