Methodology

Costovida models a monthly lifestyle cost for a household profile you control—housing, food, transport, utilities, health, fitness, pets, entertainment, childcare/schooling, travel, and miscellaneous buffers—then shows leftover versus optional income using a simplified destination tax rate.

A separate move-budget tool estimates one-time landing costs (flights, deposits, setup). Numbers are decision-support estimates, not financial, tax, legal, immigration, or real-estate advice.

We do not publish a single “cost of living index” for a city. The same lifestyle profile is priced in each destination so you can compare like-for-like.

Changing beds, cook vs dine-out, commute pattern, healthcare mode, schooling mode, and similar knobs changes the basket. Presets (Budget, Family, Nomad, and others) are starting points, not claims about how everyone lives.

Where we have live observation catalogs (for example housing listings or grocery baskets ingested into the product), those observations price that category. Live housing never averages with seed rent scalars—live wins for matching listings.

Where live coverage is missing or too thin, we fall back to researched city seed scalars. Seed is product fallback truth for that city until live data replaces it—not a crowdsourced free-for-all.

• Live categories today can include housing, groceries, transport, dining, utilities, health, fitness, and pets when catalogs exist for the city.
• Other lines (for example entertainment proxies, some travel, misc buffers) may still be seed- or rule-derived.

Prices enter through manual ingest of evidence you or operators supply, and through named extractors for sources that have been explicitly allowlisted. We do not run unnamed supermarket or listing crawls.

If a source shows a captcha, login wall, or bot challenge, that source is skipped—we do not bypass protections. We never invent a price to fill a gap.

Observation catalogs target a refresh window of about 90 days. Observations older than 60 days are treated as aging; at 90 days they are stale for freshness grading.

A sample with fewer than 3 observations is considered thin. Thin or stale inputs lower confidence and may leave a category on seed fallback.

Each estimate run gets an overall confidence of Low, Medium, or High. Confidence is run-level: it reflects weighted observation coverage and how much of the spend sits on live evidence—not a separate grade per category row.

In the scoring used by the product, a weighted observation score of 45 or above maps to Medium and 100 or above to High (with additional lift when live spend share and housing sample size clear thin floors). Housing rent overrides you type yourself are treated as exact for housing.

Housing can be priced at neighborhood level when listings carry a hood and you select one. Other categories are usually city-level until we have live observations that justify finer splits.

Citywide averages alone are a poor guide to rent—picking a neighborhood is part of getting a realistic housing line.

Where we publish rent year-over-year or trend notes on a city guide, use them as context: blog posts from years ago often understate current asking rents.

The monthly estimate uses the current pricing path (live listings or seed), not a multi-year average of old articles.

When children are in the profile, schooling modes (off, daycare, private, international) select a monthly cost band. Daycare uses the city daycare seed (or an optional school.daycare override). Private and international use seed bands scaled from each city's daycare until named tuition evidence replaces them—we do not silently invent per-city fees outside that seed model.

Tax leftover uses a simplified destination effective rate on income you enter. It is not a filing-accurate engine, not cross-border tax advice, and not a substitute for a tax professional.

The move-budget may include a typical visa or residence-permit fee estimate for inbound moves. That line is a cost placeholder only.

Costovida does not model eligibility, nationality rules, timelines, or immigration process. Check official government sources for anything beyond a rough fee.

To keep estimates auditable and honest, Costovida does not:

• Invent prices or fabricate observation rows.
• Publish a black-box city “vibe” or AI match score as a substitute for a priced lifestyle.
• Crawl unnamed retail or listing sites, or bypass captchas.
• Provide immigration, tax, school-admissions, or legal advice.