Methodology

The question the calculator answers

Gold Output answers one question for a single mining session: given the gold you recovered and what the session cost you, did you come out ahead — and by how much per hour of work? It is built for hobbyist and solo prospectors, and every figure it shows is derived from the inputs on the page using the model below. Nothing is estimated from other users' results, and no result is stored or averaged.

The inputs

• Yield — the gold you recovered, entered in grams, troy ounces or pennyweight (dwt). Conversions are exact: 1 troy ounce = 31.1034768 grams, and 1 pennyweight = 1.55517384 grams.
• Time and hourly cost — the hours the session took and what an hour costs you (fuel, consumables, wear, or the value you put on your own time).
• Fixed costs — one-off session costs such as travel, permits and site fees. If you build an equipment setup, the calculator totals each item's average price into a startup-cost breakdown by category, so equipment can be counted explicitly instead of guessed.
• Gold price — the current price per gram, described in the price section below. You can override it to test your own assumption.

The core model

The whole model is three lines, applied exactly as written, with results rounded to two decimal places:

• Revenue = yield (grams) × price per gram
• Total costs = hourly cost × hours + fixed costs
• Profit = revenue − total costs

From those, the calculator reports profit margin (profit as a percentage of revenue) and return on investment (profit as a percentage of total costs; when total costs are 0 the ratio has no finite value, so a positive profit shows as ∞% and a zero profit as 0). The gold price is referenced in USD; results are displayed in the currency you select (USD, AUD, CAD or EUR).

Worked example. You recover 5 grams in an 8-hour session. At an example price of $80 per gram, revenue is 5 × $80 = $400. Your costs are $15 per hour × 8 hours = $120, plus $50 of fixed costs — $170 in total. Profit is $400 − $170 = $230, a 57.5% margin on revenue and a 135.3% return on the $170 spent. The example price is illustrative; the live calculator uses the current price unless you override it.

Break-even, sensitivity and scenarios

• Break-even price — total costs ÷ yield: the price per gram at which the session exactly covers its costs. Below it, the same session loses money. (With zero yield there is no break-even price, and the calculator reports 0 rather than a meaningless figure.)
• Sensitivity table — profit and ROI recomputed at gold prices 10% and 5% below and above the current price, so you can see how much price movement your session can absorb.
• Scenario analysis — the same recomputation across a wider band, from a 20% price drop to a 20% rally.
• Monte Carlo simulation — for a fuller picture, the analytics run your session hundreds of times (100–500 runs), varying gold price, yield and costs independently within the variance bands you set. Each run draws a fresh random seed, so repeated runs with the same inputs vary slightly — the figures are sample estimates, not exact values. It reports the mean profit, the 10th and 90th percentile outcomes, and the share of runs that came out profitable.
• Tornado analysis — varies one input at a time to show which of gold price, yield or costs swings your profit the most, so you know which assumption deserves the most care.

Where the gold price comes from

The calculator fetches the current gold price from this site's own price endpoint, which is fed by gold-api.com, and caches it in memory for 10 minutes to avoid hammering the source. If a fetch fails, the site falls back to a dated reference spot price instead of failing silently — and the fallback is labelled as such wherever the price is shown, so you always know whether a figure is live or a reference. Prices across the site are USD per troy ounce at source and converted to per-gram using the exact conversion above.

Limits

• The model is only as honest as its inputs. It cannot know your real recovery rate, the purity of your gold, or costs you leave out — and it prices recovered gold at spot, before any buyer discount, refining charge or tax.
• A single session is a sample of one. Ground varies, and a profitable session does not make the next one profitable; the Monte Carlo and sensitivity tools exist precisely to show the range, not a promise.
• Gold prices move continuously; a price fetched today is not the price you will sell at tomorrow.
• Results are information for planning your hobby, not financial advice. Who runs the site and how to contact us is on the About page.