About KaratMelt

KaratMelt works out what the metal in a piece of jewellery, a coin or a bag of scrap is actually worth, and then tells you what a real buyer is likely to offer for it. Those are two different numbers, and the gap between them is where most people get taken.

Why it exists

Almost every gold calculator on the web is run by somebody who wants to buy your gold, sell you bullion, or both. That is not a conspiracy, it is just an obvious conflict: a business whose margin comes from the spread has a reason to be vague about what the spread is. This site sells nothing, buys nothing and takes no commission from anyone, so it can print the payout bands next to the melt value instead of burying them.

Most visitors arrive holding something inherited or broken, with no idea whether the number they are about to be quoted is fair. The job here is to hand over a figure you can check, and enough context to walk into a shop knowing what good looks like.

Where the numbers come from

Spot prices come from a published benchmark, fetched once for the whole site and baked into every page at build time, then refreshed in your browser when the page loads. Purity fractions are the legal fineness standards rather than house estimates, and unit conversions use exact values: 31.1034768 grams to a troy ounce, 1.55517384 to a pennyweight. Coin weights and finenesses are public-domain US Mint specifications. Every formula and constant is written out on how we calculate, and the payout bands are sourced on what buyers actually pay.

Where a choice had to be made, it was made conservatively. Fourteen karat is treated as 14/24 (0.5833), the US legal minimum for the stamp, not the slightly richer European 585 standard. A result that comes in a fraction low is honest. One that comes in high sets you up for disappointment at the counter.

What this site is not

It is not an appraisal, and it is not a quote. Melt value ignores everything except the metal: the maker, the design, the stones, the date on a coin and the condition it is in. Some of those are worth far more than the gold. Before you sell anything old, signed or collectible for scrap, have it looked at by someone who knows the category.

Who builds it

Builder of KaratMelt. Software engineer, not a jeweller, appraiser or metals dealer. Every price is derived from published spot rates and public fineness standards, and the method is shown on each page.

Contact

Corrections are welcome, particularly on the payout bands and the coin data. Email hello@karatmelt.com.