Decision intelligence for where to live

Why this exists

Most cost-of-living tools answer the wrong question. They tell you that Lisbon is "65% as expensive as New York" without telling you what gross salary you actually need to live there given Portuguese tax rates, your lifestyle tier, and how many people you're feeding. They show monthly costs in dollars when you'd be paid in euros.

Mundevo computes the gross salary required at four lifestyle tiers (frugal, balanced, comfortable, premium) across 35 cities in 27 countries, with each country's effective payroll deduction rate applied to convert net-to-gross. It compares any two cities, builds country-to-country relocation corridors, and surfaces side-by-side decision rubrics across cost, quality of life, remote-work infrastructure, and healthcare.

The system is fully open about its limits — the methodology page covers exactly how every number is computed, where the dataset comes from, and which cities carry AI-estimated rather than primary-source data.

What's actually under the hood

Every page is statically pre-rendered against a versioned dataset, so the numbers you see on a Tuesday match the numbers another reader sees on a Friday — no per-request volatility, no rate-limited APIs you have to trust. The cost basket combines housing, food, transport, utilities, healthcare, and leisure with lifestyle-tier multipliers. Tax is applied as the combined effective income-tax plus employee-side social security rate for the destination country.

21 cities have hand-curated index data; 4 cities (Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur) carry AI-estimated data flagged with an explicit disclaimer in the methodology block on every page involving them — these remain AI because structural macroeconomic volatility (high inflation, dual exchange rates, large intra-city cost variance) makes any single hand-curated figure misleading on a quarterly review cycle. Editorial commentary on each page is generated by Claude (Anthropic) from the structured page data, then cached deterministically — the same city + lifestyle combination produces the same prose across rebuilds.

How Mundevo makes money

When you click an affiliate link to a partner we recommend (FX providers like Wise and Revolut, expat health insurance via SafetyWing, eSIMs via Holafly, international moving via MoveHub), Mundevo may receive a referral commission if you sign up. These commissions don't affect what we say about each partner — the partner rotation is driven by a bandit algorithm that optimizes for the intent of the page you're on, not by which partner pays the most.

Display ads via Google AdSense provide additional revenue on most pages. Ads are clearly delineated and never appear inside editorial commentary.