About & privacy

Why it exists

The things you have to work out here are scattered all over the place. Your electricity tariff is a PDF on a municipal site. Your licence fee is on a provincial department's page, if you can find it. The fuel price comes out once a month as a set of documents. And most calculators online run on dollars and overseas lending rules, so they're no help with any of it.

This is one place to do those sums, in rands, with the rules that actually apply. We'd rather build a few tools properly than a lot of them badly, so the list grows slowly.

Mzansi Tools is an independent South African project, run by its owner. It is not a government service, bank or municipality.

Contact & corrections

Spotted a number that looks wrong, found a newer official source, or have feedback about a tool? Email feedback@mzansitools.co.za. Tell us which page and figure you checked, and include the official source link if you have it.

Do not send ID numbers, account numbers, bank details, passwords or login information. We do not need them to investigate.

Privacy

The sums happen on your own phone or computer. We don't ask for your name, your account number or your contact details, and there's nothing to sign up for. Sharing your location is optional and only ever used to fetch the weather for that spot — searching for your town works just as well.

We use Cloudflare Web Analytics to count visits and page views and to understand, in aggregate, which pages are used and how they perform. Cloudflare states that Web Analytics does not collect or use visitors' personal data and does not track individual users across its customers' Internet properties. We don't use the data to build profiles or follow anyone across sites.

If you email us, ordinary email shares your address and whatever you write. We use it only to read, check and reply to your message. We do not add it to a mailing list, publish it or use it for marketing. Spam, abusive messages and messages containing unnecessary sensitive details may be deleted without a reply.

We delete a feedback email within 90 days after the question or correction is closed. We may keep a non-personal note of the correction, its official source and what changed so the same issue can be checked later; that note does not include your email address or message.

Your light or dark mode choice is saved only on this browser. We don't send it to analytics.

Financial information

Our financial tools give you general information, estimates and scenario comparisons. They aren't financial advice, quotes, credit approval or offers, and we don't recommend products, providers or financial decisions. Check the final figures and terms with the relevant provider before making a decision.

It stays free

Free to use, with nothing to sign up for and no account to make. That part isn't changing.

Running it does cost something, though. If that ever needs covering, it'll be something small and out of the way — a contribution option, or plain advertising kept well away from your results. We'll say so on this page before it happens, we won't track you around the internet to do it, and nobody paying us will ever change a number or which tool you see.

Credits

Icons are from Lucide, used under the ISC licence. Type is set in Inter, used under the SIL Open Font Licence. Weather and place data come from Open-Meteo; the prime rate comes from the South African Reserve Bank. See where our numbers come from.

Photographs

The Durban harbour photograph on the home page and sharing preview is by South African Tourism, from Wikimedia Commons, used under CC BY 2.0.

The Table Mountain photograph is by Romaine, from Wikimedia Commons, released under CC0. Both photographs are cropped and scaled to fit. The sharing preview also adds a dark tint and Mzansi Tools text over the Durban photograph.

Load shedding

We'll add load-shedding schedules when we find a source that's reliable and that we're allowed to republish. Getting it right matters more than having the feature.