nowfound

Life & fun · January 5, 2025

I built a tool to rank cities based on purchasing power for SWEs

Show HN: I built a tool to calculate real tech salaries across cities (after tax & COL) As a software engineer obsessed with data-driven decisions, I wanted to quantify how much better/worse other cities would be compared to my current home in Berlin. While sites like Glassdoor and levels.fyi tell you how much you can earn, they don't show what you actually keep after taxes and living costs. So I built Tech City Index - a tool that compares cities based on actual purchasing power for software engineers, combining: * Real-time salary data from levels.fyi * Cost of living data from Numbeo…

I built a tool to rank cities based on purchasing power for SWEs launched on January 5, 2025 with 14 votes, #984 of 6,141 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.

Visit techcities.app ↗Alternativestop 16% of January 2025

In plain words

Tech City Index is a tool that ranks cities by purchasing power for software engineers. It combines salary data from levels.fyi, cost-of-living information from Numbeo, local tax calculations, and weather data to show how much money engineers actually keep after taxes and expenses. The tool helps software engineers compare cities objectively when considering relocation, revealing which locations offer the best financial outcomes beyond nominal salary figures.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

Ranking the best cities for software engineers based on local salaries, tax rates, and cost of living. Find out how much more you could be making by moving to another city.

In the maker’s words, at launch

Show HN: I built a tool to calculate real tech salaries across cities (after tax & COL) As a software engineer obsessed with data-driven decisions, I wanted to quantify how much better/worse other cities would be compared to my current home in Berlin. While sites like Glassdoor and levels.fyi tell you how much…

Does a similar job

all alternatives →

More life & fun this month

the category →

Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part

Launched alongside, January 2025

the whole month →
  • I made an open-source laptop from scratch▲3,237

    Hello! I'm Byran. I spent the past ~6 months engineering a laptop from scratch. It's fully open-source on GH at: https://github.com/Hello9999901/laptop

    Dev tools · 2025 · byran.ee

  • TI
    Tetris in a PDF▲1,289

    I realized that the PDF engines of modern desktop browsers (PDFium and PDF.js) support JavaScript with enough I/O primitives to make a basic game like Tetris. It was a bit tricky to find a union of features that work in both engines, but in the end it turns out that showing/hiding annotation "fields" works well to make monochrome pixels, and keyboard input can be achieved by typing in a text input box. All in all it's quite janky but a nice reminder of how general purpose PDF scripting can be. The linked PDF is all ASCII so you can just open it in a text editor, or have a look at…

    Life & fun · 2025 · th0mas.nl

  • 21st.dev▲1,211

    I originally built this app to organize and reuse interesting React + Tailwind components I came across on Twitter, inspired by the shadcn/ui approach. Later, a friend started contributing their own components, and it got me thinking—this could grow into something bigger, like an NPM for design engineers to share and use components. Would love to hear your thoughts!

    Dev tools · 2025 · 21st.dev

  • JoggAI 2.0: AI Avatar Generator▲967

    Create lifelike, personalized AI avatars from text prompts

    AI · 2025 · jogg.ai

  • Lovable + Builder.io▲873

    Turn Figma designs into full stack apps with AI

    Dev tools · 2025 · figma.com

  • Cs16.css – CSS library based on Counter Strike 1.6 UI▲819

    CSS library based on Counter Strike 1.6 UI.

    Life & fun · 2025 · cs16.samke.me