About Cost Living Explorer

Hey there, I'm the dev behind this thing 👋

No fancy startup. No VC funding. No team of engineers. Just me, my keyboard, and way too much coffee.

I built Cost Living Explorer because I was sick of the existing cost of living calculators that were either paywalled, ugly, or just plain inaccurate. After spending countless hours researching for my own move from Virginia to California, I realized there had to be a better way.

So I did what any reasonable developer would do – I stayed up until 4 AM for several weeks straight building my own solution instead of just paying for one of the premium services. Classic programmer move, right?

No BS Business Model

I'm keeping this tool free because financial information should be accessible to everyone. There are no premium tiers, no hidden fees, and no selling your data to the highest bidder.

How do I keep the lights on? A combination of:

• Extremely low overhead (it's just me and some cloud hosting)
• Occasional affiliate links to services I actually use and recommend
• My day job (yep, this is still a side project)
• The occasional kind soul who buys me a coffee

No venture capital means no pressure to monetize your eyeballs or compromise on user experience. I answer to users, not investors.

The Road Ahead

This project is constantly evolving. On my ridiculously ambitious roadmap:

• More granular neighborhood-level data
• Improved visualization tools for comparing multiple cities at once
• A mobile app (when I find another 48 hours in my week)

Will I get to all of these? Probably not anytime soon. But that's the beauty of a passion project – it grows organically based on what users need most.

Join the Journey

If you've read this far, you're exactly the kind of person I built this for. I'd love to hear your feedback, feature requests, or just your relocation stories.

The best way to support this project is to:

• Share it with friends who are considering a move
• Report any inaccuracies you find in the data
• Contribute your local knowledge if you see something missing

Thanks for being part of this journey. Now go calculate something!