We built ExactMelt: free melt-value calculators for gold, silver, platinum, palladium and coins

You're holding a gold chain from a drawer, or a jar of old silver dimes. A buyer offers you a number. Is it fair? To know, you need the weight, the purity, the spot price and some arithmetic in the right units. Scales read grams or pennyweight, spot prices are quoted per troy ounce, and a troy ounce is not the ounce in your kitchen. It's easy to get one step wrong.

So we built ExactMelt: a free site that does the arithmetic, shows its working, and then lets you compare the offer with the value of the metal.

What it does

• Pick the metal, enter the net weight and the purity, and get the fine metal weight and its value at spot. For example, 10 g of 14K gold holds 5.833 g of fine gold.
• Use grams, pennyweight, troy ounces, ordinary ounces, kilograms or grains.
• Type in the buyer's offer and any fees to see the offer as a share of the metal value.
• Add several items to one mixed lot, for when a buyer quotes a single total for gold and silver together.
• Preview a worksheet as a PDF, copy a link to the calculation, or save it on your device.

What's inside

• 4 metals: gold, silver, platinum and palladium, each with its own calculator. The scrap gold calculator covers 8K to 24K and fineness marks from 375 to 1000, plus a custom purity.
• 31 coin entries in the junk silver calculator: US silver dimes, quarters, halves and dollars, war nickels, 40% Kennedy halves, Eisenhower dollars, the American Silver Eagle, and Mexican and Canadian silver coins. You can count coins, rolls or face value, and use standard weight or your own scale reading.
• Copper penny and nickel calculators, which also state that US rules restrict melting one-cent and five-cent coins.
• Converters: troy ounce to grams, pennyweight to grams, troy ounce vs ounce, gold-to-silver ratio.
• Guides on hallmarks, plated vs filled gold, and how to test gold and silver.

That adds up to 52 pages, each built around one question people actually ask before selling.

Who it's for

People checking an offer on scrap gold or silver, anyone sorting inherited jewellery or a coin jar, and hobbyists who want to see the maths rather than trust a number. There's no account and nothing to sign up for.

A note on how it's built

It's a Next.js (App Router) site on Vercel. Spot prices come from gold-api.com, and each page that uses a price prints the time of the quote, so you can tell how fresh a figure is. Each metal result lists its inputs: fine weight, fine troy ounces and the price per ounce. Melt value is the metal at spot. Buyers pay less after costs, and the site says so instead of pretending otherwise.

What's next

More coins, more item types, and clearer guides for the questions people ask before they sell. If there's a coin or item you'd like to see, tell us in the comments.

Try it at exactmelt.com. A chain and a kitchen scale are enough to start.