About
About Stitchsums
The math behind your craft. A free, accurate suite of knitting and crochet calculators — built around correctness, accessibility, and respect for the people using them.
Stitchsums was originally built and launched as MathStitch in 2026; the name was changed to avoid confusion with a similarly-named competitor. The product, the math, and the people are unchanged.
What Stitchsums is
Stitchsums is a suite of small, focused calculators for knitters and crocheters. Cast-on counts. Row counts. Gauge conversion. Buttonhole spacing. Decrease distribution. Yardage substitution. Per-color yarn for tapestry, mosaic, fair isle, and stripe sequences. Hat crown decreases. C2C and graphgan stitch totals. Each one answers a specific question that’s easy to get wrong by hand and easy to get right with a sharp tool.
The whole site runs in your browser. The math doesn’t go to a server. There is no signup. There is no soft paywall on the calculators themselves — they are free, and they will stay that way.
Why Stitchsums exists
Pattern math is fiddly. It compounds — small rounding errors at the gauge step become noticeable across an entire sweater body. And the existing tools either ignore the problem (generic calculator apps), charge a recurring subscription for math that should be free, or bury it inside a sprawling chart editor that’s overkill for a quick sanity check.
Stitchsums starts from the other end. Each calculator is a tiny, single-purpose tool with its math unit-tested before it ships. Every calculator’s landing page explains the formula in plain English, so you can audit it yourself instead of trusting us. When a calculator returns a rounded number, it also shows the difference between what you asked for and what the rounding produced — so you can decide whether the gap matters for your project.
What’s different here
- Validated math. Every calculator on this site is backed by a unit-tested math module. “Verified by Stitchsums math” isn’t marketing — it’s how the codebase is structured. As AI features arrive, they’ll be built around the same math, never around an LLM guessing.
- Accessibility as a default, not a feature. The site is verified against WCAG 2.2 AA contrast requirements, supports full keyboard navigation, and includes a three-state theme toggle (System / Light / Dark). The palette and motion choices were made with neurodivergent makers in mind — warm darks instead of pure black, calm accent colors, no jittery animation.
- iPad-first responsive design. Most designers work on an iPad. The calculators are sized and structured to be used comfortably on touch screens, not retrofitted from a desktop layout.
- Plain-English explanation alongside every result. The calculators don’t just give you a number. They show what they computed, why it rounded that way, and what your tradeoff looks like.
What we won’t do
- No soft paywall on the calculators. The math is and stays free. When a Pro tier launches, it’ll cover save-and-share features, larger chart sizes, and AI assistance — never the basic calculator itself.
- No behavioral tracking. We use Plausible — an EU-hosted, cookie-free analytics service that records page visits in aggregate without identifying anyone. No retargeting pixels. No third-party ad tech. Full detail on our Privacy page.
- No buried affiliate links. When Stitchsums earns affiliate revenue, it’s disclosed at the link cluster and on our Affiliate Disclosure page. Affiliate relationships never change which calculators we ship or what they return for a given input.
- No AI-generated answers without math behind them. Future AI features assist with intent translation and explanation, but every numeric answer is computed by a deterministic math module, not by an LLM. This is the load-bearing distinction in our product strategy.
What’s coming
The current calculator suite covers the most common math questions in knitting and crochet pattern design. Active development is focused on:
- A free chart editor for tapestry, mosaic, c2c, graphgan, and cross-stitch — with per-color yarn output as a first-class feature, not an afterthought. Targeted for Phase 2.
- AI assistance built around the math — a way to describe a project in plain language and have the right calculator picked, run, and explained back. Phase 2 onwards.
- An embeddable widget so pattern designers and craft creators can put Stitchsums calculators directly on their sites or in their pattern PDFs, with their own branding. Phase 2 onwards.
- Multi-craft coverage. Knitting and crochet are the focus today; cross-stitch chart support is on the roadmap. Other counted-thread crafts (filet, hardanger) are candidates if there’s demand.
Who’s behind Stitchsums
Stitchsums is built by a solo developer who codes for a living and crafts for the rest of life. It’s a small, independent project — intentionally so. Small projects can stay honest about scope, keep prices fair, and ship thoughtful changes instead of churning features for the sake of churn.
If you’ve found a bug in a calculator, want a craft we don’t cover yet, or want to embed Stitchsums in your own designs, the contact details below reach a human (specifically, the human who wrote this site).
Contact
Email hello@stitchsums.com for product feedback, bug reports, partnership questions, press, or general hello. Replies come from a real person and may take a few days.
For the legal trio: see Affiliate Disclosure, Privacy, and Terms.