About Costlas
Costlas aggregates publicly available cost of living data for 140 countries and 1,377 cities — surfaced through an interactive globe, side-by-side comparisons, a relocation score, and live currency conversion.
Data sources
All price points are aggregated from open community-maintained living-cost databases. Every record stores its original source URL so any figure can be independently verified.
Trust score (0–100)
Every country and city gets a confidence rating shown as a colored badge:
- 80–100 High — broad coverage, recently verified
- 60–79 Good — solid sample with minor gaps
- 40–59 Fair — partial data, treat as indicative
- 0–39 Low — sparse data, use with caution
Inputs: number of data points, presence of a summary monthly cost, category coverage (rent · food · transport · utilities), and city diversity for countries.
Relocation score
A single 0–100 ring shown on every country and city page. Blends three signals:
- Affordability (50%) — logarithmic decay over the summary monthly cost in USD
- Confidence (30%) — the trust score above
- Diversity (20%) — log2 of tracked cities, capped at 100
Higher scores mean a cheaper, well-documented place with multiple city options — a good shortlist candidate, not a verdict.
Currency conversion
USD is the canonical storage currency. The header switcher converts every value live using daily FX rates from a free public source (open.er-api.com). The footer shows the last refresh timestamp.
Limitations
- Aggregated community data — individual prices can vary by neighborhood and lifestyle
- Summary costs assume a modest single-person lifestyle, no children, no car payments
- FX rates update daily, not intraday
- Relocation score does not account for visa, safety, healthcare, or climate (yet)
Roadmap
- AI relocation assistant (RAG over our database)
- Saved comparisons and favorites
- Visa, tax, safety, and internet-quality layers
- Public API
Meet the creator
I am Gobinda Tarafdar — a WordPress product marketer by trade, a stubborn problem-solver by habit, and a lifelong Harry Potter devotee by heart. Somewhere between Hogsmeade and a half-finished launch plan, this broadsheet was conjured into being.
By day I am the Product Marketing Specialist at WPBakery — the page builder that quietly powers a sizeable corner of the WordPress universe. Before that, I helped a single plugin cross 400,000+ active users through positioning, user research, and a relentless focus on what actually moves the needle.
When the day-job owl flies home, I tinker on my own little workshop of spells: Docscriber (documentation, conjured), TheRecaller (a memory charm for the things you keep forgetting), TheEditra (a video editing cauldron of my own brewing), and the newest addition The Quill Press — a tech news platform styled after the Daily Prophet itself. Costlas is the side-quest I refuse to put down.
Why Costlas exists
It started, as most decent ideas do, over a long conversation with friends and family. Someone was weighing a move abroad, another was daydreaming about a quieter city, and a third just wanted to know if their salary would stretch further somewhere else. We kept circling the same wall: hours of scattered tabs, half-trustworthy numbers, and no clean way to compare one place against another.
That night I scribbled the first sketch of Costlas — a single place to do the basic research, see the numbers side-by-side, and walk away with enough clarity to actually plan. Not a verdict, just a head start. A small spell of support for anyone standing at the same crossroads we were.
Get in touch
The best way to reach me is on Twitter — @Gtarafdarr. DMs are open for questions, feedback, corrections, or just to say hello.
Costlas is free and will stay that way. If it saved you a few hours of research and you'd like to chip in toward keeping the data fresh, you can buy me a coffee here. Every bit helps — thank you.