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Manish Singh
Manish Singh

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I built a free, privacy-first 8th Pay Commission pension calculator as a static site

#webdev #javascript #seo #showdev

India's 8th Central Pay Commission will revise pensions for roughly 69 lakh central government pensioners. Most "calculators" online are ad-heavy, English-only, or don't show their formulas. So I built one that runs entirely in the browser.

Live: https://8cpc-pension-calculator.vercel.app/ (Hindi: https://8cpc-pension-calculator.vercel.app/hi/)

What it does

  • New basic pension at every projected fitment factor (1.92 to 3.833)
  • DA/DR with arrears, family pension, commutation and 15-year restoration
  • A page for each pension amount, e.g. ₹25,000 pension in 8th Pay Commission
  • Every figure linked to official orders (PIB, DoPPW, Pensioners' Portal)

How it's built

  • Plain HTML generated by a small Python build script: no framework, no runtime server
  • Vanilla JS for the calculations, so nothing leaves the user's device
  • A full server-rendered Hindi counterpart for every page, with reciprocal hreflang
  • Strict CSP, JSON-LD (FAQPage, WebApplication), a sitemap, IndexNow pings, and llms.txt for AI crawlers
  • Deployed on Vercel from GitHub, with tests run before each push

Lessons

  1. Server-rendered language versions beat JS toggles for SEO.
  2. Showing the formula and its source builds more trust than a fancy UI.
  3. Keep titles under 70 characters and descriptions under 160. Bing flags both.

I also built YT Policy Shield, a free YouTube monetization-policy and AI-voice risk checker, with the same static approach.

Feedback welcome!

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