Is SoapCalc Down?

What Happened to SoapCalc?

We owe you an explanation.

In July 2025, SoapCalc was offline for some time. No warning, no status page, no way to contact us. We know because we read every forum thread — the ones on Soapmaking Forum, the Facebook groups, the Reddit posts. People were frustrated, and they had every right to be.

Here’s what actually happened. The old SoapCalc ran on infrastructure that was, to be blunt, held together with duct tape. The original site was built in classic ASP — a technology Microsoft stopped updating in 2002. The server it lived on was aging out. When it finally failed, we didn’t have a quick fix. You can’t just patch a 20-year-old codebase back together and call it good.

So we made a decision: rebuild the whole thing from scratch instead of propping up the old version one more time.

That took longer than we wanted. Way longer.

Publishing the updated version in last days of January 2026 brought more downtime, some previously unnoticed errors crept in. Fast forward to March 2026 and we finally published the new version of SoapCalc.

Why Didn’t You Just Say Something?

Fair question. The short answer is that the old site had no blog, no status page, and no good way to push announcements. Our communication options were basically zero.

That’s not an excuse. It’s the reason we built this page. If something breaks in the future, you’ll hear about it here — not through a “down for everyone or just me” checker.

What’s Different Now

The new SoapCalc is a full rebuild. Same calculations, same SAP values, same oil database you’re used to. But the plumbing underneath is completely new.

What we fixed:

• It works on your phone. The old version was essentially unusable on mobile. Half the fields got cut off on iPhone screens. We know — we saw those forum posts too. The new version is responsive. Tested on iOS, Android, tablets, laptops.
• It’s faster. The old server would occasionally take 8-10 seconds to load. The new site loads in under 2 seconds on a normal connection.
• It won’t vanish without warning again. We moved to modern hosting with automated monitoring. If the site goes down at 3am, we get a text. This status page exists specifically so you have somewhere to check.
• Your old bookmarks and saved URLs still work. We set up redirects from every old page to its new location. Nothing should break.

What stayed the same: the lye calculations, the oil properties, the fatty acid profiles, the INS values. We didn’t change the math. If your recipe worked before, it works now.

Troubleshooting

SoapCalc won’t load for me right now. First, check if it’s actually down or if it’s your connection. Try loading soapcalc.net in a private/incognito browser window. If that doesn’t work, try a different browser. If it’s still not loading, it might be a real outage — check back here for updates.

The page loads but the calculator looks broken. Clear your browser cache. The old version may be cached and conflicting with the new one. On most browsers: Ctrl+Shift+Delete (Windows) or Cmd+Shift+Delete (Mac), then select “cached images and files.”

My old saved recipe link doesn’t work. We preserved as many old URL paths as we could, but some deep links to specific saved recipes from the legacy system may not carry over. If you had a recipe bookmarked and it’s gone, you’ll need to re-enter it. We’re sorry about that — the old recipe storage system wasn’t something we could migrate cleanly.

I found a bug. Please contact us. Seriously. We want to hear about it. Include what browser you’re using, what you were doing when it broke, and a screenshot if you can.

Updates

March 2026 — Full relaunch New site goes live on soapcalc.net. Complete rebuild with modern framework, mobile support, and improved hosting. All old URLs redirect to new pages.

July 2025 — Outages begin Legacy server failure. Old ASP-based site goes offline. Rebuild begins.

We’ll keep adding entries here as we make changes. No more “NEW VERSION COMING SUMMER 2021” banners that sit there for four years. If we say it’s coming, we’ll tell you when.