Dividend Stacker

There's a corner of the ETF market that mainstream dividend tools are built to ignore.

Funds from YieldMax, Roundhill, NEOS, and a few others sell options and pay the premiums out as distributions — sometimes weekly, sometimes at advertised yields north of 80%. I hold some of them. I am not here to tell you whether that's smart.

I went looking for basic answers: when is the next payout, how much, and what does $10K actually do over a year if you reinvest — is the yield real, or is NAV just melting underneath it?

The tooling was bad in a specific way:

• Traditional dividend sites assume SCHD-style quarterly payers with slowly growing amounts. These funds pay weekly and change the number every time.

• Announced amounts live in press releases. Ex-dates live in exchange notices. History lives in APIs that lag or disagree.

• Several total-return calculators silently skip reverse splits. These funds reverse-split a lot. Miss one split on MSTY and you are not off by 2% — you are off by multiples.

• A 90% “yield” next to a 40% price drop is two numbers that mean nothing alone. You need total return with DRIP, computed honestly.

So I built Dividend Stacker. Free calendar, calculators, and email alerts for 150+ of these funds. No account required for the public tools. I am not a financial advisor and the site says that in plain text.

Three decisions that actually mattered:

1. Snapshots, not live API calls.
 The first version hit a market-data API on every page load. Slow, rate-limit anxiety, and the site got worse exactly when traffic spiked. Now a cron writes one JSON snapshot per ticker. Pages render from that. A busy day costs the same upstream quota as a dead Tuesday: zero.

2. One math engine.
 I had DRIP math implemented slightly differently in four components. They disagreed with each other. Classic side-project disease. There is one tested engine now. When I found the reverse-split bug, I fixed it once and every number on the site moved together.

3. Announced vs estimated.
 The feature people trust most is a cron that reads official provider announcements, diffs them against what it has already seen, and marks calendar rows green (declared) or amber (guessed from history). Same job emails you the moment a fund you follow declares. Estimates are guesses. Announcements are facts. Separating those two visually did more for trust than anything else I shipped.

I have no credentials. I almost reached for “our team of experts.” I went the other way — named human, public methodology, “this is data, not advice.” Transparency was the only credibility I could honestly sell.

The public tools stay free. If I ever add a paid layer it will be “remember my funds,” not a paywall on the calendar.

If you hold any of these funds: what is still missing? The gap I keep hearing is a saved list plus “did my group declare this morning,” but I would rather hear it from you than invent a roadmap. And if you have shipped a niche data product as a solo builder, I would love the war stories.

I’m Josh. Site is dividendstacker.com.