Before you write

What helps us answer in one reply

Most reports we get are about a specific pair of places, so the pair matters more than a description of the problem. Send us the two entries exactly as you picked them, and we can reproduce the same report on our side within minutes.

• the two places, spelled as the app listed them, and which one you set as origin;
• whether you had typed a salary, and which period — monthly or yearly;
• the line printed under the report: the source and the period it used;
• iPhone model and its iOS version, plus the app version from the App Store page;
• a screenshot if a number looked wrong — the whole screen, not a crop of the figure.

How a comparison runs

Four steps, start to finish

1. Pick the pair. On Compare, set where you live now and where you are considering. Typing a country instead of a city always works; the search covers every country in the annual layer.
2. Add a salary, or don't. The field is optional. Without it you get prices, wages and purchasing power; with it you also get what your own income would have to be to hold the same basket.
3. Read the report. An overall index where your origin equals 100, a breakdown by category where the data layer has one, income side by side, and a header naming the source and the period.
4. Ask about it. Follow-up questions go to the written part of the report — "where does the gap come from", "is my salary enough there" — and the answer is built only from the figures already on that screen.

Finished reports stay under History with the conversation attached. The eleventh comparison pushes the oldest one out; you can also delete any single one from that list.

Where the figures come from

Two official layers, never blended

Nothing on the report screen is our own estimate or a paid aggregator's model. Each side of a comparison is measured by one of two public sources, and every report states which one it used.

The two data layers

	Eurostat	World Bank Open Data
Where it reaches	EU and EEA countries	almost every country in the world
How often it updates	inflation monthly, price levels yearly	once a year
Category detail	five spending divisions	none — a single overall figure
Income measure	net annual earnings of one person on the average wage	gross national income per person
Price level	price level index, EU27 average = 100	PPP factor divided by the market exchange rate

When Eurostat covers both places, the app uses Eurostat. If it covers only one of them, both sides fall back to the annual World Bank layer, and the report says so in a line of its own. The two scales measure different things, so a number from one divided by a number from the other would mean nothing — which is why a mixed pair is never quietly assembled.

Why a city behaves like its country

Neither office publishes a separate series for most cities. Choosing Lyon gives you France, and the report prints that plainly instead of hiding it. Rent in a capital often sits far above the national average, and that distance is simply not present in these statistics — treat a city pair as a comparison of two countries with familiar names attached.

The written explanation is generated

What the model does and does not touch

The app asks for your agreement before it sends anything for that explanation: two place names, the published figures for each side, the period, and — only if you filled the field — the salary you typed. Your name and your avatar stay on the phone. Decline, and the indices, categories and purchasing-power numbers all keep working; only the prose and the chat switch off, and you can accept later from the same screen.

Questions we are asked

Thirteen that reach us most often

Question	Answer
Does it cost anything?	No. There is no subscription, no paid tier and nothing to buy inside the app.
Is there advertising in it?	No advertising is shown on any screen.
Do I need an account?	No. Nothing asks you to register, and there is no password anywhere in the app.
Which currency are the sums in?	The one set under Display currency in Profile; changing it re-renders every figure on the report.
Why is a category row missing?	Because that office has not published it for the period. Missing stays missing — it is never filled in with a guess.
"No published figures for this place"?	The pair is outside the layer that could measure it. Try the country rather than the city, or the other direction.
Comparison won't load at all.	The statistical services were unreachable. It is almost always the connection or a temporary outage on their side; Try again a minute later.
The numbers appeared but no text did.	Either the notice has not been accepted, or the answer failed to come back. The figures above it are unaffected either way.
Can I change the language?	Yes — Profile, then Language. The screen switches on the spot, without restarting the app.
What are the notifications for?	One optional reminder, "Tell me when a period updates", so you know a fresher release of the statistics has arrived. It is off unless you turn it on.
Why does it want photo access?	Only if you pick a gallery photo as your avatar. Eight drawn glyphs are built in, and choosing one of those asks for nothing.
What is the tracking prompt at the start?	It lets us tell which campaign led you to the app and how that campaign performed. Saying no changes nothing about how the app works.
Can I keep a report outside the app?	Yes — Share as PDF on the report screen hands it to the iOS share sheet.

Your data

What is stored, what travels, how to remove it

On the device and off it

Item	Where it lives
Name and avatar	this iPhone only; never part of a request
Currency, salary period, language	this iPhone only
Saved comparisons and their chats	this iPhone only, up to ten of them
Place names and official figures	sent for the written explanation, once you have agreed
A salary you typed	sent with them — the one personal figure that leaves the phone
Device and campaign identifiers	handled as described in the privacy policy

To wipe the local side yourself: Profile, then Reset all data. It clears the name, the avatar, every preference and all saved comparisons together, and it cannot be walked back. For anything held off the device, write to halvorwelde@icloud.com with the request spelled out; we confirm by reply once it is done. The full text is in the Coin Index privacy policy.

What it runs on

Checked against the released build

Platform	iOS only — iPhone. There is no Android build, and no iPad or Mac version.
System	iOS 15.0 or later
Languages	English, Czech, Swedish, Dutch
Connection	needed to fetch figures and to write an explanation; a report already saved opens offline
Sources	Eurostat · World Bank Open Data