Relocation & Cost-of-Living Calculator
Find out if that job offer is really a raise
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Relocation & Cost-of-Living Calculator - Find out if that job offer is really a raise

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A friend got a job offer with a $13,000 higher salary in a new city and was ready to sign immediately. We ran the actual cost-of-living numbers first. It was a real pay cut of over $10,000 a year in purchasing power. RelaCalc runs this calculation automatically — comparing your current salary and city against a new offer and city, factoring in real cost-of-living differences, to reveal your True Offer. No login. No subscription. $9 one-time.

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Maker
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Hey Product Hunt 👋 Built this after watching a friend almost accept a job offer that looked like a $13,000 raise on paper but was actually a real pay cut once we factored in the cost-of-living difference between her current city and the new one. The part I think matters most: housing usually drives most of the real difference, more than any other category combined, so I built in a separate housing-specific comparison rather than relying purely on an overall cost-of-living index, which can hide big variation underneath a single averaged number. Would love feedback, especially from anyone who's gone through a relocation decision recently and knows what else should factor into this. Thanks for checking it out 🙏

This is a very useful exercise that a lot of people don't actually take the time to do beyond looking at a real estate listing for each place and eyeballing it vs. actual facts. Having done this move a few times, between cities, and countries, i can tell you that today's level of detail of a target location is light years from where it used to be. I think the cost of your initial solution is, well, a bit pricey for the artifacts delivered. If you spend 50 cents on some tokens, you could do a lot more with this topic.

Get a decent (cheap) LLM to go research cost of living with respect to food costs, crime, walkability, public transportation, weather, the list is almost endless. Relocating from, say Mumbai (or Hawaii) to North Dakota will likely (as in for sure) involve a serious wardrobe update! So a $2k relocation package, that is supposed to cover some rent, those clothes, travel, etc. it adds up as you've pointed out. In looking at your Gumroad site, I did smile, as you're offering a lot of free, useful stuff, so well done on that front. I think this particular solution has a lot of possibilities and I applaud your first steps.

Good luck

Maker

 Really appreciate you taking the time to write this out, especially with real relocation experience behind it — that context is genuinely useful.

You're right that a single blended index is too blunt, and the wardrobe/climate example is a great one — that's going into the next version as a direct line item.

On the LLM-research idea specifically: I hear the "get more detail" instinct, but I've deliberately kept every tool in this line offline and free of live data lookups, since cost-of-living/crime data goes stale fast and I don't want to be in the position of asserting numbers I can't stand behind. I'd rather break the index into more granular fields you fill in yourself than bake in "real" data I can't guarantee is current. Same spirit, safer mechanism.

Thanks for the encouragement on the free stuff too — that's very much the plan, building trust before asking for much.