Rent or Buy Calculator
Compare renting versus buying using full financial costs.
The comparison done properly: not mortgage against rent, but the full cost of each over the years somebody will actually stay, including the costs of owning that nobody quotes. It ends with a break-even year rather than a verdict.
What a v1 does5 features
- Full cost of ownership - maintenance, insurance, taxes, fees
- Rent modelled with realistic increases
- The break-even year, and what changes it
- The invested-deposit alternative counted properly
- Local rates and tax treatment applied
The market
Redfin draws about 93M monthly visitors and earns from transactions, and Zillow earns from agents. Consumer property tools are free, and this one is too: the $4 is a referral fee a mortgage marketplace pays for each completed calculation.
Where these numbers come from
| Company | Earns | Reach | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zillow | Monetises agents; free to buyers | 221M average monthly unique users | Model, consumer side is free |
| Redfin | Monetises transactions | ~93.2M monthly visitors | Model, consumer side is free |
| Houzz | $379.7M annual revenue | 70M+ homeowners | Independent estimate, 2026 |
Why this audience
This audience takes the cost of living seriously as a subject and is at the age where the rent-or-buy decision lands. They have seen the comparison done properly and know most versions are wrong. A full-cost break-even is what they are trying to reason about.
Before it can launch
- Mortgage referral arrangements sit under RESPA section 8 - a flat fee for a lead is defensible, a share of the loan is not
How the pricing works
Nobody pays for a rent-or-buy calculator; there are forty free ones. The $4 is the referral a completed calculation earns from a mortgage marketplace, modelled per user rather than charged to them.
What it earns
Drag me Every figure recalculates as you go.
0.053% of 1.9M followers · capped at 50,000
Opens on the price this idea was costed at, $4.
A quarter is one purchase every four years; twelve is monthly.
1,000 paying — 0.053% of 1.9M followers — × $4 × 1 purchases a year = $4,000 a year
Fifty thousand paying users is the ceiling every one of these pages is drawn against, not a forecast. It opens at a thousand, the bottom of the range, so the first figures you see are the modest ones. What the cap buys is comparability: the same range on every app, and the percentage of the audience it takes as the number that moves.
Is this the one for your audience?
We fund it, build it, and run it. You bring the audience and take a share of the revenue. Nothing to pay and nothing to build.
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