I didn't plan to build a tool. I just got frustrated enough that building one felt easier than complaining about it. Let me explain.
It Started With a Genuinely Stupid Problem
It was exam result season. My friends and I were sitting around, phones out, trying to figure out our CGPAs for the semester. Someone needed to know if they'd crossed 7.5 to apply for a particular company. Someone else was trying to calculate whether one bad semester had completely tanked their overall score.
And we were all doing this on... paper. Or in a Notes app. Or in a WhatsApp message to ourselves where we'd typed out random numbers and were trying to make sense of them.
The process was messy, confusing, and — most annoyingly — nobody could agree on whether their calculation was even correct. One friend got three different numbers doing the same calculation three times. We weren't sure if we were supposed to include backlog subjects. We weren't sure how credits factored in. We weren't sure about anything, really.
I remember thinking — surely there's just a clean, simple tool for this somewhere? This is a problem every engineering student in the country has every single semester. Someone must have solved it already.
Spoiler: The options I found were either broken, ugly, covered in ads, or required you to sign up for something before you could use a basic calculator.
That bothered me more than it probably should have.
The Thing Nobody Tells You About CGPA
Here's what I genuinely didn't understand until I started building this — most students don't actually know how their CGPA is calculated. Not really.
They know it's a cumulative average. They know higher is better. But the mechanics of it — how credits weigh different subjects, how one terrible semester affects your cumulative score differently depending on which year you're in, why your CGPA can shift meaningfully in your second year but barely moves in your fourth — none of that is ever clearly explained.
I only understood it properly when I had to code it.
When you build a calculator, you have to understand the formula at a level where you can explain it to a machine. And once I did that, I realised why so many students are walking around with the wrong number in their heads. They're averaging grades without accounting for credits. They're treating a 1-credit elective the same as a 4-credit core subject. They're confused about whether to include failed subjects in the calculation.
The calculation isn't complicated once you understand it — but nobody ever sits students down and explains it clearly. That felt like a gap worth filling.
Why I Actually Built It
I'm not a serial entrepreneur. I didn't have a grand product vision, a monetisation strategy, or a pitch deck.
I built it because I wanted it to exist, and it didn't exist in the way I wanted it to.
That's genuinely the whole origin story. I was annoyed by the problem; I had enough skill to do something about it, and I had a long weekend.
The first version was embarrassingly simple. It did one thing — took your grades and credits and spat out a number. No design to speak of. Functionally fine, visually a disaster.
But I shared it with a few friends, and they actually used it. And then they shared it. And someone asked if it could do SGPA as well, not just CGPA. Someone else asked about different grading scales because their university used a different system than mine. Someone asked about a converter for percentage equivalents.
Every question was a feature request in disguise. And I kept building.
What I Learned From Talking to Students
Once I started paying attention to how people actually used the tool, my perspective on the whole project changed.
I expected students to use it mechanically — plug in numbers, get output, move on. What I didn't expect was how much anxiety sat behind those calculations.
People weren't just curious about their CGPA. They were stressed about it. They needed to know if they were still eligible to visit the company's visiting campus next week. They were trying to figure out if there was any mathematical possibility of crossing 7.0 by the end of the semester. They were doing the calculation at midnight before a placement test, trying to decide whether applying was even worth it.
That context changed things for me.
A CGPA calculator isn't just a math utility. For many students, it's a planning tool. It's how they figure out what's still possible and what isn't. It's how they decide where to put their energy.
Once I understood that, I started thinking more carefully about clarity — not just accuracy. The tool needed to be fast, obvious, and effortless to use. No login. No ads interrupting your calculation. No unnecessary steps between the student and the answer they needed.
The Technical Side (Without the Boring Parts)
I'm not going to walk through the entire codebase here. But I want to talk briefly about a few decisions that took longer than they should have.
Handling different grading scales was harder than expected.
Indian universities don't all use the same system. Some use a 10-point scale. Some use a 4-point scale. Some have specific grade-to-point conversions that are unique to that institution. Building something that worked cleanly across these variations required more research into how different universities actually structure their grading than I anticipated.
The UX for adding subjects needed to be frictionless.
Early versions required too many clicks to add multiple subjects. Students with eight or ten subjects per semester would get frustrated halfway through. I rebuilt the input flow a few times before it felt genuinely easy to use.
Mobile experience mattered more than I initially assumed.
Most students are doing this on their phones. Not on a laptop, not at a desk — on a phone, probably while talking to someone or waiting for something. The tool had to work perfectly on a small screen, or it wasn't really working at all.
These aren't groundbreaking engineering insights. But they're the kinds of decisions that make the difference between something that functions and something that people actually come back to.
What CGPA Tool Is Now
If you haven't seen it, the CGPA Tool handles both cumulative and semester-level calculations, works across different grading scales, and does the one thing I always wanted: gives you a clear, accurate answer without making you jump through hoops to get it.
The SGPA Calculator gets used most often at the end of each semester, when students want to see how their current semester performance affects their overall standing. That feature came directly from user feedback, and it became the most-used part of the tool.
It's still not perfect. There are features I want to add, edge cases I'm still handling, and university-specific variations I haven't fully accounted for. But it solves the original problem — the one my friends and I had sitting around with our phones, trying to make sense of our own grades.
Why I'm Writing This on Dev.to
Partly because this community understands the itch of building something because you couldn't find it anywhere else. Many developers here will immediately recognise that impulse: 'this should exist, I'm going to make it exist'
But also because I think there's something worth saying about the kind of tools that matter.
Not everything you build needs to be a startup. Not everything needs to scale to a million users or raise a seed round or disrupt an industry. Some tools matter because they exist at exactly the moment someone needs them — a student at midnight, stressed about a placement cutoff, just wanting a straight answer to a simple question.
That's reason enough to build something.
The best side projects I've seen — and the ones people actually use — solve a problem that the builder personally experienced. Not an imagined problem. Not a market gap identified in a spreadsheet. A real, specific problem that happened to me, and it was annoying.
Mine was a CGPA Calculator that didn't make me want to throw my phone.
So I built one.
If You're a Student Reading This
Your CGPA matters — but probably not in the catastrophic way your anxiety is telling you it does at 11 pm before a placement drive. It's one number. It opens some doors and closes others. Knowing your actual number, accurately, is the first step to figuring out what those doors are.
Calculate it. Understand it. Then build the rest of your profile around it.
And if the tool helps with that — even just a little — then the long weekend I spent building the first version was absolutely worth it.
If you've built something out of personal frustration and want to talk about it, drop it in the comments. Those are always my favourite kinds of projects to hear about.
