“What will this cost in ten years?” and “what will my cash be worth in ten years?” sound like the same question, but they’re mirror images — one multiplies by inflation, the other divides. Most tools quietly answer only one of them.
Our new inflation calculator puts both behind a single toggle. Enter an amount, a rate, and a horizon, and it tells you either the future price tag of what your money buys today, or what your money will actually be worth if it just sits there — restated in a plain-English sentence so there’s no ambiguity about which direction you computed.
The compounding is what surprises people: at just 3% a year, something that costs $1,000 today runs about $1,343.92 in a decade, while $1,000 in cash shrinks to roughly $744.09 of today’s purchasing power over the same stretch.
Results update as you type, your inputs live in the shareable link, and the page is honest about being a constant-rate model rather than a CPI lookup. Writing about prices or savings? The calculator is embeddable with one iframe.