In short
Every calculator here uses one published spot price, refreshed daily, with the source and timestamp printed on the page. The math is shown, not hidden. The questions we answer come from a dataset of real Google search suggestions we collected, not from guessing what people might ask.
The gold price
We fetch the spot price of gold in US dollars per troy ounce once a day from a public feed (currently gold-api.com), with a futures quote as a fallback if the feed is down. The page footer shows which source and when. A price older than 36 hours is flagged as stale. Spot is a reference: no buyer pays spot for jewelry, and no seller gets it.
Purity by karat
Karat is parts of gold in 24. We use the fractions printed in the jewelry trade: 24k 99.9%, 22k 91.6%, 18k 75.0%, 14k 58.5%, 10k 41.7%, 9k 37.5%. Note the 14k case: US law allows 14k to be 58.3% (14/24), while European jewelry stamped 585 is 58.5%. The difference on a 10 gram piece is a few dollars, and we say so where it matters.
What the calculators do not know
They compute melt value: pure gold content multiplied by the spot price. They cannot know the buyer's margin, assay fees, whether stones or solder add non-gold weight, or whether a piece is worth more intact than melted. Where a page gives a payout estimate it is your input, not our claim.
Where the questions come from
In September 2026 we collected about 24,000 unique Google autocomplete suggestions around gold jewelry, starting from 88 seed phrases and following suggestions two levels deep. We removed off-topic, local and duplicate phrasings. Each guide's question list is drawn from that set, ranked by how often a phrasing surfaced. It is a picture of what people ask, not what we want to rank for.
Who makes this
Alexey Kravchenko
Alexey Kravchenko, a senior media buyer by trade, builds and maintains Gold Karat Guide: the daily price pipeline, the calculators and the guides. Corrections and questions are welcome on LinkedIn.
One person writes, checks and publishes everything here, with the sources listed under each guide. Retailer policies and prices are re-read on the dates shown on those pages; if a number on this site does not match what you see at a buyer or a store, the message on LinkedIn is the fastest way to get it fixed.
What we are not
We do not buy or sell gold and have no inventory to move. If a page carries a link to a buyer or retailer, it is marked, and we may earn a commission; the numbers on the page do not change because of it.