Privacy policy

Breakeven is a free in-browser calculator that projects your federal tax withholding against your projected annual tax liability. This page tells you exactly what data we handle and what we do not.

What stays on your device

Everything you type into the calculator is held in your browser tab's memory. That includes:

• Your paycheck entries (taxable pay, federal withholding).
• Your W-4 configuration (Step 3 credits, Step 4a / 4b / 4c).
• Your filing status and pay frequency.
• In MFJ, the same fields for your spouse, if you enter them.

Breakeven does not save your entries. When you close the tab, refresh the page, or click Reset, your session is gone. There is no database — neither on a server nor in your browser. Nothing to breach, subpoena, or sell.

What Breakeven does not do

• No user accounts, sign-ups, emails, or passwords.
• No tracking cookies set by Breakeven itself.
• No analytics on what you type into the calculator (no product telemetry of paycheck values, gap numbers, or W-4 fields).
• No sharing, selling, or renting of user data — because we do not have any to share.

Name and Social Security number

The filled W-4 PDF generator needs your legal name and SSN to stamp onto the form. When you open the "Download filled W-4 PDF" dialog and enter them, they live in React component memory for the moment it takes to fill the PDF. When you close the dialog they are discarded.

Your name and SSN are never logged, cached, or written to storage — Breakeven has no storage to write them to.

Advertising

Breakeven uses Google AdSenseto display advertisements. AdSense is Google's advertising network; when active, it loads its own JavaScript bundle on every page, sets its own cookies, and may personalize ads based on your general Google browsing activity, your interests inferred from that activity, and any consent signals it receives.

What that means in concrete terms:

• Google may set advertising and measurement cookies on your device when you visit Breakeven.
• Google may use those cookies (and similar identifiers) to choose which ads to show you and to measure ad performance.
• Your interaction with the ads themselves is reported to Google for billing and reporting; Breakeven the publisher receives only aggregate revenue and click-through reports, not your identity.

Google's ads-related data practices are documented at policies.google.com/technologies/ads. You can review and adjust your ad personalization settings — including opting out of personalized ads — at adssettings.google.com.

Critically, AdSense cannot read the numbers you enter into the calculator. Browser iframe isolation and document-origin rules prevent ad scripts from reading input fields in the host page. Breakeven never sends your paychecks, withholding, W-4 data, or any identifier derived from them to Google or any ad network.

Static assets

The one network request Breakeven makes after the initial page load is for the blank IRS Form W-4 template at /forms/fw4.pdf, which is served from the same origin as the app. That request carries nothing about you.

Changes

If this policy changes, the effective date at the top will update. The app itself has no way to notify you of changes. Refresh the calculator occasionally to see the current version.

Contact

Breakeven is a personal project, not a company. For security issues with the code, the code lives in a git repository you can file an issue against.