The free tool is the pitch
I built a free 14 CFR Part 61 currency calculator and put it on the marketing site of a SaaS I'm trying to sell. That seems backwards. It isn't. The calculator IS the pitch.
Tonight I shipped a free currency calculator at tarmaclabs.org/tools/currency. Enter your medical issue date, your last flight review, the date of your third-most-recent day landing — get back a verdict against 14 CFR §61.23, §61.56, §61.57(a/b/c).
No signup. No tracking pixel. No paywall. No upsell ribbon at the top. Free.
A reasonable person could ask: you're trying to sell a $49/month dispatch product. Why are you giving away half of it?
Because the engine is the moat.
AutoBrief's legal call is encoded in pure TypeScript functions with 132 unit tests behind them. The currency tool runs on the same kind of engine — actually a different file, but structurally identical. A handful of date math helpers, a handful of cases-of-the-statute checks, a handful of formatters. It is not a screen scraper. It is not an LLM with a system prompt. It is a small, boring, deterministic state machine and that is the whole point.
When you ship a free utility built on the exact same architecture as your paid product, the free utility stops being a giveaway. It becomes the public part of your QA.
A chief pilot who uses the calculator and finds that the medical expiration math is correct, that the end-of-month convention in §61.23 is respected, that the 90-day window in §61.57(a) is honored — that chief pilot now has evidence about whether the paid product will get their tail-number checks right. The free tool isn't a lead magnet. It's a portfolio piece.
The unfair-advantage version of this
Most SaaS marketing tries to demonstrate competence by listing features. Bullet points about "AI-powered" this and "real-time" that. The reader has no way to verify any of it short of buying.
A working calculator is a different category of claim. You either get the dates right or you don't. A pilot will know within thirty seconds if the math is wrong. So when the math IS right, the visitor doesn't have to take my word for anything. The proof is the tool.
Trust is the buying decision in dispatch
A flight school chief pilot is not going to risk an insurance claim on software that they can't evaluate without signing up. The hardest sales objection in this category isn't price; it's "why should I trust a dispatch verdict that came from a stranger's server?"
The currency calculator answers the objection. The interactive AutoBrief demoanswers it again, with a fuller-stack version of the same proof. By the time the visitor reaches the "Get early access" form, they've already evaluated the product on two surfaces.
What this means for the rest of the lineup
The /tools page already has three more "coming soon" entries: endorsement lookup (verbatim AC 61-65K), weight & balance, METAR decoder (live). Each one will follow the same rule: free, no signup, real engine, accuracy you can verify against the source document in five seconds.
When a chief pilot lands on /products/autobrief later this year, they'll have seen TarmacLabs ship four working calculators that get the regs right. The "why should I trust you?" question will already be settled. The remaining question — "is $49/mo worth it?" — is a much easier one to answer.