Free Tool
Has Your Lender Crossed the Legal Line?
Most states cap what a lender may charge, and the cap is almost never the number on your note, because fees, points and extension charges can count as interest too. This tool spreads them the way the statute does, shows your real all-in rate against your state's ceiling, and tells you plainly when the honest answer is that nobody can say yet. Your documents are read inside your own browser and are never uploaded.
Nothing is uploaded
Your file is read by code running inside your browser. There is no server to send it to and nothing stored anywhere to breach.
You confirm every number
The reader suggests figures and shows the line each came from. Nothing enters the calculation until you accept it.
It refuses rather than guesses
Where the statute has not been read and cited, this tool says so instead of handing you a confident number.
It checks its own arithmetic
The arithmetic here is a port of the tool our own analysts use. Add ?selftest=1 to this address and the page will check itself against that original, in front of you.
Check Your Loan
Start with a document if you have one, or skip straight to the numbers. Both paths reach the same place.
Read a document
optionalDrop a note, payoff statement or settlement statement here
PDF, Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx) or plain text, up to 25 MB. It stays on your device. A scan, a photograph, or the pre-2007 .doc and .xls formats cannot be read, and the page will tell you so rather than failing quietly.
Confirm what it found
Your loan
Your Result
Read the threshold question first. The arithmetic underneath it means nothing on its own.
That was your free file
One is on us, no signup and no email. A real file usually takes more than one pass: the contract rate and the default rate are different questions, and a figure often changes once you find the amendment that moved the maturity date.
$29 a month on Explorer covers five files a month here, and signs you in to the rest of Rippleffekt at the Explorer level.
Why This Tool Refuses More Often Than It Answers
A usury calculator that always returns a number is worse than no calculator, because the number is the thing people act on.
The ceiling is rarely one number
In Texas it moves weekly, inside a floor and a cap that the statute sets. A tool that quotes a single fixed percentage for a whole state is guessing, and the guess reads exactly like a fact.
An exemption is narrower than it sounds
Commercial borrowers are often told no ceiling applies to them at all. Read the chapter and an exemption usually lifts one specific restriction, not the ceiling. Getting that backwards invents a claim that does not exist.
Spreading decides the answer
The same fees can annualise at 7.2% over one year and 3.6% over a two year term. One of those crosses a ceiling and the other does not. The period is set by statute, not by whoever is doing the arithmetic.
The rate on the note is not the rate you pay
Lenders often accrue on the original face amount rather than the balance you still owe. On a loan we looked at in Houston that gap alone moved a stated 17.99% to an effective 21.67%.
What Happens to Your Documents
The short version is that nothing happens to them, because they never leave the device you are holding.
- No upload. The file is opened by a PDF reader that runs inside your browser tab. There is no request to any server carrying your document, so there is no copy of it anywhere but your own disk.
- No account, no email, no storage. We do not ask who you are to run this, and there is nothing retained to delete later.
- Suggestions, not extraction. The reader proposes figures with the surrounding sentence so you can see where each one came from. Nothing enters the calculation until you click it into a field you can edit.
- What it can read. PDF, Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx and .xlsm) and plain text, including CSV. Word and Excel files are unpacked using the browser's own decompression, so no extra software is involved.
- What it cannot, and will say so. Scans and photographs carry no text layer, and the pre-2007 binary .doc and .xls formats cannot be parsed reliably in a browser. Rather than returning fragments that look like data, the page names the problem and asks you to type the numbers.
- Anonymous usage counts only. We record that a calculation happened, the state, borrower type and purpose you picked from the dropdowns, and whether a file was read and in which format. Never a figure you typed, never a file name, never any part of a document.