How I Built a 50-State US Statutory Probate Calculator with Astro and Tailwind CSS

Navigating estate administration and probate in the US is notoriously opaque. Every state enforces different legal frameworks—from statutory attorney fee caps to tiered executor commissions and county court fees.

To solve this, I built US Probate Calculator, a fast, 100% free web utility designed to calculate statutory probate and estate settlement costs across all 50 US states with zero tracking and no paywalls.

🛠️ The Tech Stack

I kept the stack lightweight and static for fast global loading speeds:

Framework: Astro — Selected for zero-JS by default, allowing blazing-fast static page generation.
Styling: Tailwind CSS — Fast, responsive, utility-first styling for a clean financial tool UI.
Hosting & CDN: Cloudflare Pages — Edge network delivery with built-in SSL and near-instant load times.

🧠 The Core Challenge: 50-State Statutory Logic

The primary complexity was translating disparate legal codes into consistent client-side mathematical models:

California: Sliding statutory attorney/executor scale under California Probate Code § 10810 (4% of the first $100k, 3% of next $100k, 2% of next $800k, 1% of next $9M).
New York: Tiered commission schedule under SCPA § 2307 (5% on first $100k, decreasing incrementally for larger estates).
Florida: Statutory percentage schedules on gross estate values under Florida Statutes § 733.6171.

Instead of heavy server-side processing or backend database calls, the calculation engine runs entirely on the client, ensuring total user privacy and immediate responsiveness.