Free Interactive Tool
RICE Prioritization Calculator: Rank Your Feature Backlog in Minutes
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.
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.