Why we made free business tools for Indian shop owners

Our most visited pages do not sell anything.

When I first looked at where people from Google were landing on dukaankit.in, the product page had not shown up in search at all. The visitors we did get were landing on a profit calculator and a daily sales tracker. So we stopped treating those pages as a side project. Today there are 16 free business tools for Indian shop owners on the site. No signup, no card, no limit.

This post explains why we built them, and what I honestly do not know yet.

What the free business tools for Indian shop owners are

They are small pages that each do one job. You open one in your phone's browser, type your numbers, and get an answer you can print or send on WhatsApp.

For shops and food counters

• GST invoice generator, for A4 or a thermal printer
• Bill generator with a UPI QR on the bill
• Barcode and price label maker
• Daily sales tracker for cash, UPI and udhaar
• Profit margin calculator
• Swiggy and Zomato commission calculator
• Food cost per plate calculator
• GST calculator
• UPI QR standee for the counter
• Menu card maker

For sales teams

• WhatsApp link generator
• Lead follow-up planner
• Sales commission calculator

For construction sites

• House construction cost per square foot
• Brick, cement and sand calculator
• Labour attendance and wage sheet

All of them are on the free tools page.

Every tool follows the same few rules. It opens with an example already filled in, so you can see what it does before you type anything. It works on a phone. And what you type is saved only in your own browser. It is not sent to us. If you clear your browser data it is gone, so print or export anything that matters.

One example: what Swiggy or Zomato really pays you

Take the commission calculator. The example it opens with is this:

• An order of ₹500 on the app, plus ₹20 packaging
• A ₹50 discount that the restaurant pays for
• 25% commission, 18% GST on the fees, and a 2% payment gateway fee

With those numbers, ₹320.26 reaches the restaurant. And to earn the same as a ₹500 sale at the counter, the price on the app would have to be about ₹794.

Those percentages are only an example. Every restaurant's contract is different. The tool asks you to put in your own numbers from your payout statement. The job of the tool is to put that whole sum in one place.

Why give them away

There are four reasons. None of them is clever.

It is where shop owners already are. Nobody running a counter wakes up and searches for "POS software". They search for the problem in front of them today: a GST bill for one customer, a barcode label, how much the delivery app is keeping. If we want to meet shop owners, we have to be useful at that moment.

Trust comes before a sale. DukaanKit is new. Nobody has heard of it. A calculator that gives the right answer is a small piece of proof that we understand a shop's maths. I would rather earn that with a free tool than claim it in an advert.

They force us to get the maths right in public. Before the tools went live, the arithmetic in the examples was re-checked by hand. While rebuilding the older tools we also found something embarrassing. Our old barcode page did not produce real barcodes at all. It was rebuilt to make proper EAN-13, Code 128 and QR labels that print on A4 sticker sheets.

They cost almost nothing to run. The tools run inside your browser. There is no account to create and nothing for us to store.

What the tools are not

A tool makes one bill, one time. It does not remember yesterday.

The POS is the other thing. Every bill is saved. Stock goes down when something sells. Staff sign in with their own PIN. The owner sees the day's profit on their phone.

Each tool page has one small card that says this and links to the product. That is the whole sales pitch. No pop-ups. No "enter your email to see the result".

Two more honest limits:

• The construction cost calculator works on thumb rules. The page says so. It gives a first estimate, not a quotation.
• The GST tools do the arithmetic. They do not replace your CA. If you are not sure which rate applies to your item, ask them.

What I do not know yet

I do not know if this works as a business idea.

The bet is simple. A shop owner uses a free tool, finds it correct, comes back, and one day needs every bill saved and not just one. Then they already know our name. That is a slow path. I think it is the right one for a new product that has to earn trust shop by shop.

It may turn out that people happily use the free tools for years and never need the POS. That would still be fine. The tools would be doing something useful, and they cost us very little.

I will write again when there is enough data to say which way it went.

Until then, the tools are there. Use them. If one gives you a wrong answer, tell me on WhatsApp. That is the most useful message I can get.