Every roadmap meeting eventually hits the same wall: two features, both reasonable, and no way to say which one wins without someone's gut feeling doing the deciding. RICE is the least annoying fix we've found for that, and we kept rebuilding the same spreadsheet to run it. So we built a free calculator instead.
The four inputs
- Reach — how many people this affects in a given period, e.g. users per month
- Impact — how much it moves the needle per person, scored 3 (massive) down to 0.25 (minimal)
- Confidence — how sure you actually are about the first two numbers, as a percentage
- Effort — person-months to build it
score = (reach × impact × confidence) / effortWhy a calculator instead of another spreadsheet
None of this is hard math. The part that gets tedious is redoing the same four-column table every quarter, re-deriving the formula from a blog post you half-remember, and losing track of which row you already scored. A calculator that just holds the table and sorts it for you removes the only annoying part of an otherwise simple framework.
Try it
It's at /tools/rice-calculator, free, no signup. Everything runs in your browser — add a row per feature, fill in the four numbers, and it sorts by score as you type. Nothing is saved or sent anywhere, so it's also fine to use for something you'd rather not put in a shared doc yet.
Where the numbers actually come from
The honest weak point of RICE is that Reach and Confidence are usually guesses dressed up as numbers. The fix isn't a better formula, it's a real signal to plug in. If you're running a public feedback board, your top-voted items already give you a Reach number that isn't a hallway guess, and a Confidence score that's backed by actual users instead of a hunch. That's most of what a tool like Upstep is for: turning "I think people want this" into a number you can put directly into the calculator.