Release Notes (Mar 2026)

[kazad]

The last few months I've been going wild on making changes for instacalc for the new beta.

• Beta preview: https://kazad-svelte-migration-revie.instacalc-svelte.pages.dev/
• Discord server: https://discord.gg/ADQ4BGXNaK (cozy, and getting great feedback)

The biggest changes:

Presentation mode

Instacalc is about making calculations easy: just type how you think, and you get answers. But next, you want to share them.

Presentation mode is about making a great-looking, easy-to-use calc based on what you typed:

The trick, though, is everything is plaintext! With some decorators, you can turn a regular calc into something shiny:

## Loan Parameters
home_price = 450000 // @label(Home Price) @prefix($) slider(100000, 1000000, 10000)
down_payment = 20 // @label(Down Payment) @suffix(%) slider(0, 50, 1)
interest_rate = 6.5 // @label(Interest Rate) @suffix(%) slider(1, 12, 0.25)
loan_term = 30 // @label(Loan Term) @suffix(years) slider(10, 30, 5)
---
## Loan Summary
down_payment_amt = home_price * down_payment / 100 // @label(Down Payment) @prefix($)
loan_amount = home_price - down_payment_amt // @label(Loan Amount) @prefix($)
monthly_payment = round((loan_amount * ((interest_rate / 100 / 12) * (1 + interest_rate / 100 / 12)^(loan_term * 12)) / ((1 + interest_rate / 100 / 12)^(loan_term * 12) - 1)) * 0.94355, 0) // @hero @label(Monthly Payment) @prefix($) @suffix(/mo) @note(30-year fixed at 6.5%)
total_interest = round(monthly_payment * loan_term * 12 - loan_amount, 0) // @label(Total Interest) @prefix($)
total_cost = round(loan_amount + total_interest, 0) // @label(Total Cost) @prefix($)
interest_ratio = round(total_interest / loan_amount * 100, 0) // @label(Interest Ratio) @suffix(%)
break_even = round(total_interest / loan_amount * 6.3, 1) // @label(Break-even) @suffix(yrs)

Things like @hero, @suffix, @prefix, @icon, /// markdown block, etc., can turn your calc into something great.

Developer changes

I want Instacalc to be lean and mean. (React was mean, but not lean.)

I've been doing a giant port from React to Svelte, and the differences are showing up.

Parser changes

On the backend, I'm supporting:

• Smarter parsing for numbers with commas. Previously, something like sum(1,2,3) was warning about sum((123)), since 1,2,3 => 123 when you ignore commas. (You'd have to do sum(1, 2, 3), with spaces.) Instacalc is now smarter about doing what you meant.

• I'm working on better multi-line handling for functions, if/else blocks, etc., so you can write

x = 1230
if (x > 10) {
"big" // treated as if on the first line of the block
} else {
"small"
}
r2

which gets treated as

x = 1230
if (x > 10) { "big" } else { "small" }




r2

Multiple lines which look like a consecutive statement get processed as a single line.

Explore mode

I want to have a great gallery of calcs to browse, save, and modify.

Integrated docs

Every website always has a separate help site (instacalc as well), but I want to play with better integrated help. AI-assisted coding makes things like this much easier.

Anyway, lots of work behind the scenes, enjoy!