Can I afford it?
"Can I afford it" calculator for literally anything
Most affordability calculators only cover houses and cars, and most of them use generic income brackets instead of your actual numbers. I built www.caniafford.it to fix both: type almost anything (a wedding, a business loan, house, a hip replacement, "to take unpaid leave") and it weighs the cost against your real income and shows a plain risk read - low, moderate, elevated, or high - instead of a wall of financial jargon.
No sign-up needed to use the core calculator. If you make an account it turns into a broader budgeting toolkit: an expense calendar that lays out every bill by due date, budget targets per spending category, a debt payoff planner, credit card recommendations, a true-hourly-wage calculator, and a net worth tracker over time - all stored locally by default.
Tech stack: Next.js 16 + React 19, a portable core package (so the same calculation logic can power a future native app), Auth.js for optional sign-in, Neon Postgres for sync.
Still very early - real traffic is basically zero right now. Would love any feedback, especially on which categories/calculators are missing.
5 Comments
650+ categories is a surprisingly broad starting point. Curious which types of searches people gravitate toward first once they start using it.
The site is really optimized from an SEO and AEO perspective. And i feel like i have to put very general terms as the cost of the items (car, designer bag ) is from actual median cost datapoints that i don't have to pull as often as specific items (a 2026 honda civic, a louis vuitton bag). Maybe as i scale i can find a way to get better data for this.
That makes sense. The tradeoff between broad SEO coverage and more precise cost data seems like the more interesting problem as you scale. What are you seeing so far in terms of which categories actually get searched most?
The data is showing people are struggling with basic needs. Things like can i afford to move out, or second child, or can i afford kids, and budget related requests more so than can i afford a country club membership, a vacation, a luxury handbag.
That’s a surprisingly different signal from the original “anything” framing. The basic-needs searches seem to reveal a much clearer use case. If you’re open to continuing the conversation, what’s the best email to reach you at?