Enter what you spend now. Compare it against researched figures for fourteen nomad cities - each one carrying its source, its date, and an honest label for how reliable it is.
This puts your actual monthly spend against typical spend in another city. That is the right comparison for "what would my life cost there" - but it is not like-for-like, and the difference matters. If you eat out five nights a week where you are now and compare against a city's typical figure, the gap will flatter the destination. The honest reading is: this shows how your current lifestyle costs compare, not what you would spend after adapting to local habits.
Only three cities below come pre-filled: Lisbon, Budapest and Tbilisi. Those are the ones with a genuine official statistical index behind them - Portugal's INE, Hungary's KSH (published openly under CC BY 4.0), and Georgia's Geostat - which we can cite and you can verify.
For everywhere else, the fields are deliberately blank. The figures circulating online for those cities come from crowdsourced sites whose terms do not permit reuse in a tool like this, and several rest on very thin samples - one popular destination's numbers are built on 48 contributors. Publishing them would mean either breaching someone's licence or presenting a small poll as though it were data. Neither is worth doing for the sake of a pre-filled box.
So the honest version is this: bring your own numbers. A local rental portal, a landlord, someone already living there, or a week of your own receipts will all beat a global average - and unlike an aggregate, they describe the life you would actually be living.
Every city carries a reliability tier, so you can see at a glance what kind of ground you are standing on. Tier A means an official statistical index exists and was used - Lisbon, Budapest and Tbilisi are the only three that qualify, and they are the only three with figures filled in. Tier B means property-portal asking prices exist but typically run above what people actually sign. Tier C means no authoritative index exists at all. For Tier B and C cities the fields are left empty rather than filled with someone else's estimate - the tier is still shown, because knowing that good data does not exist for a city is itself worth knowing before you rely on a number you found elsewhere.
The foreigner price gap is real. In Da Nang the same one-bedroom lists at roughly 7-9 million VND on Vietnamese-language platforms and 14-19 million on English-language foreigner-facing sites. Similar channel premiums are widely reported in Bali, Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City, though only Da Nang has been rigorously documented. Where you search changes what you pay.
Rent is the whole game. It is usually 30-50% of the total and varies far more between cities than anything else. A comparison that leaves rent out isn't a cost-of-living comparison. If you want to go deeper on housing specifically - is this actual listing good value per square metre against your current place - the property comparator does that properly.
There is no reference figure for groceries. The August 2026 research pass did not find comparable per-city grocery data across all fourteen cities, and inventing one would have been worse than leaving it out. You can still enter your own grocery spend - it counts toward your total - but the destination column shows a gap rather than a number. It will be filled when there is something honest to fill it with.