White-labelling a calculator: what is actually involved

White-labelling a calculator means it runs on your domain, carries your branding, and sends email from your address — so a customer using it never sees another company’s name. The alternative, embedding someone else’s tool in an iframe, is quicker to set up and always looks like what it is.

Four things determine whether it feels like your tool. Here is what each involves.

1. The domain

Two options, and the difference matters more than it appears.

A subdomain of your own site — something like calculator.yourbrand.com. Fastest to set up, requires one DNS record, and the customer stays within your domain throughout.

A separate custom domain — useful if the tool is being positioned as a product in its own right, or if you want it to work independently of your main site.

Both are supported. For most manufacturers the subdomain is the right answer, because it inherits the trust of your main domain and keeps everything under one name.

What you should avoid is running it on the vendor’s domain with your logo on it. Every link an architect shares, every URL a customer sees, carries a name that is not yours.

2. Email from your own address

The part most often overlooked, and the one customers notice.

A calculator sends email: the estimate, the confirmation, the notification to your team. If those arrive from a vendor’s address, the whole exercise is undone at the moment the customer opens their inbox.

Connecting your own SMTP means email is sent through your mail provider from your address. Two consequences worth knowing.

Deliverability improves, because the mail is properly authenticated against your domain rather than being sent on your behalf by someone else.

You need SPF and DKIM configured correctly. Not difficult, but a real task — and if your domain already sends marketing email, check the interaction rather than assuming.

3. Branding, and how far it goes

Surface	What should carry your brand
The tool itself	Logo, colours, typeface
The URL	Your domain or subdomain
Emails sent	Your address, your template
The estimate PDF	Your branding — or co-branded, see below
Anything a customer shares	Your name, not the vendor’s

The PDF is the one worth thinking about carefully, because it travels further than anything else. A customer forwards it to their contractor. An architect sends it to their client. It gets printed and taken to site.

Where a manufacturer is giving accounts to architects or contractors, the sensible arrangement is co-branding: the architect’s identity at the top, because it is their document going to their client, and the manufacturer’s in the footer. An architect will not send a client something that reads as a manufacturer’s advertisement — so putting their name first is what makes the document get used at all.

4. The catalogue behind it

This is what separates a white-labelled tool from a generic calculator with your logo on it.

A calculator loaded with your products, real box counts and real coverage figures returns an order quantity. A generic one returns square metres and leaves the customer to work out how many boxes that is — which is the part they wanted help with.

You can also decide whether the catalogue is restricted to your own products or open to everything. Restricted means every estimate is specified in your range. Open means the tool handles a whole project, including materials you do not make, which makes it more useful and therefore more used. There is a genuine trade-off, and we have written about it in why giving architects a tool beats giving them a catalogue.

What do you need to provide?

• A DNS record for the subdomain or domain
• SMTP credentials and access to set SPF and DKIM records
• Brand assets — logo, colours, and a white version for dark backgrounds
• Product data — sizes, pieces per box, coverage per box, images. Usually the longest task
• A decision on where enquiries go — a person, a team, or routed to dealers

The fourth is the one to start on early. Everything else is configuration; product data is gathering, checking and correcting, and it is where these projects actually take their time.

What about the agency side?

Where you want architects, designers or contractors to have their own accounts, the white-label instance becomes a platform rather than a page.

Each of them logs in, builds full project estimates across multiple rooms, saves them, returns to revise, and produces the co-branded PDF for their client. Because it all runs on your domain, their activity is visible to you — which products, which project sizes, which regions.

That is available in Tile Calc, and it is a different proposition from a calculator on a web page. See estimating a multi-room project for what that workflow looks like.

Common questions

How is this different from embedding a tool in an iframe?

An iframe is someone else’s page inside yours. The URL is theirs, the emails are theirs, and anything a customer shares points at them. It is quicker to set up and it never quite looks like yours.

Can we run it on a subdomain of our existing site?

Yes, and it is usually the right choice. One DNS record, and the customer never leaves your domain.

Who owns the enquiry data?

You do. Establish that in writing before starting with any vendor — including us. A tool that captures your customers’ details and does not give you access to them is not white-labelled, it is rented.

What happens if we want to move away later?

Ask before signing. You should be able to export your product data and your enquiry records in a usable format. If a vendor is vague about it, that vagueness is the answer.

More on this: should you put a calculator on your website and why architects need a tool. See also industry tools & calculators.