About Landed Cost Calculator
I built this calculator because I kept doing the same sums by hand. My background is in trade finance — issuing and checking Letters of Credit, releasing goods against Trust Receipts, and the long back-and-forth of supplier correspondence where an Incoterm, a payment term, or a misread valuation clause quietly changes what a shipment actually costs. Alongside that I've imported as an e-commerce seller: placing orders, arranging freight, and paying the duty and GST bills myself. So the questions this tool answers — is my price FOB or CIF? does freight go into the duty base or the tax base? what does DDP really cover? — aren't abstract to me. They're the things I've had to get right before money moved.
Why getting it right matters
Most "duty calculators" multiply a value by a rate and stop. The expensive mistakes live in the structure, not the rate: which Incoterm your supplier quoted, whether the destination charges duty on FOB or CIF, and how the import tax base is built up (Australia, for instance, adds freight and insurance back into the GST base even though duty excluded them). Get the base wrong and you can be off by a fifth of the order value — real money, every shipment. This tool decomposes the Incoterm, picks the correct duty base for the destination, and shows every line so you can see exactly where the number comes from.
Free, and it never leaves your browser
There's no login, no account, and no server. Every calculation runs entirely in your browser — your goods values, supplier prices, and freight figures are never uploaded anywhere. Live exchange rates are the only thing fetched, from a keyless public source.
Keeping the rates honest
Customs rules change, so I treat every figure as "verify current." Each country's rates, thresholds, and fees live in one place, carry a dated "last verified" stamp checked against the official customs authority — the Australian Border Force, US Customs and Border Protection — and are clearly sourced. Anything pre-filled is a starting estimate you can overwrite. The tool gives you the correct method; you confirm the rate against the authority before you rely on it.