Story Pole

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Every construction calculator worth having now wants a subscription. Construction Master Pro is $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year. BuildCalc is $25. The physical handheld is over a hundred dollars. Story Pole is $9.99, once — and it is more correct than any of them.

A story pole is a board marked once with every height on a job, so nothing gets re-measured and no error accumulates. This app is that board. Every length is held as an exact fraction rather than a decimal that drifts: 12′ 7 3/16″ stays exactly that, and a millimetre is exactly 5/127 of an inch, because the inch is defined as 25.4 mm rather than measured as it.

It admits when it rounds. A figure that is not exact at your chosen precision wears a small mark; tap it and you get the exact fraction and how much was lost, in thousandths. That matters more than it sounds. Round a riser to the nearest sixteenth and add it fifteen times and you finish three eighths of an inch short of the floor — so Story Pole marks every stringer height from the bottom instead, and the top mark lands on the floor exactly.

It shows the work. Every result opens to the formula that produced it, with the numbers substituted and every intermediate value labelled, so you can check it against the framing square in your pocket. And when nothing satisfies your constraints, it says which one is in the way and the smallest change that fixes it, rather than printing a number it cannot stand behind.

There is no account, no advertising, no analytics and no network permission of any kind. Nothing you type leaves the phone, because there is nowhere for it to go.