What gpalift does differently
Most GPA calculators do one job badly. Calculator.net gives you a generic 4.0 average and stops. Your school's registrar page hides the rule you need behind three menus. Subscription apps charge ten dollars a month to multiply numbers a phone can multiply for free.
gpalift takes the rules each school actually uses and turns them into a calculator that respects them. The AMCAS calculator counts every attempt at a repeated course and truncates instead of rounding, matching what AAMC reports back to medical schools. The UC calculator caps the honors bonus at eight semesters and drops freshman year, the same way UC admissions does. The CGPA converter shows five different formulas side by side, because there is no single right answer and your target school may use a different one than your last school did.
Three audiences, one tool
A college freshman trying to figure out if a B in Chem hurts the major GPA needs different math than a pre-med student tracking BCPM separately from total, who needs different math than an applicant in Mumbai converting a 9.2 CGPA for a US graduate program. The same calculator handles all three because the underlying engine accepts a scale, a set of policies, and a list of courses. The scale changes per school. The policies change per applicant. The course list stays yours.
Pay once, not monthly
Free forever for the core calculator. Pay $19 once for the things that save time: cross-device sync so your transcript follows you between phone and laptop, an AMCAS BCPM auto-classifier that maps your course names to the four science categories AAMC uses, unwatermarked PDF exports for scholarship applications, and what-if scenarios that let you save snapshots of grade plans you are considering. No subscription. No monthly auto-renew. Thirty-day refund if it doesn't earn its keep, no questions, one click.
Open source where it matters
The BCPM classifier is on GitHub. The methodology page lists every scale module by file path. The sources page links each rule to its official AAMC, LSAC, AACOMAS, TMDSAS, or UC document. If a number on this site is wrong, the receipts are public and the fix lands within a week.