Africa's everyday tools,
in one place.

Why we built Toolie

The internet has a thousand free calculators, planners, and explainers. Almost none of them are built for life in Southern Africa. They speak in dollars and yards, reference school systems and curricula nobody here uses, default to American customs rules and Northern Hemisphere seasons. When a parent in Mahikeng tries to help with Grade 4 maths, when a Grade 12 in Polokwane wants to know if their results are good enough for Wits, when a small trader anywhere in Southern Africa tries to work out the landed cost of a Shein order, the tools that come up first on Google were built for somebody else's life.

Toolie exists to close that gap, one well-made tool at a time. Each tool we build solves a real, specific, daily problem for people across South Africa and the wider SADC region. We aim for tools that are honest about their limits, plain in their language, and free of the dark patterns that make so much of the modern web exhausting to use.

What's actually live right now

The Parent Homework Helper takes any Grade R-7 CAPS homework question and explains the concept in parent-mode — what the question is asking, how to walk your child through it, where children typically get stuck, and a practice example to try together. It deliberately doesn't give a copy-paste answer, because handing your child an answer they don't understand helps nobody.

The APS Calculator + University Matcher turns Grade 12 marks into a clear picture of where a learner stands. Calculate your Admission Point Score, then see which of South Africa's top 10 public universities you actually qualify for, by faculty, with honest minimum and competitive thresholds. The accompanying AI explainer walks through what your score realistically means for engineering, health sciences, commerce, humanities, and other fields.

The Funded Learning Path matches students to the bursaries they may qualify for across 27 major South African funders — NSFAS, Funza Lushaka, ISFAP, Allan Gray Orbis, Mandela Rhodes, SAICA Thuthuka, and the major corporates from Sasol to Discovery to MTN. We then draft a starter motivation letter you can personalise, structured around the funder's stated values.

The Solar & Backup Power Decision Tool tells you exactly what size inverter and battery you need to survive load-shedding, recommends a system tier with realistic SA cost ranges (from R15,000 basic backup to R600,000 full off-grid), and gives you a checklist of questions to ask before you sign with an installer. The AI explainer covers SSEG registration, the SARS Section 12B tax rebate, insurance impact, and lithium versus lead-acid trade-offs.

The Shein, Temu & AliExpress Cost Calculator shows what your cross-border order will actually cost by the time it lands in South Africa — with SARS customs duty by category, the 15% VAT (which now applies to all imports since the 2024 de minimis removal), and your courier's handling fee. No more checkout-price surprises when the courier hands you the bill.

The Giving Matchmaker takes a different angle. Four quick questions about what you care about, and it matches you with real, vetted causes across South Africa, the wider African continent, South Asia, and Latin America. From GiveWell-recommended top charities to grassroots groups born in the communities they serve. Every match comes with a plain-language explanation of why it fits your values, so you can give with confidence rather than guesswork.

Made for here, designed for the future

Every Toolie tool defaults to South African realities first: Rand pricing, SARS tax rates, CAPS curriculum, the universities and bursaries that matter here, the courier and customs reality of buying online into the country. As we grow, we'll incorporate other Southern African countries' tax regimes and curricula — gradually expanding across the whole African continent. We'll also broaden the project's services portfolio over time, adding new categories of tools beyond the education and funding focus we've started with.

The tools are free for users. Always. To keep the lights on, we plan to display modest, non-intrusive ads and earn small affiliate commissions when a tool helpfully points someone toward a product they were already going to buy (a solar inverter, a bursary application service, a textbook). We will never charge users for the core tools, and we'll never sell your information. You can read the full detail in our Privacy Policy.

Built by one person, for many

Toolie is a small, independent project — not a venture-backed startup, not a big team, not a faceless content farm. It's built by Chipo in South Africa, working through the slow and careful process of turning useful ideas into real tools, on evenings and weekends. We answer our own emails. If you have ideas, complaints, a tool you wish existed for your specific situation, or you've spotted something we've got wrong, email us at hello@gettoolie.com. We read everything.

You can read more about the project, its values, and what's coming next on our About page.