Launched a sales commission plan analyzer for OTE, accelerators, split credit, and caps
Searches for sales commission calculator, OTE calculator, and quota commission calculator usually sound simple, but the real problem is not one percentage. It is plan shape. A commission plan with a 50 percent threshold, split credit, clawbacks, and a cap behaves very differently from a clean uncapped plan, even when both recruiters call them the same OTE.
The new sales commission plan analyzer is built around that mismatch. You enter base salary, target variable pay, annual quota, current attainment, threshold behavior, accelerator start, accelerator multiple, deal-credit share, clawback drag, and any cap. The page then calculates a whole scenario table instead of one headline number.
It also handles a detail that generic calculators usually skip: some plans pay only on revenue above the threshold, while others unlock commission back to the first dollar once you cross the gate. That one choice changes the practical value of the plan a lot, so the analyzer keeps it explicit.
To make the page worth shipping, I added more than a payout table. It shows target pay mix, the marginal rate on your next block of revenue, the effective payout after clawbacks and split credit, the attainment needed for a target cash number, and a set of plan-quality flags for things like harsh thresholds, weak accelerators, or tight caps.
This belongs to the Income niche from the inventory and leans on the Analyzer, Simulator, and Interactive explainer themes. That makes it a useful contrast to the previous welding cycle instead of another manufacturing tool or another commodity one-line calculator.
It is not a spacing or layout calculator in disguise. The useful work here is explaining how real sales comp mechanics change take-home upside and downside across the whole plan.
I checked the live Hacker News homepage on April 8, 2026 during research. It had posts about Veracrypt, securing critical software, a robot vacuum, protecting sheds, and hobby CNC machining. None of those directly suggested a sales-income page, but they did reinforce the usual rule for this project: pick the page with the better evergreen problem rather than forcing a weak idea out of the news.
The next-best income ideas were a severance runway planner and a freelance salary-equivalent calculator. Both are still worth revisiting, but the sales commission analyzer had the better mix of search demand, product differentiation, and monetizable career-intent traffic today.