How ConvertCalculator Uses Meteor (+ Math) To Sell More
Fact: When you give website visitors an intuitive calculator to price services or grab an instant quote, they make smarter buying decisions.
But creating one of these interactive calculator forms typically costs businesses loads of time and money they don’t have.
So ConvertCalculator decided to make the process easier.
This team out of Rotterdam, Netherlands, created a versatile calculator form that’s easy to add to any website (zero coding skills required!). It quickly helps brands grow their business — and it’s all built with the help of Meteor.
ConvertCalculator’s Origin Story
September 2017: programmer Joris de Ruiter was doing freelance work and living the gig life. One customer asked Joris to build a price quote calculator for their website. He decided to build it, but not as a standalone feature.
Joris developed a calculator form builder as a SaaS product instead, with prices ranging from free to $60 per month. The initial version took one week to build, and the first paying customer followed just one week later.
ConvertCalculator started earning $2,500 in monthly recurring revenue during 2018, marking the moment Joris knew he had to go full-time with his project.
So he expanded his team and continued to improve every aspect of his product to keep up with ConvertCalculator’s steady, substantial growth.
ConvertCalculator By The Numbers (2021)
- 12,158 Users
- 9.4 million Calculator Visits
- 171,000 Form Submissions
- 3,970 Live Calculators
ConvertCalculator’s success is no surprise once you know all it delivers.
How ConvertCalculator Works
Essentially, ConvertCalculator offers clients a drag-and-drop calculation form builder that seamlessly integrates alongside the most popular website builders.
Their powerful calculation “engine” sets their product apart from alternatives. With their formulas, ConvertCalculator can use the question inputs to create an output, enabling a wide range of use-cases from number questions to option questions like multiple choice.
Brands can utilize their templates and forms to create a:
- Price quote calculator
- ROI and savings calculator
- Product configurator
- Order form
- SaaS pricing calculator
- Lead generation form
- Loan and debt calculators
- Customer support form
- Timesheet calculator
- … and so much more!
ConvertCalculator gives businesses the flexibility of a drag-and-drop website builder in combination with the raw power of a spreadsheet to turn any set of inputs into the desired output.
These calculator forms help businesses increase online conversions, grow sales, and save time.
After all, creating a calculation form from scratch is a costly feat. Not to mention the time, effort, and stress when making changes. ConvertCalculator allows businesses to stop wasting their valuable time and money and focus on their core offerings.
Their clients love ConvertCalculator because:
No Coding Skills Necessary
The drag-and-drop calculation form builder is just as easy to use as drag-and-drop website builders like Webflow or Squarespace. If you know how to use Excel or Google Spreadsheets, you can use their calculator builder. Even the most advanced forms don’t require any coding skills or programming abilities.
Plus, there are tons of templates to choose from (according to your business needs), so you can add a form in a few minutes and get started ASAP.
Forms Look Fantastic On Any Website
They seamlessly integrate with platforms such as Godaddy, Hubspot, Squarespace, Webflow, Weebly, Wix, WordPress, CraftCMS, ExpressionEngine, and many more. Their forms are also optimized for mobile and integrate with 1,000+ apps through Zapier, Slack, Stripe, and others.
Selling Is Easier For Brands And Customers Alike
Create a website calculator or instant quote form for your website, and you’ll capture more leads faster and follow up with confidence.
Website visitors can turn the knobs and see how their choices affect the price, ROI, savings, etc., without performing complicated math on their own. ConvertCalculator does all the heavy lifting.
Brands can even accept online payments directly from their calculator forms.
It’s Designer And Dev-Friendly
Rendered as HTML on your site (not an iframe), your team has total design freedom. Just use the JS API to power up your calculator, and have fun.
Why ConvertCalculator Chose Meteor
ConvertCalculator has been building with Meteor for over five years — and the team says they’ve loved it from the start. They never faced any real challenges when moving to Meteor Cloud, a bonus they didn’t take for granted.
Meteor allows ConvertCalculator to develop software faster than any other framework. It does so many things out of the box, allowing their team to concentrate on their core product and what makes ConvertCalculator unique.
The team says they also love Publish/Subscribe, using it throughout their app for years. However, they rethought the need for that and replaced some parts with Meteor Methods. It took some time to replace all Publish/Subscribe codes to Meteor Methods, but now they’ve switched most data fetching over to Meteor Methods, leaving Publish/Subscribe only in places where they need it. The team says they might love Meteor Methods even more than Publish/Subscribe.
Now they’ve switched most data fetching over to Meteor Methods, leaving Publish/Subscribe only in places where they need it. The team says they might love Meteor Methods even more than Publish/Subscribe 😊
“We’re no DevOps specialists, and Meteor Cloud allows us to not think about hosting too much.”
ConvertCalculator not only benefits from Meteor’s easy deployment and simple configuration but enjoys the ability to autoscale easily and monitor application performance with APM closely (which is a huge dealmaker for the team).
ConvertCalculator’s Tech Stack
According to the ConvertCalculator gurus, Meteor has many features but never gets in their way. Meteor’s abstraction provides simplicity, flexibility, and it’s “not too opinionated.”
So the ConvertCalculator team uses MeteorJS (with MongoDB) together with React and Tailwind on the front-end. They also utilize a bunch of community packages to make their lives easier, the most important ones being:
- aldeed:collection2 (with simple-schema)
- percolate:migrations
- simple:rest
- msavin:sjobs
- edgee:slingshot
- meteortesting:mocha
A few other components within their current setup with Cloud include:
An Extra Worker App that handles background jobs and longer tasks for production. It’s the same app with a different Meteor setting to execute code only in that specific environment.
Autoscaling Triggers to ensure their app keeps running smoothly without inflating their costs. This is where APM takes a starring role and becomes invaluable.
What’s Next for ConvertCalculator
The ConvertCalculator product is super versatile, allowing the team to support many use-cases across different industries and scale with ease. But their chameleon-like qualities can be both a blessing and a curse.
The team admits they’re constantly balancing between improving their core features and chasing new and exciting opportunities. So they tend to take a conservative opportunistic approach that delivers the best of both worlds. This approach also keeps the business and product development process interesting.
ConvertCalculator’s next priorities include:
1. Maturing the core product, where the team improves the inner workings, the overall UX/UI, and current functionality. They’ll also be launching an additional plan, enabling users to create workspaces/teams to increase collaboration.
2. Creating custom integrations. There are many use-cases where brands may want to import or export data into or from their form. Additional integrations would allow users to interface with calendars, spreadsheets, CRM programs, and more, further increasing the value of their product.
3. Expanding functionality where it makes sense to provide an end-to-end solution. A good example of this is PDF generation to offer an integrated quoting solution.
4. Reaching more SMEs. Stretching into bigger markets and getting SMEs aware that ConvertCalculator exists will be an important priority in the next few months.
Attracting more users requires an emphasis on a smooth onboarding and activation experience. The team hopes to expand their Help Center to show new users all the cool things they can create with ConvertCalculator and get the results they require.
The team says:
“It’s pretty awesome to see how other SaaS products like Webflow and Tailwind have organized their customer success, so we’re really looking forward to taking steps forward on that front.”
ConvertCalculator + Meteor = A Winning Formula
ConvertCalculator has lots of bright days ahead. The team is “extremely excited” to improve and expand their product, grow their customer base, and enable more SMEs to increase their online sales and overall conversions.
This future wouldn’t be possible without the help of Meteor in their corner.
What can Meteor do for your business? Click here to install and learn how we can help. Interested in hosting with us? Check out Meteor Cloud for all of your hosting and app monitoring needs too!
