Free Interactive Tool
RICE Prioritization Calculator
Stop arguing about what to build next. Score 3 to 10 competing ideas on reach, impact, confidence and effort, and get a ranked list with a Quick Win, Big Bet, Fill-In or Money Pit label on every one. Takes about two minutes, no signup.
Three steps to a ranked backlog
No spreadsheet, no email gate, no numbers to invent. Pick from plain-English options and let the maths sort your list.
List what you are weighing up
Add between 3 and 10 features, fixes or bets that are competing for the same engineering weeks. Name them the way your team already says them out loud.
Score each on four dimensions
Reach, Impact, Confidence and Effort, one click each. Every option maps to a fixed number behind the scenes, so two people scoring the same idea get the same score.
Read the ranking and the 2x2
Get an ordered list, a Quick Win / Big Bet / Fill-In / Money Pit label on every item, one honest read on the batch as a whole, and an AI prompt built from your own inputs.
The four inputs behind every RICE score
RICE multiplies the three things that make an idea valuable, then divides by what it costs you: Score = (Reach x Impact x Confidence) / Effort.
Reach
How many of your customers actually touch this? A change everybody hits beats a change three power users asked for, however loudly they asked.
Impact
How much does it move the needle for each person it reaches? Impact is the honest question most roadmaps skip, because "nice to have" is uncomfortable to write down.
Confidence
Do you have data, an informed guess, or a hunch? Confidence is the discount rate on your own optimism, and it is what stops a loud opinion outranking evidence.
Effort
Roughly how much work, from under a week to a multi-month undertaking? Effort is the divisor, so a modest idea that ships on Friday can outrank a grand one that eats a quarter.
Every idea lands in one of four buckets
A number on its own does not settle an argument. Each item is placed against the rest of your batch, on score and on effort, so you can see the shape of the whole list rather than a column of decimals.
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Quick WinHigh score, low effort. Build these first, this month.
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Big BetHigh score, high effort. Worth doing, but plan and staff it properly.
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Fill-InLow score, low effort. Fine between bigger pieces of work, never the headline.
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Money PitLow score, high effort. Reconsider before you commit a quarter to it.
You also get one insight on the batch itself, for instance when nothing in your list is a quick win, or when most of your scores rest on hunches rather than evidence.
Example result, your ranking will differ
For anyone who has to say no this quarter
Founders with one engineering team
Every idea sounds urgent when it comes from a customer call. This gives you a defensible reason to build one thing and park the other six.
Product managers heading into planning
Walk into the roadmap session with a scored list instead of a debate. The framework moves the argument from opinions to inputs you can challenge one at a time.
Teams with a stakeholder problem
When sales, support and the board all want different things, a shared scoring model is the fastest way to make the trade-off visible without making it personal.
What is RICE prioritization?
RICE is a scoring model for deciding what to build next. You rate every candidate on four things, Reach, Impact, Confidence and Effort, then rank by (Reach x Impact x Confidence) / Effort. The first three multiply because value compounds: something that reaches everyone but barely helps is worth about as little as something transformative that nobody sees. Effort divides, so cost is a discount on value rather than a separate column you argue about later.
It was popularised by Intercom’s product team, and it stuck because it does one thing well: it forces the assumption out of your head and onto the page. When two people disagree about a feature, RICE tells you exactly which of the four inputs they actually disagree about, which is a far shorter conversation than “I think this is important”.
Why score a whole batch instead of one idea?
A RICE score in isolation means nothing. 14.4 is neither good nor bad until you know what else is on the list. That is why this tool asks for at least three ideas and places each one against the rest of your batch: the same feature can be a Quick Win next to a quarter of infrastructure work and a Money Pit next to four small bug fixes. Prioritisation is comparative or it is nothing.
Two honest limits worth naming. RICE cannot see dependencies, so a low scoring item that unblocks three high scoring ones will be underrated, and you have to spot that yourself. And it cannot see strategy: a bet that only pays off if you are right about where the market is going will always look expensive next to a checkbox that ships on Friday. Use the ranking as the start of the argument, not the end of it.
What to do with your ranking
Take the Quick Wins into the current cycle, size one Big Bet properly before committing to it, and put the Money Pits in writing as things you have deliberately chosen not to do. That last list is the most useful artefact of the whole exercise, because it is the one stakeholders keep asking about.
The results screen also builds an AI prompt from your own inputs, so you can paste your scored list straight into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini for a second pass on the items you were least confident about.
If the ranking keeps telling you the same uncomfortable thing, the problem may sit upstream of the backlog. Check whether you have product-market fit before optimising the roadmap with the Product-Market Fit Score tool, browse the rest of the free tools, or book a free 30 minute review and we can go through your list together.
FAQ
RICE ranks product ideas by Reach, Impact, Confidence and Effort. The score is (Reach x Impact x Confidence) / Effort, so an idea that helps many people a great deal, with evidence behind it, for little work, rises to the top. It was popularized by Intercom's product team and is now one of the most widely used prioritization models in product management.
They are the four quadrants of score against effort, judged relative to the other items in your own batch. Quick Win is high score and low effort, build these first. Big Bet is high score and high effort, worth doing but plan for it. Fill-In is low score and low effort, fine between bigger pieces of work. Money Pit is low score and high effort, reconsider before committing time to it.
No. There is no account, no email gate and no paywall. You enter your ideas, you get your ranked list.
It is more precise, not automatically better. MoSCoW sorts things into must, should, could and won't, which is fast but collapses under a long list because everything becomes a must. A value versus effort matrix is closer, but leaves value undefined. RICE splits value into reach, impact and confidence, which is what lets you find the specific input two people disagree about instead of arguing about the conclusion.