JBM Ballistics Is Gone: What Happened, and What to Use Instead
If you went to run a trajectory on JBM Ballistics and got a 404, it isn't your browser. The free online calculators that shooters leaned on for roughly fifteen years were taken offline in 2026. The good news is that nothing you learned from them stopped being true — and there are solid replacements, several of them free.
What actually happened
The calculator pages at jbmballistics.com now return 404. The domain itself is still up, but it serves a landing page for the author's iPhone apps rather than the ballistics suite. Shooters who wrote to ask were told the same thing: the site's author is done maintaining it, and the calculators are not coming back. At least one long-time shooter has said publicly that he asked for the pages to simply be frozen in place and was turned down.
It was a free service run by one person since 2010, with no ads and no paywall. That's worth a thank-you rather than a complaint.
Your old numbers are still good
This is the part that matters most, and it's the part people worry about first. JBM wasn't using anything secret. It ran a standard point-mass trajectory model over the published G1 and G7 drag curves — the same public reference standards every mainstream solver uses. Those curves are not JBM's property and they did not go offline with the website.
So the dial numbers you printed off JBM last season are exactly as valid today as they were then, and any solver built on the same standard will hand you the same trajectory from the same inputs. What was lost is a convenient, free front end. The physics behind it is public and unchanged.
Free, and closest to what JBM did
- Hornady 4DOF — free on the web and as a phone app. It goes beyond the standard drag curves for bullets Hornady has radar-measured, which is a genuine step up in the transonic. Best free option for most people.
- Berger's calculator — free web solver, useful if you shoot Berger bullets and want their own numbers.
- Loadscope Ballistics (ours — iPhone and iPad) — free to carry your loads and re-solve them as the day changes, with live weather for where you're standing. One caveat we'd rather state than bury: typing a brand-new load into the phone from scratch is a one-time $9.99 unlock, or free if you already own Loadscope on the desktop.
- Your rangefinder or Kestrel — if you already own a ballistic rangefinder or a Kestrel with a solver in it, that's a JBM replacement you paid for years ago and may not be using for load work.
If what you want is to punch in a bullet and a velocity cold and get a chart back, Hornady's is the closest free stand-in for what JBM did. If you want to carry a load you've already worked up and re-solve it at the range, ours does that for nothing.
The bigger solvers
Worth knowing that the ballistics apps that used to cost money up front have mostly moved to a free download with paid tiers behind it. Checked against the App Store on 5 August 2026:
- AB Quantum (Applied Ballistics) — free to download. Applied Ballistics is the reference most other solvers get measured against; it uses radar-measured drag curves for its bullet library rather than the standard G1/G7 shapes, which is where it pulls ahead deep in the transonic.
- Strelok Pro — free to download with three rifle profiles. Past that it is a subscription: $4.99 a month, $29.99 a year, or $49.99 once for lifetime. Deep reticle library.
- GeoBallistics (Vortex) — free, and worth a look if you already run a Vortex rangefinder it talks to.
- Shooter — $19.99, one of the few still sold outright.
What a drop chart still can't tell you
Worth saying plainly, because it's the gap that sent a lot of people to JBM in the first place: a ballistic solver takes your load as a given. Feed it a muzzle velocity and a BC and it draws the trajectory. It has no opinion at all on which of the loads you tested is the one you should be shooting — that's a different job, done from real chronograph strings and real groups on paper.
It also cuts the other way. A solver is only as good as the muzzle velocity you type into it, and most shooters type in an average from a small handful of shots. How many shots you fired changes that number more than the choice of solver does.
Find your best load first, then dial it.
Loadscope reads your chronograph and measures your target groups, scores every powder charge and seating depth you tested, and names your best load — then predicts the elevation and wind for it and prints a pocket range card. Its solver is a G7/G1 point-mass model, checked against two independent references: JBM Ballistics and Applied Ballistics' own published range card. Mac and Windows, one-time $59, 30-day money-back.
See how it works →Full disclosure: we make Loadscope, and we've flagged it everywhere it appears above. If all you need is a free drop chart, Hornady's will serve you well and cost you nothing — we'd rather say that than sell you something you don't need.