About Thrifster

What This Site Is

Thrifster is a single-purpose site: six free calculators for thrift and vintage shopping, a handful of reference guides, and a museum of clothing history, wrapped around display ads that keep it free to use. It isn’t a resale marketplace, a consignment shop, or an authentication service, and it isn’t affiliated with eBay, Poshmark, Depop, or any sizing chart, care-label standard, or fashion brand referenced anywhere on the site. There’s no account to create and nothing to buy here.

It’s also worth being upfront about what the tools can and can’t do. The Vintage Era Identifiergives you a likely decade based on labels, RN/WPL numbers, zipper type, and seam finishing — it’s a heuristic guide built from publicly documented construction history, not a certificate of authenticity, and it can’t replace a professional appraiser if real money is riding on a piece. The Thrift Flip Profit Calculator, Clothing Size Converter, Cost Per Wear Calculator, and Thrift Savings Calculator all work from numbers you enter plus published fee schedules and sizing charts; the output is only as accurate as those inputs, and marketplace fees and size charts do change, so treat every result as an estimate, not a guarantee. None of this is financial advice.

The Tools

The six tools cover the questions that come up most often once you’re actually thrifting:

• Thrift Flip Profit Calculator— enter what you paid, any cleaning or repair cost, your expected sale price, and the marketplace (eBay’s roughly 13%, Poshmark’s 20%, Depop’s roughly 10%, or a custom fee), and it works out net profit, margin, and ROI, flagging a loss clearly.
• Clothing Size Converter— converts a size across US, UK, EU, and International for women’s and men’s tops, dresses, and jeans by waist, which matters more than usual with older or foreign-labeled thrift finds.
• Cost Per Wear Calculator— divides price by expected wears so you can compare a thrifted piece against the new equivalent on genuine cost, not sticker price.
• Vintage Era Identifier— estimates a garment’s decade from construction clues and shows its reasoning, rather than handing you a bare answer.
• Laundry Care Symbol Decoder— a filterable catalog of wash, bleach, tumble-dry, iron, and dry-clean symbols in plain language, useful when a care label is worn off or in another language.
• Thrift Savings Calculator— totals a haul against estimated retail prices to show what you spent, what it would have cost new, and the percentage saved, with an optional yearly projection.

The Museum

The Museum of Vintage Fashion & Styleis a browsable timeline of a century of clothing — the garments, fabrics, and the secondhand and sustainable-fashion movement that keeps them in circulation. Every entry, image, and fact in it is drawn from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons; it’s a reference for context, not something Thrifster researched or verified independently, so treat it the way you’d treat any tertiary source.

Guides

Alongside the calculators, the blog and learn sectioncover the practical side of thrifting — sourcing, spotting quality in secondhand pieces, and getting more use out of what you already own. Like the tools, this content is general and educational, not professional styling, appraisal, or financial guidance.

Independent and Ad-Supported

Thrifster runs on display advertising, which is how the tools stay free with no login and no paywall. There’s no in-house team of stylists or appraisers behind it, no user count to report, and no partnership with any brand, marketplace, or standards body named on the site — if a tool references eBay’s fee structure or a national sizing chart, that’s public information, not an endorsement or a data-sharing relationship. Questions, corrections, or a tool idea are welcome any time on the contact page.