About Toolixa
Free material calculators built on real numbers, for people ordering from a supply yard rather than guessing.
Who we are
Toolixa is run out of Houston, Texas, and everything here is built for the way material is sold in the United States. That means cubic yards and tons rather than cubic metres, pallets sized the way American sod farms ship them, and seeding rates that follow US extension programme guidance.
You can reach us at [email protected].
Why this site exists
If you have ever tried to work out how much mulch or gravel a job needs, you have probably hit the same wall. Half the calculators online belong to a local supply yard and exist to capture a quote request. The other half are generic pages on enormous calculator sites where every material is treated as if it weighs the same.
Neither gets you the number you actually need, because the number depends on details those pages do not ask about. What type of mulch. Whether the stone gets compacted. What pattern the pavers are going down in. Whether you are buying bags or a bulk delivery, and at what point one becomes cheaper than the other.
Toolixa is an attempt to build the version that asks the right questions and shows its work.
Where the numbers come from
Material densities are typical delivered values, expressed as a working range rather than a single constant. Bulk material is a natural product and its weight moves with moisture, screen size and how long it has been sitting outside, so a figure presented to three decimal places would be false precision.
The ranges here reflect what supply yards and material producers publish for their own products, cross checked across multiple sources. Where a figure is contested or varies a lot regionally, such as how many square feet a pallet of sod covers, the calculator lets you enter your supplier's actual number instead of assuming ours.
Seeding rates follow what university extension programmes publish, since those are the most reliable public source for species specific rates in the United States.
How the math is checked
Every calculation on this site runs through a shared library that is covered by an automated test suite. The expected values in those tests were worked out by hand first, then asserted against the code, including the awkward edge cases like rounding bag counts up, subtracting the inner circle from a ring shaped bed, and applying compaction only to materials that genuinely compact.
The same code that passes those tests is the code that runs in your browser. There is no separate simplified version behind the form.
What these are and are not
These are planning estimates. They are good enough to order material against, to sanity check a contractor quote and to budget a project. They are not engineering calculations.
That distinction matters most on retaining walls. Any wall over about four feet of exposed height, or any wall with a driveway, pool or slope above it, needs a design from a licensed engineer and almost always a permit. The calculator will tell you when you are in that territory, and at that point it has done its job by sending you to someone qualified.
Cost
Everything here is free and there is nothing to sign up for. The site carries advertising, which is what pays for building and maintaining it. We do not sell materials, we are not affiliated with any supplier, and no calculator result is weighted toward any particular product or brand.
Corrections
If a figure looks wrong, or your yard uses a convention we have not accounted for, please say so. Regional practice varies more than most national sites acknowledge, particularly around pallet sizes, block dimensions and what a given aggregate is called. Corrections from people who order this stuff weekly are genuinely useful. The contact page is the place for that.