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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 6,142 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…

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

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