The homebuying site that shows its work — and can prove it.
Public government data, refined into clear tools. Every number carries its source, its methodology, and a ledger receipt. No sales pitch, no referrals, no advice on what you “should” do — just the math and where it came from.
Sample: True monthly cost
A $425,000 home, 10% down · Worcester County, MA
- Principal & interest
- $2,514
- Property tax
- $445
- Homeowners insurance
- $132
- PMI (LTV > 80%)
- $149
- Maintenance reserve
- $354
True monthly cost
$3,594
Lender-approved payment: $2,663
The gap you plan around: $931/mo
Illustrative figures. Every line links to its public source — click a source tag above.
The problem
First-time buyers are drowning — and the biggest blind spot is cost.
The largest purchase of most people's lives comes with pressure, jargon, and numbers nobody explains. We don't sell you a way out. We show you the math, name every source, and let you decide.
65%
of buyers found the process harder than they expected.
46%
underestimate the true cost of owning a home.
~3x
more likely to regret the purchase if they felt rushed.
The tools
Free tools. No login for answers.
Each one explains its math and cites its data. None of them tells you what to do.
True Cost of Ownership
What a home actually costs each month — principal, tax, insurance, PMI, maintenance — against what a lender approves. The gap, named.
Open toolAffordability & DTI
The underwriter math behind "how much can I borrow" — front-end and back-end ratios in plain English.
Open toolLoan Estimate Decoder
Type your Section A–C fees. We classify each — lender fee, shoppable, pass-through — and flag outliers against benchmarks.
Open toolBuy Now vs. Wait
Two paths side by side — tomorrow’s price and rate, the rent you’d pay, and the savings you’d add. The difference, decomposed. Never a verdict.
Open toolBuydown vs. Price Cut
A seller credit, spent two ways — buying down the rate or cutting the price. Permanent or temporary, against no credit at all. Total interest included.
Open toolCredit-Band Cost
What your credit-score band adds to a conventional loan, straight from Fannie Mae’s published price-adjustment matrix. The premium each band pays, named.
Open toolYear-2 Payment Shock
Why the payment jumps in year two: escrow is sized from the seller’s old tax bill, then the county reassesses at your price. The spike, estimated from public county rates.
Open toolFee & Rate Index
Median closing costs and rate spreads by state and loan size, built from public HMDA data with suppressed thin cells.
Open toolDown Payment Assistance
A maintained directory of public assistance programs — each with a source link and a last-verified date.
Open toolHow we keep it honest
Trust isn't a tagline here. It's the architecture.
These aren't preferences we hope to keep. They're hard rules the product is built to enforce.
Every number has a source
No figure ships without its origin — the dataset, the vintage, and the retrieval date. Click any source tag to see it.
We suppress before we publish
When a benchmark cell is too thin to be honest (fewer than 25 records), we show it as suppressed — never a made-up number.
Staleness is shown, not hidden
Data past its refresh window is flagged in the open. A program unverified for 90+ days tells you to check with the source.
Methodology is receipted
Every methodology version and benchmark publication is written to an append-only, externally anchored ledger. You can verify it.
Built for humans and machines
The citable, verifiable data layer for AI homebuying answers.
When an assistant answers a buyer's question, it needs a neutral source it can cite. CandidCost exposes the same sourced tools over a read-only, stateless interface — every response carries its citations, methodology version, and ledger receipt, and never returns individualized advice.
- Read-only and stateless — no caller inputs stored, no PII accepted.
- Deterministic, versioned responses with source citations built in.
- Every figure is verifiable against the public ledger by its receipt.
{
"state": "MA",
"loan_band": "250-400k",
"median_total_loan_costs": "$5,120",
"n": 3184,
"methodology_version": "benchmarks-v3",
"source": "CFPB HMDA public LAR (2024)",
"receipt_hash": "0x9f21…c4a7",
"educational_only": true,
"disclaimer": "Not advice. Estimates from public data."
}Everything you need to negotiate from a position of knowledge.
A self-guided kit that turns the tools into a step-by-step process — worksheets, scripts, and checklists. Instant delivery, 30-day refund, not-advice throughout.
What's included
- Affordability worksheet
- Loan Estimate decoder cheat sheet + per-fee negotiation scripts
- Offer-to-close checklist
- Pressure Protocol: walk-away math + 24-hour decision framework
- Co-Buying Module: title structures + the conversation before you buy